Finding Purpose in Your Empty Nest Years (Part 1 of 2)

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An amazing marriage is possible. It begins with you. Listen on your favorite podcast app. I miss their mess. I miss their noise. I miss their rudeness and neediness. I miss their laughter. I miss my place in their lives. I mean, who am I?

And what do I do with the rest of my life? Well, we all have struggles when the kids move out. That's a quote from a book written by Jim Burns, and that really identifies what some of those feelings are. We've got Jim in the studio with us today on Focus on the Family, and we're going to be unpacking this topic. Thanks for joining us.

Your host is Focus President and author Jim Daly, and I'm John Fuller. John, I've got one that's flown the coop, one that is perched and ready to do that. I'm just not sure when. And then where are you at? You're a near empty nester. I'm a near empty nester.

Where are you at in this journey? Well, we are technically empty nesters. We have been for some time. When the last kid moved out, my mother-in-law moved in for a couple of years, and she's in eternity now. So we are experiencing the fullness of an empty house, and it's really kind of nice.

It is. And we do ask folks, where are they at? What do they want to hear? And this is one of the topics that comes up pretty regularly now that do more for the grandparenting age and stage, and help us better understand how to live this part of our life a little better. So we're going to talk about it today, what empty nest looks like, maybe in the grandparenting stage for some, and just where we need to go from here.

I'm thinking of a friend whose kids, adult kids, live mostly around the neighborhood. I think he had three or four out of the six kids right nearby. And then all of a sudden, in about a two to three week period, boom, they all left. And it wasn't organized or talked about. It just happened. And he talked to me about the trauma of that, like they didn't expect it, didn't anticipate it just happened. And it was a bit of a struggle for he and his wife to manage that and readapt.

What do we do now? So we're going to get into all this today with Jim Burns. Yeah. And Jim has been here before. He's always a popular guest. Our audience tells us we like Jim.

We like what he says. He's the president of Homeward, an organization that really advances the kingdom of God by educating and equipping parents to build God honoring families. He and his wife, Kathy, have three girls. They've all left the nest, at least for now. And he really captures a lot of his insights and experiences in a terrific book called Finding Joy in the Empty Nest, Discover Purpose and Passion in the Next Phase of Life. We'll encourage you to stop by our website.

Details are in the episode notes or give us a call for your copy, 800, the letter A in the word family. Jim, welcome back to Focus. Good to have you.

It is so good to be with both of you. And I think I first came, I was talking with you, we were talking about young kids. Yes, here we go. My kids have flown the coop. You all have these stories.

And so now here we are talking about the empty nest. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, this is part of life, right? It really is. And it's a good part of life.

But for a lot of people, it's a tough part of life. That transition story I talked about, sometimes it's kind of unplanned. You think the kids are going to be around. I know my brother and his wife, they kind of they've sold their house in California, moved to Oregon to be near the grandkids of their adult daughter. And then they decided to move out to Tennessee. And so they thought, wow, okay, what do we do now?

Sold the house, got an RV. And they're kind of tour around the country and spending more time in Tennessee so they can be near the grandkids. But everybody's got some kind of story in this space and stage of life. Let me ask you, with the empty nest territory, it can be daunting for some of our listeners and viewers. It can take you by surprise, like we talked about, or can even be planned.

And then it still emotionally is really hard to manage. So what's that first idea that, okay, this is going to be new? Do you fill it with stuff to do?

Or what do you do? Well, I think a lot of us didn't prepare for it. And all of a sudden it just happened, right? So our daughter Heidi, we drop her off at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

It's in central California. And we were so busy getting things ready. It didn't dawn us that we were going to become empty nests.

We honestly hadn't thought much about it. Yeah, we get in the car and Kathy and I didn't talk to each other for about a half an hour. It was just, I was in my thoughts. I look at her, she's gazing out the window and all of a sudden I see a tear running down. And I said, you okay, babe? She goes, yeah, no, I'm okay. I said, you want to stop in Santa Barbara?

It's about 90 minutes. Yes. You want to stop in Santa Barbara and get a lunch? Which she would typically say what you just said.

