When Your Last Kid Leaves, it’s a Major Transition and a Time to Pro-Actively Reinvent Yourself and Let Go of Your Young Adult Fledglings. With JW Walker, an actor who produced The Incredibles movies, and his actress wife Pamela Gaye Walker, who performed together in the two-person gig The Empty Nesters play. When their two daughters left home, the Walkers tapped their personal experience for The Empty Nesters play and poured it into their characters. The play earned accolades in San...Read More

Baby Boomers Are Finding a Renaissance in Their Marriage Relationships When the Kids Leave Home: As We Move into Later Life, We Become Better at Understanding Emotions of Others, at Compassion and at Marriage. Robert W. Levenson is a Berkeley psychology professor and researcher who has been conducting an ongoing study of baby boomers and their parents since 1989. He researches long-term marriages in midlife and beyond, focusing on couples who have stayed together. Bob...Read More

 David and Claudia Arp, founders of Marriage Alive International, have run seminars and marriage education programs for tens of thousands of couples in the United States and internationally for more than three and a half decades. They’ve also been married for 56 years. Together, they have written more than 40 books on relationships that have sold more than a million copies in 10 languages, including the Gold Medallion winner, The Second Half of Marriage...Read More

Being Available as a Parent Helps Young Adults Succeed in an Era When 30 is the New 20 and They Take Longer to Graduate from College, Get Married and Launch a Career. Jeffery Jensen Arnett, author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, is a research professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens...Read More

How to Reignite the Spark in your Empty Nest Marriage by making positive “bids,” Listening without Criticizing and Creating Rituals of Connection. Donald Cole is clinical director with the Gottman Institute, a Seattle-based couples counseling center. He also works with the institute’s research arm, which is known as the Love Lab. He’s a marriage and family counselor with three decades experience and has worked with more than 1,000 couples. He also trains therapists nationally and...Read More

Transition to Empty Nest is a Daunting Passage and Can Trigger Existential Angst: a Signal it’s Time to Identify Passions and Strengths, Act on Values and Priorities, Cultivate New Friendships and Contribute to Something Larger than Yourself. When your last child leaves home, you can be caught in a swirl of emotions: emptiness, excitement, and angst. You start to grasp that your time on Earth is finite and that life is impermanent. You notice more...Read More