Distance unlearning: How to handle home, away from home

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Sooner or later, the balance shifts. The kids become the grown-ups. The grown-ups start to need help. It starts out innocuously. How to delete 300 Good Morning Dear messages from Mum’s phone? How to link Dad’s UPI to pay the electricity bill? It moves on to more serious duties: The full-body checkup Dad’s been putting off, Mum’s mutual funds that need updating, what to do with the farmhouse no one can manage.

It’s a problem families face around the world. But in India, as kids move away from home to study or to work, once-tight family structures are being tested in ways parents and their children didn’t expect.

This is the bit about growing up no one talks about. In addition to the new freedoms that cities offer are also new challenges of settling in without family around. There’s guilt about spending on oneself, and anguish over not being around for one’s folks as they age.

Psychiatrist Dr Kersi Chavda, who consults at Mumbai’s P D Hinduja Hospital, and psychotherapist Dr Chandni Tugnait, the founder-director of Gateway of Healing, find that this freedom-responsibility paradox has hit India fiercely, but quietly. “The empty nest syndrome has an impact of the kids too,” says Dr Tugnait. “We call it emerging adulthood transition.” They offer ways to cope.

Families, then, need to learn a new skill: To speak and hear each other as equals, without the Indian-family expectations of elders having the last word. Open dialogue is vital in addressing concerns, expectations, and boundaries, says Dr Tugnait. It also allows younger family members, at home or away, to voice their need for independence, set boundaries while acknowledging parents’ emotions or concerns.

A big part of why moving out of home is especially hard on Indian kids is because they’re allowed so little autonomy over their own lives. “It’s time parents give their child space and trust their decision-making abilities,” says Dr Chavda. “Of course, stay involved and offer support as a parent, but when needed. Don’t impose your values and beliefs on your child’s choices. Encourage their individuality and independence.”

Network building

Most young people living away from family are probably cut up over the same conflicts, but are suffering silently. And most parents back home, grappling with the empty nest and world changing too fast, share the same bewilderment and worries but rarely articulate them.

On both sides, it helps to rally your kind, not as an echo chamber but for advice. Speak to friends and colleagues, check out support groups or online communities. This helps ease feelings of isolation, loneliness, even guilt. Moving out and taking on new responsibilities means the now-adult child needs to develop healthy coping mechanisms such as journalling, meditation, or talking to a counsellor or therapist, to build resilience and avoid becoming overwhelmed.

Encourage your parents to explore new hobbies and socialise. “Make sure they feel comfortable using and learning about technology,” adds Dr Tugnait. Walk them through it, enable their video calls, Instagram, Ubers, Zomato and the like. While doing so, understand that technology and fast-paced life do not come naturally to your parents as it did to you, so be patient.

And, be more self-reliant. If you’ve learnt to cook, clean up after yourself, manage your finances, and pay your own bills on time, there’s less for parents to be worried about in the first place.