Yeah. And she said, no, I'm okay. I'm not really hungry. And we drove, I'll just drive all the way home. And we get home and it was quiet. And do you know that the next day is when I wrote that phrase, I missed their mess. I even said I missed their rudeness, right?

And I hadn't really missed their rudeness yet. But what we found was that we had to reinvent ourselves. And I found in writing Finding Joy in the Empty Nest that there were so many people that felt loss and grief. And I did all these focus groups during the pandemic of all times. And so it was on Zoom.

Some of your friends were on that. And I didn't see it coming. I mean, I saw fun things and they would talk, John, like your situation. Oh, yeah, I don't have an empty nest. My, you know, my mother-in-law's back in. And all the complications understood that. But what I didn't hear was the depth of pain, what I call now the empty nest syndrome. And, you know, Kathy experienced it because she was the sun and we had three planets going around her.

Well, I'm a fourth planet. She's the anchor. Exactly. She is in our home. And all of a sudden she didn't have a place. So she experienced, you know, a sense of, you know, even anxiety. And she's not an anxious person necessarily, but some sadness. And I went, well, I don't have it.

And then I found out later, wait, I just was going to work an hour earlier, staying an hour later. So my empty nest syndrome pain was a different kind, but I still experienced it. And I see a lot of people experiencing that. And the people who do well in the empty nest are the people who figure out how to live in a different stage. And the people who don't do well, they're stuck. And I think one of the big principles that I love is just simply, you know, this principle when your child leaves home and their life fills up with fresh ideas, you do the same. It's a rite of passage.

Yeah. I was going to ask you this and I want to get back to the empty nest syndrome point that you made. But one of the articles I read a few years ago was the graying of divorce.

And it pointed to this substantial increase. The fastest growing segment of the culture filing for divorce were empty nesters, you know, and mostly women, the wives and mothers, because they go, wow, I feel like my job is done. I really don't know you anymore.

We don't have much in common. I think we're done with our marriage. Speak to that issue because that really is the dramatic outcome of what you're talking about. And I think a lot of your listeners might be surprised at that, that the greatest demographic, the largest demographic of getting a divorce right now is 50 and over. Yeah. What they call the graying of divorce. And I think part of it was they had a lot of issues in their marriage and they held out for the kids. Yeah. And then they looked up and they said, wow, I don't want to work at it hard enough. The interesting thing is that when they do work at it, even in a troubled marriage, if they will persevere for say five years and they'll kind of reboot their marriage, 78% say that their marriage is better off. Yeah. So it's the people who, instead of giving up and, and some people come into this empty nest, boy, they're limping and they're bruised in their marriages. But the fact is, is you can reinvent.

You were in love. So if you've lost that, or if you've drifted, you can come back. Yeah. You can make course corrections. And that's the good news of this. You know, the it's important data is important. I like to look at data because it shows a direction. And I remember, I think it was a university of Chicago study that showed it. I don't know how they did this, but they created two research groups, both headed for divorce, but they had the one cohort commit to counseling and staying married for a period of time versus the others that were headed for divorce. They came back to them some years later, three, four years later, and 80% of those who fought for their marriages were doing better and happy. So 80% of the marriages survived is the point.

In the other group, 80% of the people who had divorced were extremely unhappy and said that it was a mistake. That kind of supports what does it supports your point. It's exactly that case. And again, it's hard because you got to lean into it. You got to rework, you know, we're talking before the program, we're talking about working out and you know, and I do it once a year, no matter if I need it or not. Right. But you know, it's not easy, but when you do, you get better and you feel better. Yeah. So when you lean into your marriage and you work on your marriage, it makes sense.

Yeah, that's good. Going back to empty nest syndrome, you mentioned four things that were really helpful for you. And I think others that you've encountered to deal with the negativity of the emptiness syndrome, what are they? Well, one is that you actually close this chapter. I was thinking back to rites of passages when I was younger and I was speaking to a lot of kids and stuff. I'd always talk about the rite of passage. You know, 13 is a rite of passage, 16, you get your driver's license, all these things.

