You may see more of him than you expect when he is done with school if he doesn’t have money to live on his own. 
At least it sounds like you will be able to see him every Christmas.
I moved away from home when I was in my early twenties and my parents have only been able to see me every couple of years since then.
It’s too far and too expensive to visit more often.
I do appreciate the time I can spend with them when I am able to visit. Especially now that they are older.
I’m a few years behind you, but a couple of suggestions. Definitely go to visit. What we did with my son was we got an AirBnB nearby and my wife made meals for us all. So we had some great family time. But…we wrapped it up by 8 or 9 so he could go do his own thing. Insisted on a 1:1 drink with dad and a 1:1 meal with mom. Can’t explain why, but doing the AirBnB thing (a full apartment) just made it all more relaxed for all of us.
That said, in my own grad school days I came home a lot less as well. I was in Michigan, family in Boston. It was harder to get away. Just part of growing up.
Part of growing up, yes, and sometimes forced by circumstances like distance and cost of travel, and busy schedules
But I would like to add a point of view based on some reading, and that is, that sometimes kids who felt really really connected to family do this, especially those who have trouble with transitions.
First, kids who feel closely connected to parents need to go to further extremes to disconnect, for a time, before returning as autonomous adults. So you could reflect on whether you were very close to your son at one time. This was a good thing and understanding the need to separate can help make this less hurtful.
Second, as our guidance counselor put it, once a kid leaves for college, “home never really feels the same.” Some kids cannot handle this and disconnect for awhile until they can come home in a different way- sometimes not until they have a family themselves.
I usually don’t pull out the experience of having a kid with significant health issues but I am so grateful that one of mine if finally able to be far away. I don’t think the dramatic experiences of some families in terms of health or mental illness should, however, minimize your own experience of feeling hurt.
Some of us have downsized these days. So our kids don’t have that much of a home to return to! I moved to the city and got an inflatable mattress for visitors to my studio apartment. My son rarely visited for years when I still had our house but he seems to like camping out now that he is 30!
Thanks, @compmom, you made me feel a lot better. Yes, we were a very close family, and we had so many good times while the kids were growing up. That’s why it’s been hard for me to understand why he doesn’t want to come home now. And, yes, it does hurt. But if he needs to disconnect a little more in order to make the transition to adulthood, I can respect that. I do hope he comes to a point where he enjoys spending time with us again.
He may love to spend time with you…when he can. But that doesn’t mean he will visit more often.
Yes…we miss seeing our kids more often…but we are very proud of the young adults they have become. We enjoy visiting them…and they enjoy visiting here too. It’s just not as often as it was when they were growing up.
I am not sure whether this is a good idea. It depends on the terms of your agreement to pay for his graduate school. If you made a commitment to support him and didn’t set any conditions like “as long as you’re frugal with your own money,” he could feel that you’re backing out of your agreement if you change the terms now, and this could damage your relationship with him over the long term.
@BigWideWorld - instead of being hurt that he doesn’t want to come “home” (yes, I know it’s hard), be proud that you have done such a good job raising him to be an independent adult. That’s always been one of my goals raising my DS. When he leaves this fall, I will have to remember that it will be okay to miss him but that’s it’s not really my “right” to be hurt if/when he chooses to not come back here to visit. Special occasions like family weddings or such are, of course, exceptions.
I couldn’t wait to get out of the house when I left for college. I hated going home because my parents didn’t have a very good marriage and it was always uncomfortable (that doesn’t sound like the case for you). And I had the whole “not going back to such a small town because it’s boring” attitude. Thirty-odd years later, it’s still not comfortable for me to go visit my parents (they haven’t changed and our lifestyles are very different), but I’ve come full circle with my hometown. I’ve grown to appreciate some of what it offers and enjoy seeing old friends more than I would have ten or twenty years ago. I just wanted something different for many years (and I certainly got it being an Army wife).
My husband has told me that the day he left for college (he went to a military academy which is a slightly different scenario) was the day he always felt that he left home permanently (i.e. not the day he got his first real job, or married, etc.). He didn’t feel like he was going “home” when he went to visit his parents. And ironically, my dad has told me the story many times of being the oldest of seven kids (in a poor to barely lower middle class family) and being told by his dad on the day of his high school graduation that he had xxx time to move out or start paying rent because there were six more kids behind him.
OP, you have my sympathies.
Sure, I know it’s a normal part of parenting to let out kids leave the nest.
But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.
I have no answers, no suggestions. But I did want to offer some support.
This parenting stuff isn’t for the faint of heart!!
I totally get feeling “dissed” but honestly it’s normal. Be happy he has friends to go visit! (I wish I had a friend in Europe to go visit!)
“That said, if he has the cash lying around to take a trip to Europe, I would start weaning him off the bank of mom and dad to some degree.”
Not every trip to Europe is expensive–especially if you’ve got a friend. I think it’s a great opportunity for your son to go–I’d encourage it rather than moan about it. If you don’t do it while young and have the time then it might never happen.
