COMMITMENTS : It’s OK to Love Adult Kids From a Distance

When Diane Twachtman realized her two children were beginning to empty themselves out of her nest, she made her own move.

“I thought if I didn’t get some greater interest and meaning in my life, I would fall into the trap of living through my kids,” she recalls.

Twachtman, a speech-language pathologist, went back to school, deepening her expertise in treatment of autism and eventually getting a doctorate.

“I filled up my empty nest with course work,” she says. “It turned out that it gave me an absolute common ground with the kids. We spoke the same language.”

In the case of her daughter Jennifer, exactly the same language. Jennifer Twachtman is now a speech-language pathologist, specializing in autism.

The bookstore shelves groan with material about how to raise young kids, but the relationship between a parent and a child stepping out into adulthood is, by comparison, undiscovered country.

When they move out, do you call a lot? Visit? Wait for them to make the first move? How do you stay in their lives without pushing too hard?

“Whatever style you choose has to work for your family, not for someone else down the street,” says Shauna L. Smith, a family therapist based in Sacramento and author of “Making Peace With Your Adult Children” (HarperCollins, 1993).

When Sara Kennedy started Bowdoin College, she and her mother Sally hadn’t really spelled out how much they’d be in touch.

“At first, I didn’t call home much at all,” says Sara, the oldest of three children. “We let each other sort each other out.”

Sara had attended the high school where her mother is a teacher, so their daily lives had been heavily enmeshed.

“At first, it was kind of a relief, even though we were great friends, just to finally be on my own,” she says.

They fell into a rhythm of phone chats--Sara says once a month, Sally says every two weeks.

When Roberta Kurlantzick’s son, Josh, started at Haverford College, he was issued an e-mail address. “He’s a child who never wrote letters beyond the days when he was required to, from camp,” says Kurlantzick.

But e-mail was different somehow, and Josh became a conscientious correspondent. Kurlantzick says she was headed for life online anyway as part of her job, but she and her husband got hip to e-mail that much quicker. (Parents whose kids spend semesters in places like Australia find e-mail a godsend because it’s so much cheaper than a long-distance call.)

Sally Kennedy discovered that her younger daughter Annie, now at Oberlin College, was more of an e-mailer than Sara.

“We don’t talk on the phone that much, but rarely does a day go by that I don’t get two or three sentences from her,” says Kennedy. “And I respond in kind. Often it’s pretty inane stuff.”

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Smith says communication with older children is too tricky and individualistic a matter to be left to chance. It’s better to talk about it before the child leaves, she says, and find out what the hopes and expectations are on both sides.

“And parents have the right to speak of their needs,” she says.

Twachtman says it’s important not to make older children feel obligated to spend more time with their parents just because the parents miss them.

“I think you stay in your kids’ lives by giving them a lot of space, but the kind of space where they know you are there for them, and that they are front and center in your life,” she says.

Keeping roles straight helps, too, she says. “You can’t sink down to the level of simple friendship,” she says. “Once Jennifer said to me, ‘You’re my best friend.’ I said, ‘Thank you for the compliment, but you’re going to have a lot of friends and best friends in your life, but I’m your mother.’ ”