If your last child is all grown up and about to leave home, you’re probably experiencing a mixed bag of emotions. The child who once used to rely on you for everything is now set to go out into the world and fend for themselves and use all the skills and life lessons you’ve taught them. However, if you are still feeling a bit down over the thought of your child moving away there a number of steps to follow so you can try overcome this.

Prepare
If you know your child is about to move away, then you should start taking certain actions beforehand so that they will be properly set up. For instance, if you know they are going to be moving to university in a year’s time you should start making sure they are able to cook for themselves and preform basic household duties such as working a hoover and washing their clothes. By doing all of this you will be making sure that they are properly set up and it will also help offer you some piece of mind that they can look after themselves properly when they are away.

Keeping in Touch
It is important to try and make sure you know exactly how you can stay in touch with your child. In 2017 there certainly isn’t a shortage of platforms available to get in contact with people. However, when you are used to seeing your child every day sometimes a little phone call with them doesn’t suffice. So you may want to start utilising video calls so you can still have a nice chat with your child and still be able to see them too.

Accept Support
If you find you start feeling down and start getting lonely then you can try and see people who can support you. This can be going to see a psychiatrist or by confiding in a friend or family member so you have a person you can talk to that can help you get your feelings out and start finding avenues you can go down to improve your happiness.

Find Something to Help Keep Your Mind off Them
Following on from the last point, you can then start to do things which will make a change to your own life. This can be something small such as simply taking up a new hobby such as painting or starting a new sport. There is then something which you may not have considered which is adopting another child. Now, this is obviously a huge step and you should certainly put a lot of thought into and make a hasty decision. There a number of avenues you can down when doing this such as adopting a child full-time or you can also foster a child, on a part-time basis as a way to still care for a child but still have time to explore other avenues.