When Should You Redecorate the Empty Nest?

Your children are off to college. Do you have to keep their rooms intact forever?

This can be a bittersweet time of year for parents of high school and college seniors. You are proud that your child has reached such important milestones, but you also know that this means nothing will ever be quite the same for your family. So while you celebrate your son or daughter's accomplishments, you also know it's time to make some changes at home.

One of the biggest dilemmas for parents is what to do with your child's bedroom. When is the right time to turn it into a study or a guestroom? Some parents are purists on this issue. They keep the room intact for decades – just in case their child (at 30 or 40?) decides to return home. Others have barely waved good-bye before they call in the contractors to tear down walls and redecorate.

Most parents are somewhere in between. Unless you live in a space-short apartment, keeping the bedroom relatively intact during the college years isn't a bad idea. That's especially true when your child is a freshman. They will be struggling with lots of new experiences – new friends, new classes, new freedom to make decisions on their own – and it is comforting to return home at Thanksgiving and find that their posters and books are still right where they left them in August.

But after that, it's more complicated. If your child starts spending summers away from home – either working or traveling – then you should feel less of an obligation to preserve the shrine to their high school years. A gradual approach often works well. You don't have to take over the whole room at once. Establish a beach head in one area – the desk, example. Clear it off and start using it to pay bills. Then move on to the bookcases. Donate stuff he or she hasn't looked at it years (the collected works of Maurice Sendak, for example) to a local day care center or library and start stocking it with your own books. One word of warning: be careful not to toss out anything that has special meaning for your child.

If the departed kid shared a room with a sibling, allow the one left behind to redo the space to fit his or her needs while still leaving a bed intact for the college-age child.

After college graduation, the rules change drastically. In this economy, your child may not have a job to go to immediately, but you want to make it clear that his or her childhood home is not a permanent refuge. One way to do that is to suggest a thorough cleaning out (in between job interviews, of course). You supply the Hefty bags and boxes for donations; he or she does the hard work of sorting and tossing.

Eventually, we all move on and once your children have a place of their own, they won't care so much about whether you have preserved all their posters from 2005. Then their space becomes your space to use however you want.

Article source: Family.lifegoesstrong.com

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