Why Does My Teen Suddenly Seem Impossible?
It May Be Time to Leave the Nest
By Dr. Teresa Alasio
August has always felt like a month caught between two seasons. Summer is still here, but the signs of what comes next are everywhere. School supplies appear in stores, college students begin packing, family calendars fill up again, and parents start making mental lists of everything their children will surely forget. In some homes, though, something else starts happening too: everyone suddenly seems to be getting on everyone else’s nerves.
This year, that last part has felt particularly familiar to me. As we prepared to send one of our sons off to college, I expected the emotions that usually come with a milestone like this. I expected pride, excitement, nostalgia and probably some sadness too. I expected that strange realization that the child whose hand you once held walking into kindergarten is somehow old enough to leave home. What I did not expect was quite so much friction.
Then I came across a phrase that stopped me in my tracks: “soiling the nest.”
It is an informal term used by psychologists to describe what can happen as teenagers and young adults prepare to leave home. Clinical psychologist Regine Galanti, who has written about the phenomenon, describes it as a phase where a child who has generally enjoyed being part of the family may start picking fights, talking back, or generally putting stress on the relationship. Child psychologist Lisa Damour has covered the same territory on her podcast, noting that a graduating senior can turn genuinely difficult to live with almost overnight. Parents, meanwhile, may find themselves disproportionately irritated by things they have tolerated for years. The messy bedroom that was always annoying suddenly feels unbearable. The eye rolling hits harder. The dismissive tone seems worse. The sense that your child is pushing away becomes impossible to ignore.
In other words, home can start to feel just a little less comfortable right before someone has to leave it.
Once I heard the phrase, I could not stop thinking about it, because there is something psychologically understandable about the whole process. Developmentally, the main task of the graduating senior is to consolidate a sense of identity separate from the family. For a young adult, independence requires creating some emotional distance from the people who have cared for them their entire lives. Picking fights, rejecting advice, questioning family rules and insisting that parents do not understand anything may not be particularly pleasant ways of establishing independence, but they can be effective ones.
After all, it is probably easier to walk out the door thinking, “I cannot wait to get away from these people,” than to admit, “I am scared to leave the people I love.”
What interested me even more was the realization that parents may be doing their own version of the same thing. We spend nearly two decades preparing our children to become independent while simultaneously building our lives around caring for them. Then, if everything goes according to plan, they begin doing exactly what we raised them to do. They become less dependent on us. They make more decisions on their own. They push back. They want privacy. They start building lives that do not revolve around the family home.
And that can hurt more than we let on. A survey of parents of first-year university students in the UK found that nearly all of them described feeling real grief once their child had actually left, and about one in six reported physical symptoms of that grief, things like a racing heart, trouble sleeping, or crying spells they did not see coming. That number surprised me less once I sat with it. Grief is not usually reserved for loss in the permanent sense. It shows up any time something we have organized our life around is ending, even when the ending is exactly what we hoped for.
Sometimes anger is easier to feel than sadness. Sometimes frustration gives us somewhere to put emotions we have not quite figured out how to name. It may be easier to become furious about the dishes left in the sink than to acknowledge that soon there may be one fewer plate at the dinner table. It may be easier to complain that they are never home than to admit that we are already beginning to miss them.
Of course, not every argument in August is secretly about separation. Teenagers can be inconsiderate. Parents can overreact. Rules still matter, consequences still matter, and becoming an adult means learning that our choices affect other people. Preparing to leave home does not excuse hurtful behavior, nor does understanding the emotional backdrop mean that families should simply tolerate disrespect.
But understanding what may be happening underneath the conflict can change the way we respond to it.
Instead of asking only, “Why are you acting like this?” we might also quietly ask ourselves, “What is changing here?” For families sending a child to college, the answer is: almost everything.
The relationship between parent and child has to change. The daily authority of parenting begins to give way to something less defined. We have to allow our children to make decisions we might not make, solve problems we would rather solve for them and sometimes experience consequences we would desperately like to prevent. They have to discover who they are when we are not standing nearby, and we have to discover who we are when they do not need us in quite the same way.
Here is the more hopeful part, though, and it is worth saying out loud. Long-term research following thousands of parents through this exact transition, some of it tracking the same families for decades, has generally found that overall life satisfaction and mental health hold up better than we expect once the dust settles. Physical health and energy levels tend to dip a little in that first stretch, which tracks with how many parents describe feeling simply worn down, but the sense that life is going well tends to recover. The nest does not stay quite as empty, emotionally, as it feels in the moment.
Maybe that is why these final weeks can be surprisingly messy. We tend to imagine the departure for college as a sentimental montage: packing the car, decorating the dorm room, taking the obligatory photograph and hugging goodbye. Real life may be much less polished. There may be arguments. There may be slammed doors. There may be moments when both parent and child wonder how they are possibly going to survive another week under the same roof.
And perhaps some of that is part of the process.
For those of us living through it this August, it may help to remember that the goal is not to create a perfect ending to childhood. There really is no clean ending at all. There is simply a transition into a different kind of relationship, one in which our children are moving toward lives that belong increasingly to them and our role shifts from managing those lives to being available when we are invited into them.
That is not always easy, and I suspect it is not supposed to be.
So perhaps we can give our teenagers a little grace during these strange final weeks at home, while also extending some of that grace to ourselves. Because sometimes it is easier to be angry that they are leaving a mess in the kitchen than to admit that soon, they will not be in the kitchen at all.
And maybe the messy nest is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, helping all of us become ready, little by little, to let go.
The information presented above is for educational purposes only and not meant as a substitute for medical advice. If you have a specific medical condition that requires attention, please seek the care of your medical provider.
Dr. Teresa Alasio is a Board-Certified Medical Doctor and the Medical Director and Owner of Intentional Self Aesthetics, located in downtown New Canaan. She is also a New Canaan resident who lives in town with her family, including, as of this August, one fewer set of size 12 sneakers which has been relocated to the Manhattan School of Music in New York City.