How cool is that? But this is the rite of passage. And if you don't close the chapter and really feel and embrace this new empty nest, you're not going to do well. So the people who did well close the chapter.

Yeah. Describe those that don't close that. What does that look like generally? They're still trying to be in control with their adult kids.

What does that look like? What that looks like is they're giving them unsolicited advice, which is pretty much taken as criticism because the kids are saying, you know, you don't trust me to be an adult. They're still trying to manage things that they can't manage anymore. And so to close the chapter says you take a deep breath and you say, you know what, I'm going to give my kids that passport to adulthood.

They're not always acting like adults. I get it and you know, whatever, but I'm going to do that. I'm going to close that, this, the chapter with my kids being in the home and open up a new chapter. And in that, there's some pretty exciting things that can happen. Yeah.

Exciting things if you're married, exciting things if you're single, exciting things in your faith. Yeah. But you've got to close the chapter.

I want to press in on this a little bit because I think it's so critical. And you know, I think Jean and I experienced this with our two boys and you know, we're still in the process of that empty nest development, but you know, letting go, it sounds really easy. Yeah. Yeah.

Just let go. But it's hard because I think especially at 19, 20, 21, they're not going to make always the right decisions. They're adulting, but they're learning to do it. And our instinct as parents is to continue to control, you know, did you get that doctor's appointment done?

Right. You know, what's your oil light saying to you? I mean, I'm guilty of that. I just asked Troy that the other day. Is it time for some maintenance on your car? And he said, I think so.

My right window's not going up. He probably, you know, we'll go ahead and make the appointment, right? Yeah. But those are kind of the indicators that maybe you're taking too much as the parent on. So just speak to that and that control feature. Well, I think we're controlling and sometimes when we control, we enable and we always mean, well, I mean, when you ask, you know, the oil light, my goodness, that's a great question. Sometimes experience is a better teacher than advice. And so he's going to, if he's going to go around with the window not working, you know, but it's so hard. I mean, I have scar.

You guys can see this here in the studio. I have scars on my tongue from having to bite my tongue. But what happens is control turns into enabling. And the question we have to ask is, are we enabling dependency where our kids are now dependent on us? I mean, I had a woman say to me and I thought this was ironic on several levels. She said, you know, my 22-year-old, you know, isn't making his own pediatrician appointments. And I'm like, well, A, why are you still making doctor's appointments?

And two, why is your kid going to a pediatrician who's 22 years old? But again, the point being that we mean well, our intentions are great, but we've got to give them the experience sometimes that even a negative experience so they can learn from it. Here's a hard assessment that I've made is, and Jean and I talk about this, is you've got to also let your kids experience valleys spiritually so that the Lord can show up. I mean, if they just move from mountaintop to mountaintop because you're making this bridge over the valleys, you're going to have, in my opinion, a very shallow adult.

You are. Kids have to move from dependence on you and you helping them through that process with church and spirituality to them becoming more independent in their faith. You know, our daughter Christy wrote her senior year, she was a newspaper editor, and she wrote, I had to disown my parents' faith to own my own faith.

Yeah. Oh, that shook us. But the truth is, is now she's more involved in our church than she, we live in the same area, so we go to the same church and, you know, I'll go, oh my goodness, she's out doing us and, you know, activities and things like that. But the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, but you've got to allow that even on the spiritual side. And this is a time for them to, you know, question issues or, you know, one of the phrases I like to use is that, you know, tolerance is a form of loving to this generation of millennials and Gen Zers. And so they're even dealing with biblical values that they know, and it's the values we taught, but they're straying from their faith and sometimes they're violating our values. And it's really hard in there because, you know, it makes Christmas and Easter, especially in the empty nest, when they come back, it makes it for kind of interesting conversations.

But we still have to allow them to find that. And we see kids leaving the church a lot of times in the adult years, young adult years, but we see them coming back too, you know, it's good news. We see them coming back when they're getting married, when they're making babies, when there's an issue, they need community, and all of a sudden they go, you know what, my best community was when I was in youth group in junior high and I'm going to come back.

