When a child leaves the nest, how does it affect younger brothers and sisters?

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anxiety, change, Children, dynamics, empty nest syndrome, family, home, parents, relationships, siblings, students, transition, university, withdrawn

When a child leaves the nest, how does it affect younger brothers and sisters?

It’s five years since my eldest child left home, but now it’s that time of year again, the shops filled with students buying value sets of crockery and stationery, harassed parents doing the Ikea run. I’m reminded of one of the most unexpected sides to our so-called emptying nest.

When my youngest child, seven years old at the time, became cowed with anxiety by day and unable to sleep at night, I thought at first it had something to do with his new class at primary school. It was a few weeks into the start of a school year, and our previously robust youngest had undergone a massive character change. He had been outgoing but was now withdrawn. He had been a joker; now nothing made him laugh. He started wanting reassurance at night.

It took days of probing to get to the root of the problem. No, he liked his new teacher. Yes, his friendships were all fine. When he admitted, reluctantly, that since his sister left home, it had felt to him as if a piece of the family was missing, I was dumbstruck. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that her leaving would make such a strong impact on him, especially as one sister was still at home.

“Every time I see any of the things she’s left behind, I feel upset,” he tried to explain.

At bedtime, he used to find the music and background chatter from his sisters’ rooms comforting. When one or both of them were out, he knew they would be there later. Now that the eldest had left, for good, as he saw it, he simply couldn’t get to sleep or think about anything but the gap that was left.

Empty nest syndrome is pretty well documented. Parents may well experience feelings of either grief or exuberance – a step towards regaining their freedom – as their brood take their first steps into the big wide world, but it hadn’t occurred to me to pay attention to the effect on her siblings when our first-born left.

On reflection, it seems obvious – even when other siblings remain at home, the departure of one of them affects family dynamics. Relationships shift and alter the way they have to adjust when a new baby is born, with roles altering and pecking orders changing. But there is no “empty nest” label for siblings to attach to their confused feelings, particularly those who are very young (the gap between our youngest and his 18-year-old sister perhaps exacerbated the problem), and my son, unable or unwilling to articulate his sense of loss, was suffering anxiety and sleeplessness instead. I suspect, with the instinctive perception of children, that he might also have avoided telling me why he was affected for fear of upsetting me – I may have mentioned how quiet the house seemed without the eldest or that I missed her, and he picked up some of that and didn’t want to make things worse.

Now I thought about it, I realised that her departure meant that other things had changed in the household, which must have felt unsettling to a young child. Our middle daughter, 16 at the time, had started going out more with her friends, and one or the other of us parents was usually preoccupied with work or study. The house became a place to sleep rather than the family home it had been. With only four of us, rarely all at home at once, we hardly ever gathered for family meals any more. We used to sit and watch TV or films together; now we never did.

What message had this given to our youngest? That it wasn’t worth the effort just for him?

The change must have felt catastrophic. Our first-born leaving was poignant for her parents. It was the end of an era, but it also meant we were embarking on a path that would eventually lead us back to living a child-free life again, to which in some ways we were looking forward.

For our youngest child, who had never known life without his older sister, the change was far more significant. It was uncharted and so potentially scary. It must also have felt final – he had no idea, as we did, that students come scurrying back home every holiday and often in between. As far as he was concerned, if one person could just leave, who was going to disappear next?

But all siblings are affected. Our 16 year old had lost a confidante and ally. The silence in the house was conspicuous now that the two girls’ gossip and summary of their day no longer took place nightly in their room. And, indeed, my middle daughter says it was a difficult transition for her too. “I felt really upset, driving away from her,” she admits. “And I missed her a lot,” she says.

The difference between her and the youngest was that she was able to express her feelings and fill the gap by increasing her social life and endlessly messaging her sister. But the result was that she too edged away from home, leaving the house all the emptier for her younger brother.

Once I began to think about the whole issue of siblings leaving, I remembered that when my elder brother went off on his travels, it catapulted me into adulthood. I was left at home with my younger brother, who at that stage seemed much less exciting, and I was lost. Who would I go to parties and gigs with now? My younger brother (who may also, like my youngest son, have had unexpressed feelings himself) withdrew into his room as he hit puberty, my mother returned to full-time work and my father was out more. When I got in from school, the house was silent, cold and tomb-like. I couldn’t wait to leave and made sure I did, as soon as I could.

Home was no longer the place of solace it had once seemed. Because, of course, accompanying the emotional changes when a child leaves, are economic and practical ones. Parents have to support their older kids through university and may take the opportunity – as mine did – to work more hours, in the process leaving the younger ones behind. The conflict is one I recognise only too well, as the need to earn more to support my older children through further education has been pitted against the responsibility of being around for the younger one. When you’ve been a parent for 18-plus years, it’s easy to feel that it’s time to ease off when they start to leave home, and to give yourself a bit of a break, pursuing interests you may have had to shelve during the child-rearing years, but younger children may feel – and indeed be – sidelined as a result.

