Empty Nest, Effects on Marriage

The empty nest occurs when the last child leaves home and parents no longer have coresident children. The transition often is not permanent. About 40 percent of young adults return to live with their parents. Most often, these returns are short-lived, for 1 or 2 years. Parents' housing and financial support helps children negotiate the transition to adulthood as they launch careers, change jobs, or acquire more training. For many couples, the nest-leaving stage entails a process during which children leave, return, and leave home again. This entry describes how transitions into and out of the empty nest affect marital interaction and happiness.

Research on the “U-shaped curve” of marital satisfaction has suggested a linkage between the empty nest and marriage. The key notion in this research is that raising children is stressful and thus detrimental to marital happiness. Researchers assume that certain stages of childhood are more stressful for parents than are others, especially adolescence. Thus, marital satisfaction is expected to decline with the birth of children and to reach its lowest level when couples are parenting teenagers. In numerous cross-sectional studies, declining happiness in the early years of marriage has been attributed to the demands of parenting minor [Page 524]children. Increases in happiness later in marriage (the upturn in the “U”) are linked to lessening parental responsibilities as children leave home. Longitudinal studies also suggest that the empty nest leads to increases in marital happiness, perceived marital equity (the balance between what each spouse gives to and receives from the marriage), and in women's well-being. Data from a long-term study of married couples showed that, after the initial sharp decline from the newlywed stage, marital happiness declined slowly until 40 years of marriage, then declined steeply again. The presence of children in the household had negative effects on marital happiness across the life cycle. Children's home-leaving and the empty-nest transition slowed the general decline over time in marital happiness.

The empty nest may alter the risk of divorce. This effect depends on marital duration. National survey data in the United States suggest that the risk of divorce increases after the transition to empty nest, but only for couples who reached this phase before 20 years of marriage. The effect of the last child's departure on the risk of divorce is negative for couples married more than 30 years. Thus, the impact of nest-emptying on marital stability may depend on earlier family events, including the timing of the birth of the first child and the spacing of subsequent children. These events will influence whether the empty nest occurs earlier or later in the marriage.