OP, I understand your sadness and think you’ve received some good perspective here. My 3 daughters range in age from 27 to 34, and the two oldest haven’t been “home” for many years. I don’t expect they’ll ever come back, barring a family emergency, and the youngest is trending in that direction. I totally get it. Our house isn’t what they think of as home anymore. Fortunately, we can visit them 3-4 times a year, for a weekend or a bit longer.
When we were young adults, I grew to resent and eventually dread going “home.” My mom quickly picked up on that and has never pressured us, with the result that I make the effort a few times a year and meet up with her at the halfway point a few more times. We’re still pressured to visit my husband’s family and I really hate every minute of it. We stay in a hotel for sanity’s sake, which isn’t good enough for them; when I call to see if I can stop in for an afternoon when I’m also visiting my mom, that’s not good enough, either.
And when my kids call Grandma, she lights into them for not coming home (though we haven’t lived there for 30 years) and it’s an unpleasant conversation. So pressure is not the way to go, though you already know that. Good luck - hope you’ll feel better soon.
Even though it irks me a bit that he is thinking about spending his savings on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Europe, we are not planning on changing our agreement to pay for grad school, @Marian . The only condition we put on our financial contribution was that he maintain good grades, which he has. My DH’s feeling is that unless DS comes to us asking for more money, we should keep quiet about his spending habits. DH thinks it would actually be a good life lesson if DS were to suddenly look at his bank account and think, “Holy crap, I don’t have much left. What am I going to do?” A position most of us have been in at one point or another.
I really do appreciate all the different perspectives shared here – it’s been very helpful, as well as enlightening.
I had a period of time after college where I barely kept in contact with my parents. I felt like every time that I went to visit they were trying to stuff me back into the box of my childhood and it just didn’t fit any more. I had to create a new relationship of adult-to-adult, because they kept trying to make me a child. My tastes changed and they kept trying to feed me old food. They poured wine for themselves before dinner and forgot to ask if I wanted a glass.
We reconciled when they came to visit me in my place. I took them to places I knew well and they did not. We ate at my new favorite restaurants and I paid the bill. It was hard but it was great.
He could be feeling the same thing, the disconnect between the adult he feels he is and the child he was. Nostalgia can be painful if it is laid on too heavily.
After dealing with those feelings I adjusted. Now my parents are again my best friends. I hope you have as much fun reconnecting as we did.
And rest assured that if he starts having kids he is going to want you around a lot more often. At least that’s what I’ve seen in my peer group.
How often would you want your grad school kiddo to come home? Every break? Once a term? Once a month? How often?
When my one of my kids was an undergrad, that kid did service trips through the college during spring break. We never had that kid home except for Christmas and a couple of weeks in the summer (kid had a job onncampus in the summers after the first year).
I’m another one who didn’t enjoy going home after college (or during, to be honest). I didn’t see a lot of my parents throughout most of my 20s. Then at the end I had my first kid…and that ALL changed.
My own D doesn’t like coming home much so I visit her instead. We like each other - she’d just rather be in more exciting places, generally. My S has moved out but is near, and I see him fairly regularly.
The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down,
You can’t let go and you can’t hold on,
You can’t go back and you can’t stand still…
I think the key here is that your son is in grad school. At least for me, when I started grad school, many of my friends were working. So it wasn’t like college where if I didn’t go home for spring break, there was nothing to do. Actually, when I visit home I often miss out on a lot of stuff going on with my friends. And it can feel a bit weird if you’re always going home to visit your parents and your friends aren’t, because they work and don’t have the vacation days. If your son was working would you still feel sad if he didn’t visit more than once a year?
Also they may think: If i go home, what do I do? I don’t live there…I don’t want to just sit around…esp if everyone else is just going about their daily lives.
Consider visiting him some or planning a vacation together.
Plus like others say…sometimes they don’t want to be home for a reason…too much control, treating them like kids, lifestyle differences.
^That’s a good point. My husband hates to visit his relatives, because all they do is sit around all day. Drives him bonkers.
At some point our kids made a psychological break, a declaration of independence so to speak. Not so much financial independence at first. I recall asking my son, after his first year at the University of Chicago, “How do you like being at Chicago?” His answer: “I’m not living AT Chicago, I’m living IN Chicago.” And so in his mind he had established a new home, and it wasn’t confined to the campus in south Chicago. As he put it to me, “I make it a point to get WELL off campus at least twice a week.” Some of this, but not all, was to slake his thirst for major league sports. But we weren’t surprised when during his senior year he began looking for post-college employment in Chicago. That’s where he began his career, and where in all he lived for a dozen years from first entering UofC.
I think this kind of psychological break, where the child’s home is his or her home, is inevitable.
At this stage, many years later, we don’t expect our kids to visit us in the midwest, though that could change. They conveniently now live in the same city – NYC – so WE visit THEM for the holidays, and WE still organize summer vacations in Maine (a long family tradition). They have their lives, we have ours, but we are family. But we don’t live together any more.