“So, you’re an empty nester now!” someone exclaimed to me recently, referencing a well-known term for the daily physical absence of children from the family home. Yet, because I have always felt that I have a direct and unbreakable connection with my family that links us together – like Ariadne’s golden cord – whether we are physically together or apart, I have always been baffled by this moniker since my family life is not over but endless.
Moreover, comparing people to birds that only care for their young for a few weeks until they literally fly away for good is not an apt comparison. Rather, people are much more like elephants who, according to the journal Nature, live in loving, close-knit herds that care for and grow together with their younger and older family members for multiple decades.
Thus, I feel that the “empty nest” pejorative, with its implications of loss and despair, does not apply to me nor to many others and should be reconsidered for three reasons.
Firstly, this term conveys the wrong attitude about how families were designed to function. Secondly, this term is not indicative of the sociocultural view of literacy, language, and how meaning is made within family units. And, thirdly, this term denotes only “individualistic” societal upbringings – popular within Western cultures – versus the “collectivistic” ones of most of the rest of the world.
Firstly, the wrong attitude is attributed to the term “empty nest.” Even though feminist scholar Dorothy Fisher, in her book Mothers and Children, is credited with coining the “empty nest” term to define both a time of sorrow and opportunity for parents, I feel that this term has a more deficit-based hold over Western society today than it did when it was first published in 1914.
Specifically, Fisher’s “empty nest” implies that parents’ jobs are to raise and launch their children out into the world in isolation, which leaves a void that parents can then fill with hobbies and activities. Yet, just like the elephants, many human grandparents, parents, children and extended family members naturally choose to be together as a cohesive unit of individual entities rather than as individual, untethered entities because these relationships mean everything to the members of these groups.
Secondly, I believe that families speak their own “language” that they have built together; there are no other families that “speak” that same “language.” When seen through the lens of sociocultural theory, linguistic scholar James Paul Gee and psychologist Lev Vygotsky maintain that all people bring to any literacy interaction a special social language and background derived through togetherness that is represented through text/language/ways of “being and doing.”
In this way, I view family “languages” as unique communities that have been built not only through their own ways of being and doing, but through the decades of their ancestors’ accumulated ways of being and doing.
Therefore, in this most beautiful and phenomenal way, families have their own language that they have developed together as a direct result of being with each other. It is based not only the span of their collective years, but on the span of their ancestors’ years, which have been infused, intermingled and passed down to those families.
Thirdly, much of the world, myself included, views family life through a “collectivistic” perspective where multigenerational attachments are strong, meaningful and meant to stay woven together, whereas other parts of the world view family life through an “individualistic” perspective where the independence of individual family members is prized, according to the 2024 article “Cultural Contexts Differentially Shape Parents’ Loneliness and Wellbeing During the Empty Nest Period” in the academic journal Communications Psychology.
Similarly, another article, “Acknowledging Empty Nest Syndrome: Eastern and Western Perspective,” published in 2020 in Mind and Society, capitalizes on the idea that cultural differences vary by country and that parents of Western origin families favor raising independent children while parents of Eastern origin families favor interconnected multigenerational family units. Culturally speaking, Americans are foregoing time spent cherishing and communing with their herds.
In this myriad of ways, I have the deepest love for my family, who mean everything to me. Indeed, the eternal love that I have for my multigenerational family and the language that we speak follows the ways of the elephants who “never forget.” We delight in our collective memories, look forward to making new ones together, celebrate the love we have for each other, and like the elephants, aspire to be part of something bigger, something so constant and true formed together – as a herd – that emanates from everlasting love by and for its members.
So, the next time someone refers to you as an “empty nester,” you might politely correct them and tell them that you are a “lifelong herder” instead.
Victoria Gray Palmer, a resident of Princeton Junction, N.J., and Surf City, is a former elementary school and high school teacher. She currently is a doctoral student studying literacy.
