The day had finally come for Norm and his wife to send their son off, not just to college but to his new life as a working adult. Norm’s son had graduated and returned home, after already accepting a job in the field of his college studies, halfway across the country. The job wouldn’t start until the fall, though, so Norm and his wife spent the summer helping their son pack his belongings at home and otherwise prepare to leave home for the last time. Norm made a point of doing some special things for and with his son over the summer. But the time finally came when his son climbed into his vehicle stuffed with his belongings, and headed out the driveway, as Norm and his wife stood waving goodbye. One last honk on the vehicle’s horn, and their son was off.
Launch
The foregoing chapters have maintained that bringing children into the world and nurturing them to maturity, steeped in virtue and equipped with good character, is a family’s honor, privilege, and role. If that is so, then seeing those children navigate their way effectively out of the family and into the world to start and lead their own families is a family’s culminating glory. Sending children out of the family home and into their own new homes can feel to parents like a figurative launch, including preparation, countdown, liftoff, and beautiful arc. Sending children successfully out into the world can take years of planning and preparation. The family that does not execute well-laid plans for launching their children into the world may experience a difficult delay in or failure to launch, which may be a tolerable and necessary situation but is not the goal or mark of a good family life. You and your spouse should begin launch plans early, building your children’s foundation in a character and ambitions that will give their launch its gorgeous arc.
Plans
Preparing your children to leave the family nest involves some form of plan. Families don’t generally just kick a child out of the house at high school graduation, age eighteen, age twenty-one, or some other defined or arbitrary mark. Three common launch plans include college, a full-time job, or marriage, or some combination of two or three of those plans together. And those three plans make sense. College is a path into and through adult education, often undertaken away from home. Likewise, a full-time job is an adult activity, one that can provide the income with which to house and otherwise sustain your adult child outside the family home. And marriage, too, is an adult activity beginning with courtship and engagement, through which the engaged couple will ordinarily plan and begin arrangements for their own residence outside their family homes. Help your maturing child assess college, vocational, and marriage plans that may guide them toward their own new family life outside their childhood home. Set the expectation, and help your child orient to it.
Preparation
Preparing your child to leave the family home is the next step after your child formulates, adopts, and confirms a plan for college, full-time vocation, or marriage, or some combination of those steps. Procedural knowledge isn’t often a young adult’s strength, especially when the required procedure is unfamiliar. Your child may never have moved before. Your child may not know what preparing to leave for college, an apartment and full-time job, or an apartment with a brand-new spouse at all entails. You and your spouse can help your child make those preparations. Begin with a budget, an assessment of necessary financial support including its source, and a checking account with a debit card for electronic transactions. Help your child choose the destination, identify housing options, and qualify for, reserve, and lease the chosen housing. Arranging for transportation is another key step, and then listing and acquiring the needed household items. Planning the trip, scheduling the departure, and confirming and reconfirming all arrangements can be helpful final preparation steps. Launch is a big deal for your children. Help them.
College
Plans and preparations can differ significantly depending on whether the plan is college, full-time vocation, marriage, or a combination. In a way, college can be the simplest for which to prepare because college may be an interim launch step. Children often leave for college fully expecting to return home at least the first summer and perhaps subsequent summers. College can, in other words, be a soft launch. Still, a smooth and successful college departure in which your child completes at least the first full year requires planning and preparation. College choice, for instance, can be a make-or-break issue. Choose the wrong college, and your child may return home disappointed. Help your student with college research, visits, comparisons, evaluations, and early orientations. Summer starters can even find greater-than-usual success. Listen to your child while providing appropriate guidance and counsel, to ensure that your child has the best possible college experience.
Saving
College costs are a significant issue that you and your spouse should help your child manage wisely. A four-year college education, even at a public university supported with taxpayer funds, can easily cost upwards of $100,000, significantly more than that when counting housing, food, transportation, and other costs, plus your child’s forgone income while studying for four years. If you are able and believe it to be wise, help fund your child’s college education using savings and tax-advantaged accounts like a 529 Plan or education savings account (ESA). But don’t assume that your child, just starting out in adult life, has the financial knowledge and experience to evaluate the wisdom of spending that kind of money or incurring that kind of debt, whether or not you and your spouse are funding all or any part of your child’s college education. Help your child with deciding whether and how to fund a college education. You and your spouse decide whether it is wise to spend your family’s own funds on one or another form of education for your children. Community college followed by a public university, all while your child also works part time, may be a great cost-saving option for your child that will help your child begin adult life without significant educational debt while teaching your child the cost of education, value of work, and financial stewardship.
Return
Your child attending college does not guarantee that your child won’t return home, not only for the summers but upon college graduation. Some college students remain at their college location after graduation from an undergraduate program, whether for graduate school, to await the graduation of a student with whom they’re connected, for employment, or to figure out what to do next other than return home. Good for them, and good for the family for helping them launch. Some college students, though, return home after college graduation to plan next steps. A return home after graduation can be an appropriate accommodation. But generally, such a return should be with clear plans for that next step, a clear timeline, appropriate assistance on taking those next steps, and some accountability. A first try at emancipation doesn’t always work. But better second tries should follow. You, your spouse, and your child should all want success. With persistence, success will come.
