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Reclaiming the kids’ room when they leave the nest

  • Ideas & Inspiration
Aug 09, 2024
Kids Bedroom Ideas – Beautiful Homes

August is empty nest season, and as parents prepare to send their children away to college our writer explores what happens to the room the children will leave behind

When I was growing up, we were a family of five (one grandmother, included) who shared a two-bedroom house. Therefore, the concept of “my room” was alien to me. In fact, it was only when I started college and moved to a hostel that I held the right to a room, even if it was shared with one other student. It was almost a decade later that the meme (not a word then) of empty nesters and what they did with their children’s room entered our conscience. This was primarily through a tiny running gag in the TV series, Friends, where the sibling characters Ross and Monica’s parents exhibited their preference for Ross by how they dealt with their children’s rooms. Monica’s was converted into a home gym almost as soon as she left for college, while Ross’s was maintained just as he left it. My parents themselves moved homes and cities soon after I left college and so there was no confusion at all about what to do with the rooms. Other than certificates and photographs, there was nothing to keep, and in the last two decades, as they moved through Ahmedabad and Pune and Kochi and Muscat, I have visited and occupied a room in their house, never my room. When I brought this up with her, my ever-practical mother rolled her eyes and said, “life could have been far worse”.

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Coming a Full Circle

Now, of course, I am at the other end of this equation. In a few weeks, my daughter will move to college. We haven’t started packing her things, but mentally, each time I enter her room, I am auditing what will stay and what will go. This, despite the fact that my daughter has been in a boarding school in India for five years, followed by two years of high school in the US. This process is familiar to us, we have done this many times, yet there is something about going to college that makes this time different. In the past, I always held out for the possibility that she will perhaps stay home for some of her education. But now that she is going to college in the UK, the chances of her coming to live with me for an extended period of time is remote. And so, the question about space. ‘Empty Nest’, I am beginning to realise, is a factor of time, not space.

 

August is empty nest season, and so it was not difficult to find a support group of fellow parents preparing to send their children away to college. Very few had immediate plans for re-decorating their homes and incorporating the child’s room into a new set-up, but most thought they would eventually do something. Sending your child out into the world is painful enough, and so the parental need is to have fewer changes, not more. It will likely take a few months, a couple of years even, before practical considerations trump over emotional ones.


 

Future Plans

Priya Mehta, whose son is going to the Netherlands for his graduation though, is planning on a “creeping acquisition”, and is going to use him room for her online meetings. “I currently use my dining table, but it is in the middle of the house and therefore has never-ending traffic of people walking back and forth. Even though I have my back to a wall and these people don’t show up on camera, it is very distracting,” she says. Her son’s room is at the end of the house, and her plan to is to clean up a shelf that is right behind his desk and add some flowers and a painting there and use that as her “zoom cabin”, while leaving the rest intact.

In Mumbai, where space is far harder to come by, Aseem Chibber, has been hatching some plans to spruce up the living room and convert it into a proper TV viewing area by splurging on a sound system. Currently, the room doubles up as a guest room which gets occupied frequently by visiting friends and family. “I prefer the term ‘free birds’ to ‘empty nesters’,” he says, “and so when we become free birds in a few weeks, my plan is to make my daughter’s room the guest bedroom and the living room becomes my TV-den.” His wife was unaware of these plans, so my guess is that this one will have a long gestation period from fantasy to reality.

Kids Bedroom Ideas – Beautiful Homes

Image courtesy, Fabian Franco

In Gurgaon, Purba Ray, whose daughter is 30, is a veteran of the ever-changing dynamics of the room war. She still maintains the room as her daughter’s, she says, because she can afford it. However, some creeping acquisitions occur. “Recently my husband put an exercise machine there, and my daughter was angry. It’s a fight over territory, my daughter has marked that room as hers even if she doesn’t live there.” Every once in a while, Ray goes in and throws out junk and old clothes and things that are unlikely to be used. There is a bit of give and take in the family’s relationship with the room.

 

When I bought and decorated my house a year ago, I had assigned the second bedroom as my daughter’s, and had her sign off on its creative direction. Even then, I knew she was unlikely to be a long-term occupant of the room. But, through all the life-altering changes her young life has gone through, a parental separation, and boarding school life, the one constant she has always had is coming home to her room. It was her space, a place she can anchor her life to and live with the certainty that no matter where she is in the world, there’s always a room for her in her mother’s home. And so, being a good mother, I will not be re-purposing her room. However, I can’t help eye the ample cupboard space that will become available to me and feel a shiver of delight. After all, mothers are humans too!

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