I so appreciate that because I feel like the researchers, people that you and I both know, tend to live in this, you know, wow situation where they're doing this research. But it is true when you get married, when you have a child, you tend to go back to those things that you learned as a child. And, you know, thankfully don't be too rattled if your 20-something is not engaged in church. I mean, it's a process.

It is a process, and it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, but that's hard to do. I want to go, I want to ask my kids every time, so what, how's it going at church? How involved are you? But the more controlling you are in that space, the more they'll reject it, and I think the longer it will take for the Lord to woo them back. So, man, let go, let them make those decisions. And we who do some of that research, we whine and complain, and it sounds so negative, but one of the good news things with parents of millennials, they need to hear this, is that when they find, they meander toward marriage, and they meander toward responsibility, they're just doing that during the 20s. Much more than, I mean, I got married one week after college, and I had to become an adult because we had a car payment, one car payment, that was the only payment.

And you liked electricity and gas. But the interesting side to it is with this crowd, when they get married, you know what the number one thing they want? This is the millennials. We haven't studied enough of the Gen Zers yet, they're too young.

That'd be your boys. Yes, 2022. But with the millennials, the number one thing they want is a good marriage, and they want to be good parents. So what does that say to something like focus on the family?

Yeah. They're gonna, you know, a new generation, when we were making babies and whatnot, we were listening to focus on the family, right? And a new generation needs the kind of conversations that happen here all the time, because they need content, and they crave content. And they may not do it by listening to a radio at the exact time, they're gonna listen to it the beautiful ways with podcasts.

Yeah, which is so good. So tell a friend, if you see somebody in trouble parenting, send them our way. Yeah, we have so many resources here at the ministry, including this conversation with Jim Burns and his book, Finding Joy in the Empty Nest. Reach out and we're a phone call away.

You can get help when you call 800, the letter A in the word family, or stop by the episode notes for details and resources. Jim, I know we've covered one about closing the chapter here. The other three quickly, my producers are not going to let me go with that. What are the four? Well, you know, we've got to choose to change our own attitude.

What does that look like? Attitude makes a difference. It means part of that is what we were talking about, I think, in terms of how we relate to our kids. But we have to look at this as a positive time, that we're going to take a clean break. And our attitude is okay for that, that we we have to mourn it. You know, CS Lewis said this, that when you change, you experience loss. And it's one of the necessary losses when your kids go in, you know, outside and you're now an empty nest. But so for us, we have to accept it, we have to embrace it and say this is a new time. Here's the interesting fact.

And you can Google me on this. The average person goes to the empty nest at 48.9. That was not our case, we were older, but 48.9 you're going to spend more time in the empty nest possibly than with your kids. I'm living that.

Yeah. So with that, it's important to change your attitude toward weight, there can be good things we can, we're going to miss our day to day activities with our kids. And we can now we have to reinvent that relationship. But we can also we can get more involved in church. I mean, I found that in the empty nest, you know, Kathy's been teaching Bible study for 14 years. And her empty nest ministry is stronger than it was when we had kids. Interesting. Yeah. And so she has more time.

She went out for coffee with a friend yesterday, she couldn't have done that at four o'clock in the afternoon. So there's a lot of things but you have to embrace that and lean into that and see the positive because there's a whole lot of negative because you do have to grieve. And again, these are four things that you've noticed in your own path and others that you can beat the empty nest syndrome as you call it by applying these things. So setting goals to Yeah, and setting goals is next. So they set goals and you know, we set individual goals. But Kathy and I also kind of created a dream list of what we want to do. And it wasn't just let's go to Italy.

I mean, that'd be great. But it was also a dream list of what we wanted to make our life look like. And so the changing of goals, it was both good for us to do it individually and and separately. And then also, I think you make new friends in the empty nest. People kept coming back to me when I was asking people in kind of some of my research, and they kept saying that, you know, we have stronger friends, we can go out to dinner with our friends, the ones who are more social. And like my wife, she's an introvert. So she's not going to be the one who wants to go out seven nights a week. But she has deeper friendships, because she leaned into that. And I find single empty nesters who say, you know what, I just didn't have time to get involved in church.