There is also an effect on the parents’ relationship. Couples who have worked at staying together “for the sake of the kids”, may give up making the effort once there are fewer kids at home. A friend, the mother of two adult daughters, recounts: “We managed to hold our relationship together while the older one was at home, even though it wasn’t going well. I didn’t realise it at the time, but now I see there was a link between her leaving and our relationship ending. It wasn’t conscious, but it was there. I worry now that my younger daughter must have felt she didn’t matter as much as the older one because we held it together for her sister, but not for her!”

In the years since our first daughter left for university, she has been back to live at home and moved out again. The middle child has also left, but I made more of an attempt to be aware of how her brother may feel, and to remind him that her “leaving” didn’t mean she was disappearing for ever. But by then he was older and knew that such changes aren’t finite anyway.

There are, of course, advantages to a sibling leaving. Younger children have a chance to try on new identities, to expand into the space left, to have their own room – for the first time in some cases – to take on new roles, and, potentially, to grow closer to other siblings or their parents. My son is 13 now and reaping the benefits of having siblings who have left home. “It was difficult when I was little,” he says. “But now they’re living in London it’s like I’ve got a second home,” he says.

For me, it was a salutary lesson in how strong the bond between my own children really was and how much more sensitive I should have been to the change a child leaving would make to her siblings in the first place. It seemed to me that my children became closer when they started living apart, but perhaps, and more likely, it was simply that I hadn’t realised how close they had always been. We are often the worst witnesses to what is in front of our noses within the family. I am also aware that while for us, the parents, it was a step towards a couple-only lifestyle, for my youngest, life really would never be the same again.

Perhaps these two recollections from friends best illustrate the sense of the gap that can be left when a sibling leaves home. “My sisters shared an attic bedroom just above my room. When they’d both left, I used to lie in bed aware of, and terrified by, the dark, empty hole that was left. I loved it at Christmas when they came home and that dark hole filled with the light and noise of their presence again.”

Another friend, who shared a room with her older sister, recalls how when she left home she wondered who she was going to talk to at night. “I found it devastating when my sister left, and I used to carry on the conversations I would have been having with her when she was there,” she says. “For months after she left, I just kept on talking to an empty bed.”

Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?

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hikikomori, isolation, Japan, withdrawn

Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?

As many as a million young people in Japan are thought to remain holed up in their homes – sometimes for decades at a time. Why?

For Hide, the problems started when he gave up school.

“I started to blame myself and my parents also blamed me for not going to school. The pressure started to build up,” he says.

“Then, gradually, I became afraid to go out and fearful of meeting people. And then I couldn’t get out of my house.”

Gradually, Hide relinquished all communication with friends and eventually, his parents. To avoid seeing them he slept through the day and sat up all night, watching TV.

“I had all kinds of negative emotions inside me,” he says. “The desire to go outside, anger towards society and my parents, sadness about having this condition, fear about what would happen in the future, and jealousy towards the people who were leading normal lives.”

Hide had become “withdrawn” or hikikomori.

In Japan, hikikomori, a term that’s also used to describe the young people who withdraw, is a word that everyone knows.

Tamaki Saito was a newly qualified psychiatrist when, in the early 1990s, he was struck by the number of parents who sought his help with children who had quit school and hidden themselves away for months and sometimes years at a time. These young people were often from middle-class families, they were almost always male, and the average age for their withdrawal was 15.

It might sound like straightforward teenage laziness. Why not stay in your room while your parents wait on you? But Saito says sufferers are paralysed by profound social fears.

“They are tormented in the mind,” he says. “They want to go out in the world, they want to make friends or lovers, but they can’t.”

Symptoms vary between patients. For some, violent outbursts alternate with infantile behaviour such as pawing at the mother’s body. Other patients might be obsessive, paranoid and depressed.

When Saito began his research, social withdrawal was not unknown, but it was treated by doctors as a symptom of other underlying problems rather than a pattern of behaviour requiring special treatment.

Since he drew attention to the phenomenon, it is thought the numbers of hikikomori have increased. A conservative estimate of the number of people now affected is 200,000, but a 2010 survey for the Japanese Cabinet Office came back with a much higher figure – 700,000. Since sufferers are by definition hidden away, Saito himself places the figure higher still, at around one million.

The average age of hikikomori also seems to have risen over the last two decades. Before it was 21 – now it is 32.

So why do they withdraw?

The trigger for a boy retreating to his bedroom might be comparatively slight – poor grades or a broken heart, for example – but the withdrawal itself can become a source of trauma. And powerful social forces can conspire to keep him there.

One such force is sekentei, a person’s reputation in the community and the pressure he or she feels to impress others. The longer hikikomori remain apart from society, the more aware they become of their social failure. They lose whatever self-esteem and confidence they had and the prospect of leaving home becomes ever more terrifying.

Parents are also conscious of their social standing and frequently wait for months before seeking professional help.

