What Gottman’s Early Parenting Research Can Teach Us About Parenting Adult Children
People ask me all the time if parenting gets easier.
I usually tell them the truth: no, it just gets different.
When you first have a baby, the task of parenting is actually pretty simple. You have one job: keep the baby alive. Not too much later, you add safe. Shortly thereafter, you work on healthy. At the start, that’s basically it—alive, safe, healthy.
Then, over time, things get more complicated.
We – as good parents – start adding things to the list. We want our kids to be kind. Smart. Responsible. Confident. Resilient. Maybe a little athletic. Maybe a little artistic. Definitely polite in front of other adults.
Some of those values are thoughtful. Some are inherited. Some are driven by anxiety. Most of them, if we’re honest, are at least a little made up.
And somewhere along the way, our children start making up their own list.
That’s when parenting shifts again.
In my experience, raising young adults is harder than raising young children—mostly because of the jobs we don’t have anymore.
We’re not in charge in the same way. We can’t control outcomes. We can’t monitor every influence. We can’t script the timing of their becoming.
And that’s where things get… different.
We tend to think of major parenting transitions as something that happens at the beginning—when we bring a baby home. But there’s another transition that deserves just as much attention: not bringing baby home, but letting adult children go.
Empty nesting is often framed as loss—grief, silence, absence. And it can include all of that. But it may be more accurate to see it as a second major parenting transition—a relational reorganization.
The children are still yours. The marriage is still there. But the roles and rhythms have changed.
And that shift can be surprisingly disorienting.
My wife and I are in that transition now. Both of our daughters launched this past year—one into work after college, the other into a gap year of travel and study. Watching them move into adulthood has been exhilarating, humbling, and even a little disturbing.
So yes, we’re “empty nesting,” though I’ve never loved the phrase. It sounds passive, as if something has simply been taken. Birds push their young out to learn to fly. That hasn’t been our experience. We didn’t push—we loosened our grip. And if I’m honest, the idea that we ever had a grip in the first place is a bit comical.
That may be where early and later parenting rhyme.
This is also where the Gottmans’ research in Bringing Baby Home becomes surprisingly relevant. Their work shows that couples don’t struggle simply because they’ve had a baby—they struggle because everything changes at once: roles, expectations, identity, time, and connection.
What’s striking is how similar that disruption feels on the other side of parenting.
When a baby arrives, couples often ask, How do we stay connected while everything is changing?
When children leave, the question returns in a quieter form: What is our connection now that everything has changed?
Gottman research highlights how important it is for couples to talk openly about roles, expectations, stress, and connection. Trouble often comes not just from exhaustion, but from assumptions: Who is doing what? What happened to us? How do we stay close while everything is changing?
Those same questions can quietly return when the kids leave home.
If parenting was the shared project for twenty years, what happens when the project changes? If your time and energy revolved around children, what happens when the calendar opens? If your sense of purpose was organized around raising kids, what takes its place?
For some couples, the answer feels like relief. For others, it feels like silence.
In my therapy office where “empty nesting” often shows up as a presenting problem, it usually sounds something like this: “So… now what are we gonna do?”
Sometimes it comes out as a joke. Sometimes with a shrug. Sometimes one partner says it and the other one looks at me like, Please don’t make me answer that.
And every once in a while, it lands with a thud.
Because it’s not really about schedules or hobbies. It’s about identity.
Who are we now that the kids don’t need us in the same way? What kind of marriage do we actually have? Are we friends? Do we like each other? Is there anything here besides logistics and a long history together?
The empty nest doesn’t create brand new problems. It just turns the volume up on the ones that were already there—and easier to ignore when life was loud.
That’s why Gottman’s emphasis on friendship and turning toward matters here. In a full house, bids for connection get buried under logistics. In a quiet house, they become easier to hear—or easier to notice the absence of.
Do we know how to be together without a problem to solve? Do we know how to share delight? Do we make small bids and respond to them? Can we sit in the same room without distraction and feel companioned rather than exposed?
Those aren’t empty nest questions. They’re relationship questions. But the empty nest brings them into focus.
My wife and I got a glimpse of that this fall on a trip to London and Paris.
Not because of anything extraordinary we did. Because of what wasn’t happening.
No one needed anything from us.
There were no logistics to manage, no schedules to coordinate, no one to check in on. Just the two of us, walking, talking, noticing.
At one point we stopped along the Seine to listen to a street orchestra playing pop songs. We stood there longer than we normally would have. Not because the music was so incredible, but because we could.
And somewhere in all that space, something subtle shifted.
We started talking differently. Slower. With more curiosity. Less like two people running a household and more like two people getting to know each other again.
What surprised me was that we also felt closer to our daughters—not as kids, but as adults. We found ourselves imagining the places shaping them, the worlds they were discovering. And without trying to, we expanded a bit ourselves.
Parenting adult children may involve less managing and more witnessing. Less directing and more becoming.
That shift isn’t easy. It asks us to exchange authority for influence, and influence for relationship—to move from manager to consultant. From “Here’s what you should do” to “I’m here if you want me.”
It requires restraint and trust. It means tolerating decisions we wouldn’t make and timelines we wouldn’t choose.
It also asks something of couples. Can we accept influence from each other about what this season means? Can we stay allied when our children’s choices stir up our own anxieties or disappointments?
The work is no longer to keep our children close in the same ways. The work is to remain connected while closeness changes shape.
I keep coming back to this: my children no longer need to be brought home. They need to be sent. Or at least released.
That doesn’t mean detachment. It means making room for them to discover themselves—even when that process is inconvenient or unsettling. Love changes form. Good parenting changes form. The nest was never meant to be permanent.
And yet, letting go isn’t the same as disappearing. Part of the work now is to be good stewards of the home itself—not just the physical space, but the emotional one—so that if and when our children return, or bring others with them, they come back to something alive, safe, and healthy.
This is where shared meaning becomes essential. If parenting provided built-in meaning for years, this season invites a new question: What are we building now?
Not just trips or schedules, but something deeper. What rituals are ours now? What conversations have we been postponing? What parts of ourselves went dormant while we were raising children?
In my better moments, I hear “Now what are we gonna do?” differently. There’s a lift at the end of the question. Less like emptiness. More like possibility.
That doesn’t erase grief. There is longing. There are moments when the quiet feels too quiet. But there can also be curiosity, rediscovery, and new tenderness between partners learning to see each other again.
Maybe that’s the invitation: not to go back to who you were before kids, but to move forward as who you’ve become.
As parents we’ve settled back into our original priorities: alive, safe, healthy.
Not as a finish line—but as a compass.
At the beginning of parenting, that’s the job.
But maybe it was never just the job of raising children. Maybe it’s the work of relationships—at every stage.
To create a family where people feel alive, where there is enough safety to grow and risk becoming, and where there is enough health to hold both connection and change.
The logistics look different now. The house is quieter. The roles are less defined. But the work isn’t over. If anything, it’s more intentional—and less scripted. The task becomes to keep making a home that welcomes, to build a marriage that can hold both grief and joy, and to loosen our grip without losing our love.
The transition to parenthood asks couples to become a family while staying connected. The transition to parenting adult children asks something just as difficult: to remain a family while allowing everyone—including ourselves—to change.
One small way to begin is to turn toward each other on purpose—to check in, to name what’s hard alongside what’s good, and to protect simple rituals that remind you you’re still a team.
That is no small task. But then again, neither was the first one.