And now I have a great group of women or a great group of men that I'm, you know, biking together whether I'm doing a Bible study with and whatnot. Those are the issues that I think you get through that empty nest with. And again, I'm not saying it's easy. And I'm not saying it's actually even simple.

I'm saying you have to put energy and effort in. Yeah. And Jean Jean's doing a great job.

I think she is paving the way for us. But let me ask you in that regard, you have a story in the book about Mike and Mary, who struggled with this. And I think it's so typical. And God bless Mike and Mary for being able to allow you to use their story.

But describe Mike and Mary's battle in the empty nest. Right. Well, it's actually, I changed the names. Of course, you know, whatever.

But I know these people very, very well. And what I realized with the conversation was that Mike was really mad at Mary. Because he said, she's not getting through this. And all we sit and all we talk about is, you know, the kids and their and his kids raised in the church, raised at our church, actually, beautiful people, but they were having the party scene. And, you know, they really had fled some of the values of Mike and Mary. And they now were having conflict because Mary couldn't get past it. And she really was kind of almost becoming a one topic conversationalist. And Mike's going, this is not fair, because I thought it was going to be great.

I thought we're going to run around the house and it was going to be all romantic and all this. And, you know, that's not happening. And so what happened was, is there were some things Mike could do to kind of help Mary along, but Mary had to make some decisions as well in terms of when your kids leave the empty nest, you've got to leave that too. So what Mary had to do was relinquish her old job description and create the new job description. And really, in a neat way, I've watched this transform. And they just went on a really cool trip. They got in a car and they drove kind of, you know, up to, they live in California, they drove up to the state of Washington and then over to, you know, San Juan Islands and whatever. They had a beautiful time.

They didn't do that before. So they learned to play together. One of the things that Mike and Mary, and this is not from the book, because this has been learned later, because I know these people well, but they said, you know, we had to learn to play again and to have fun because we didn't really have a lot of fun together. We had fun with our kids, but we didn't have fun connecting together. And so, you know, they started having more fun together. And that actually brought back the relationship. There was kind of a broken spirit with Mary, Mary would say. And she said, you know, my spirit was healed in some ways because Mike allowed me to have some of these experiences.

But then we played together and he started just, you know, through laughter and through fun. You also talk about the big five. Yes. And, you know, we're going to zero in here. We only have a couple of minutes left. Let's hit the big five with some description.

What are they and how does it help? Yeah, well, this is with your kids. And the big five is, you know, truly, I said it before, but have you given your child the passport to adulthood?

Because if you haven't, it's not going to go well. And they want freedom, but you've got to give them the passport to adulthood. What does that sound like? I mean, what are you saying? It says you're now in charge of your life.

I'm coming alongside you. You're moving from that being in control. And when they're teenagers, you're only in semi-control anyway. You just, let's face it, you may think you're in control, but you're not. But now moving the relationship to more of a mentoring, caring relationship. So I'm giving them, they're adults and I need to have a relationship with them as an adult.

So that's that passport. You're fired as a day-to-day parent and accept that and, you know, move on. Your role has to change. That's a brilliant point. I mean, it's a little jarring for some people to hear that. Well, it's your role. You're fired? What?

Yeah. I'm still their parent, but you need to reorient the relationship. And then quickly, you know, and this could be the biggie, you know, do you want it more than they want it? So we've talked around this, but today I see so many parents of adult children who are saying, my kids aren't, we grew up in the church and they went to Christian school and they were active in youth group and now they don't believe or they're not following the Lord.

They're violating values, they're straying from faith. And what I say to people is you can't want it more than they want. I said to a woman two nights ago, I was speaking on doing life with your adult children and her daughter had moved in with a boyfriend. And I said, does she know what you believe? Yes. Does she know how you feel?

Yes. Then broaden the relationship with her because you can't shun her because that's not going to work and you can't dump all of your anger. And frankly, you can't want it more than they're going to want it. But when she crashes, and I have no doubt that this girl is going to crash, when she crashes, you want to be that safe person.