“I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t even have the will to pick up the phone. Just what am I supposed to do?” Welcome to NHK! was a novel, comic book and cartoon about the life of a hikikomori. Copyright Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Kendi Oiwa 2004

A second social factor is the amae – dependence – that characterises Japanese family relationships. Young women traditionally live with their parents until marriage, and men may never move out of the family home. Even though about half of hikikomori are violent towards their parents, for most families it would be unthinkable to throw them out.

But in exchange for decades of support for their children, parents expect them to show respect and fulfil their role in society of getting a job.

Matsu became hikikomori after he fell out with his parents about his career and university course.

“I was very well mentally, but my parents pushed me the way I didn’t want to go,” he says. “My father is an artist and he runs his own business – he wanted me to do the same.” But Matsu wanted to become a computer programmer in a large firm – one of corporate Japan’s army of “salarymen”.

“But my father said: ‘In the future there won’t be a society like that.’ He said: ‘Don’t become a salaryman.'”

Like many hikikomori, Matsu was the eldest son and felt the full weight of parental expectation. He grew furious when he saw his younger brother doing what he wanted. “I became violent and had to live separately from my family,” he says.

One way to interpret Matsu’s story is see him as being at the faultline of a cultural shift in Japan.

“Traditionally, Japanese psychology was thought to be group-oriented – Japanese people do not want to stand out in a group,” says Yuriko Suzuki, a psychologist at the National Institute for Mental Health in Tokyo. “But I think especially for the younger generation, they want more individualised or personalised care and attention. I think we are in a mixed state.”

But even hikikomori who desperately want to fulfil their parents’ plans for them may find themselves frustrated.

Andy Furlong, an academic at the University of Glasgow specialising in the transition from education to work, connects the growth of the hikikomori phenomenon with the popping of the 1980s “bubble economy” and the onset of Japan’s recession of the 1990s.

It was at this point that the conveyor belt of good school grades leading to good university places leading to jobs-for-life broke down. A generation of Japanese were faced with the insecurity of short-term, part-time work.

And it came with stigma, not sympathy.

Job-hopping Japanese were called “freeters” – a combination of the word “freelance” and the German word for “worker”, arbeiter. In political discussion, freeters were frequently bundled together with “neets” – an adopted British acronym meaning “not in education, employment or training”. Neets, freeters, hikikomori – these were ways of describing the good-for-nothing younger generation, parasites on the flagging Japanese economy. The older generation, who graduated and slotted into steady careers in the 1960s and 1970s, could not relate to them.

“The opportunities have changed fundamentally,” says Furlong. “I don’t think the families always know how to handle that.”

A common reaction is for parents to treat their recalcitrant son with anger, to lecture them and make them feel guilty for bringing shame on the family. The risk here is that – as with Hide – communication with parents may break down altogether. But some parents have been driven to extreme measures.

For a time one company operating in Nagoya could be hired by parents to burst into their children’s rooms, give them a big dressing down, and forcibly drag them away to a dormitory to learn the error of their ways.

Kazuhiko Saito, the director of the psychiatry department at Kohnodai Hospital in Chiba, says that sudden interventions – even by healthcare professionals – can prove disastrous.

“In many cases, the patient becomes violent towards the staff or the parents in front of the counsellors, or after the counsellors have left,” he says.

Kazuhiko Saito is in favour of healthcare professionals visiting hikikomori, but he says they must be fully briefed on the patient, who must know in advance that they are coming.

In any case, the do-nothing approach has been shown not to work. Tamaki Saito likens the hikikomori state to alcoholism, in that it is impossible to give up without a support network.

His approach is to begin with “reorganising” the relationship between the patient and his parents, arming desperate mothers and fathers with strategies to restart communication with their children. When the patient is well enough to come to the clinic in person he can be treated with drugs and therapy. Group therapy is a relatively new concept to Japanese psychology, but self-help groups have become a key way of drawing hikikomori into wider society.

For both Hide and Matsu, the journey to recovery was helped by visiting a charity-run youth club in Tokyo known as an ibasho – a safe place for visitors to start reintroducing themselves to society.

Both men have made progress in their relationships with their parents. Matsu has been for a job interview as a computer programmer, and Hide has a part-time job. He thinks that by starting to talk again with his parents, the whole family has been able to move on.

“They thought about their way of life in the past and in the future,” he says. “I think that before – even though they were out working – their mental attitude was just like a hikikomori, but now they’re more open and honest with themselves. So as their child I’m very happy to see them change.”

Many parents of hikikomori visit the ibasho even though their children may never be well enough to come with them.

Yoshiko’s son withdrew from society very gradually when he was 22.

At first he would go out to buy shopping, but she observes ruefully that internet shopping means this is no longer necessary and he no longer leaves the house. He is now 50 years old.

“I think my son is losing the power or desire to do what he wants to do,” she says. “Maybe he used to have something he wanted to do but I think I ruined it.”