Vocation
College is not for every child. Straight into the workforce, or straight into marriage and homemaking, are other traditional options for maturity, emancipation, and orderly departure from the childhood home. Vocation may be the better option than higher education for your child, especially with the dramatic rise in the cost of higher education, changes in college curricula, and a changing employment landscape offering new vocational opportunities. Yet vocation also often requires special planning. High school junior and senior years can be a good time for children to explore meaningful vocational options. Some full-time work is available without vocational training, although much of it in low-wage transitional employment. Apprenticeships over school summer breaks may help qualify your child for career-track employment right out of high school. But a few weeks or months of focused vocational training may teach your child valuable new skills to gain that career-track employment. It can be an exciting, satisfying, and rewarding time for a child with the ambition to do well vocationally. Be patient, persistent, and resourceful in helping your child into the full-time workforce. Once employed full-time, your child should generally want and be able to afford moving out of the childhood family home.
Marriage
Your child’s marriage can also play into emancipation plans, whether in combination with higher education or vocation, or as a new homemaker. Indeed, marriage is a surer step out of the childhood home than either college or full-time work, where a child might prefer to remain at home for convenience, comfort, finances, or other reasons. Your child’s marriage is also something to celebrate not just for your child’s big step out of your family home but also for your child’s big step into your child’s own family and home. For that reason, parents may celebrate a child’s marriage more than a child’s college graduation or full-time work. Marriage can be a highly appropriate step out of the marital home. Children form lifelong relationships in high school, sometimes leading to an early marriage. Children also date and court in college, sometimes leading to marriage during or shortly after college. Celebrate and support your child’s marriage, if that is the responsible step your child takes out of the family home.
Relationships
Your child’s marriage, like your child’s college attendance and full-time work, benefits from a significant degree of planning and preparation. You and your spouse can help your child both plan to marry and prepare to marry. From an early age, listen to your child share relationship interests, questions, and concerns. Show your child that your child can trust you as a sensitive and wise confidante. Guide your child from your own experience and what you learned. Point your child to sound moral speakers and authors on relationship subjects so that your child learns more from you and them than from the culture. Encourage your child to participate in a church youth group or similar ministry where the adult leader includes sound relationship materials, presentations, and discussions. Help your child develop a clear, principled, and reliable view of how to relate to and respect the other sex, and how to choose, court, and marry a virtuous spouse of good character. Then, when your child finds the marriage candidate whom your child wishes to court, help them through that process. Celebrate your child’s engagement, and be as involved in helping your child prepare for the wedding and family life afterward as your child wishes. Few things can be more rewarding and satisfying than helping your child take the last few steps into your child’s own family life.
Dependency
Some children are not capable of independent living because of mental, emotional, and developmental disabilities. Some children never reach emancipation. The family raising a special-needs child has a special gift. The needs of a severely or significantly disabled child are a natural conduit through which to express the family’s devotion, care, and love. Family love and care usually remains hidden beneath the surface of normalcy. Not so, though, for a family with a special-needs child, where the family’s love, unity, loyalty, and devotion is evident in everything the family does to support the child. While adult special-needs children may be incapable of emancipation, a family may have to plan and prepare for that child’s care as the parents age and become incapable of the child’s care, even as the child matures into adulthood. The adult special-needs individual’s sibling, cousin, or other relative of the individual’s own generation may be able to take over the individual’s care. Or adult foster care or other institutional care may be necessary. Parents must investigate, arrange, and confirm these plans. Parents may also be able to establish and fund a trust to provide for the cost of the child’s long-term care. Making those alternative arrangements is its own kind of launch and something that a devoted family can celebrate in its own way. The family that reaches that point of a changing of the generations, in the care of a special-needs individual, has indeed gained a rich victory.
Reflection
Can you see sound routes out of the family home for each of your maturing children? Do you and your spouse need to help your maturing children make plans for their emancipation? For your children who already have those plans, what preparation can you assist them with to accomplish a smooth transition? For your children pursuing college, what are your plans for helping them choose a college wisely? What criteria do you hope to encourage your college-bound children to use when choosing a school? Are you and your spouse saving or planning to save for children’s college education? Will you be taking advantage of tax-favored education savings accounts? Do you plan on helping your college-bound children understand the cost of higher education, the need for prudent financial management, and the burden of educational debt? Do you have children who are planning to move straight into the workforce rather than go to college? If so, how clear and reasonable are their plans? Can you help them identify an appropriate vocational path including high school internships, summer apprenticeships, and vocational training? Is the vocation that your child has identified more than transitional work and instead career work? Will it provide a sustainable living? Do you have children planning to marry? Have you helped them form a healthy view of courting, engagement, and marriage? How can you and your spouse help them plan and prepare? If you have a special-needs child who will remain in the family home as an adult dependent, what plans are you making for that child’s continuing care?
Key Points
A family realizes victory when helping adult children out of the home.
Help adult children plan for emancipation to smooth their transition.
Adult children may also need help preparing wisely for leaving.
College is one suitable transition into adult life out of the family home.
Save for your children’s college education through tax-favored plans.
Help a child graduating from college with final emancipation plans.
Adult children pursuing full-time jobs rather than college are a credit.
Marriage and family life is another rewarding path out of the home.
Help your child prepare for sound courting and marital relationship.
An adult disabled child remaining in the home warrants special plans.