Distance Unlearning

Moved out of the family home? While parents deal with an empty nest, India's young people are grappling with guilt, fear and are feeling all kinds of sad feels

- Karishma Kuenzang

Sooner or later, the balance shifts. The kids become the grown-ups. The grown-ups start to need help. It starts out innocuously. How to delete 300 Good Morning Dear messages from Mum’s phone? How to link Dad’s UPI to pay the electricity bill? It moves on to more serious duties: The full-body checkup Dad’s been putting off, Mum’s mutual funds that need updating, the farmhouse no one can manage. As more kids move away from home to study or to work, once-tight family structures are being tested in ways parents and children didn’t expect. This is the bit about growing up no one talks about. In addition to the new freedoms that cities offer are also new challenges of settling in without family. There’s guilt about spending on oneself, and anguish over abandoning one’s folks as they age.

Psychiatrist Dr Kersi Chavda, who consults at Mumbai's P D Hinduja Hospital, psychotherapist Dr and Chandni Tugnait, of founder-director Gateway of Healing, find that this freedom responsibility paradox has hit India fiercely, but quietly. "The empty nest syndrome has an impact of the kids too," says Dr Tugnait. "We call it emerging adulthood transition." They offer ways to cope.