Adult Children Move Out: Family Meals and Reflections on Parental Self-sacrifice at the Moment of Transition

Abstract

This article examines the differentiation and change in the shared eating practices of parents and their adult children, linking theories of sacrifice with empirical research. Drawing on 26 qualitative, in-depth dyadic interviews, the authors analyse the transformation of expectations sensed by the parents before and after their adult children leave home. While the article confirms the significance of meals for family relationships, it further develops the findings in transition to the empty nest phase of family life. First, it examines the understanding of different aspects and distribution of everyday sacrificing in an intergenerational family, as well as the dynamics introduced by the life course transition connected with adult children moving out. Second, it analyses how this transition carries in consequence a transformation in the food-related practices of the parents of adult children, who tend to pay less attention to the quality, variety, and regularity of their dinners once their children have moved out. Third, it explores children’s visits to their family home that can trigger or modify old self-sacrifice patterns. Finally, it demonstrates the perceived gains or losses resulting from parents’ long-term sacrifices connected with feeding their children.

Motherhood in the empty nest - a lack of social recognition?

“…Moreover, this adult child may also make it difficult to step out of the mother's role by constantly involving her in the challenges of adult life (Spence & Lonner, 1971). The lack of precise guidance on how to act as a mother of adult children can create uncertainty, which will generate a sense of role strain (Wojciechowska, 2008); transition into liminality (after Gajewska et al, 2023a) or reconfiguration of a mother's role into a latent role (Herzberg-Kurasz et al, 2023b), activated remotely, e.g., when children come to visit (Rancew-Sikora & Skowrońska, 2022).…”

Room of her own: Remaking empty nest and creating herspaces in practices of Polish mothers whose children left home

“…This aggregation was defined as the moment when separateness appears in the lives of the interviewed women – when they acquire separate, their own rooms, armchairs, offices, bedrooms, when the woman ceases to be a mother, and in her everyday practices she takes into account her individual roles and needs first and foremost. It is a moment in a woman’s biography when she ‘sometimes turns into a mother’ when children come to her home, including in mediated contacts, or when her children come to visit (Rancew-Sikora and Skowrońska, 2022). Everyday life without children makes the mother’s role incidental, as opposed to the past when ‘just being yourself’ used to be incidental.…”