So it's that fine line, and we could talk about this all day, but it's that fine line of your heart is broken, but how do you keep in relationship with your kids and still hold to your values? That's a conversation that parents have to have in their head with each other if they're married, with a counselor if they need counseling help. But I want to push back on that a little bit because you're saying you don't want to want it more than they want it. I think it's natural to do that. I mean, you just can't express it in the ways that you would want to.

Well, when you want it more than they want it, you become a one topic parent. Correct. So what this woman was saying, she says, I said, does she know what you believe?

Yes, I tell her every day, every time. Well, that's, she needs to be talking to somebody else. Right.

You're going to, oh, I got it. You know, I'm thinking about the parents who talk to me who, you know, their kids are violating values, straying from faith. And, you know, they're praying and they're just so upset. But what I'm saying is they can't show that as much to their kid. They can show, please don't think that I'm saying ignore all that. But what I am saying is those kids have to sometimes learn from experience. Those kids have to, you know, experience the pain. And it's tough love. Tough love is allowing your children to experience their poor choices. It's not being mean or shunning. It's allowing them to experience the poor choices.

And you know what the bottom line is on this? You guys, they still ask the question, do you still love me? Even if, yes, even when they're violating, what they want to know is do their parents, do you still love me? Well, in fact, you had that experience with your daughter.

This is where we'll end in the book. You talk about she came home and she had, you know, something done to her, a piercing, I believe, through her nose, if I remember correctly, which you didn't appreciate, but you managed that differently than you wanted to explain it. Well, you know, she comes home from college and a lot of times in college they do.

She's out of Christian college. She comes home from college and she has this ring. And I'm not saying it's a little cute little diamond thing. It's this, you know, this hoop in her nose. And basically what I realized the hoop was, was saying, are you still going to love me if I look at life a little differently? And so I didn't say that is the cutest piece of jewelry I've ever seen. But, you know, I decided that wasn't the issue for me.

I wasn't going to battle that. Funny enough, you know, she went and got her master's in clinical psych and she's counseling. Guess who loves her? Every teenage girl who has a hoop in their nose because she still has the hoop. And it's funny, even her at a Christian therapy clinic, they're saying, are you sure you want that ring? And then the head guy goes, wait, all the girls want her because she has this, this ring. She identifies. Now I'm used to it.

I even forget that she has the hoop. Yeah. Life goes on. And I'm glad I didn't say you are worthless and your values are so different because it's, it's a hoop in your nose. It's not the end of life.

And she's making great decisions on so many other things. It's sometimes hard for us as parents to, uh, buy into, but I get it. And John, maybe you might want to be quiet right here. I'm passing. But, uh, Jim, this has been great. We've covered a lot of territory and we really only covered about half of what I wanted to cover today. So let's come back next time and, and keep the conversation going if you're willing. Great. And we'll get to it. I hope this content is really meeting that need in your heart and you're going, wow, I so identify with this.

And if that's where you're at either on YouTube or radio, or you're listening through your smartphone via the focus app, that's awesome. Now let's get the book into your hands and we can do that in a fun way. I think if you can make a gift to focus for any amount, uh, to support the ministry, be part of it. I mean, it's that financial support in your prayers that ends up helping another life. So you're kind of paying it forward. So, uh, call us or get in touch with us and, uh, order the book and make a gift of any amount. We'll send it to you as our way of saying thank you.

And if you could do that on a monthly basis, even better, $10, $15, uh, it's how Jean and I, uh, support the ministry. And I think you and Dina do it as well. Right.

I'm always checking to make sure John's still doing it that way. I even changed to the new credit cards. Yeah. I even up my amounts. So, I mean, that's all good, but it's such a way to even out the cashflow for focus so we can budget properly. So consider it. And if you can do it, do it.

Yeah. Join the support team today as you can. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family 800-232-6459.

Or stop by the episode notes for all the details. And on behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we continue the conversation with Jim Burns and once again, help you and your family thrive in Christ. face them together. Call us at 1-866-875-2915. We'll talk with you, pray with you and help you find out which program will work best. That's 1-866-875-2915.