CLEARING THE NEST

YOU'VE survived the agonies of indecision over the CAO/CAS form. Now all your children have to do is study, get those points, get into third level and they'll be well on the flight path to leaving the nest. Right? Wrong, say the parents of thousands of late teens and twentysomethings whose experience suggests that this may be the hardest stage of parenting.

Take Sean, for example, a father of four who had always intended that his children would leave their suburban nest at the age of 21, leaving him and his wife a few years of peace before retirement after a few decades of child rearing.

Instead, all of them - the youngest 20, the eldest 26 - are still living at home, and only one is working. Two switched courses part way through university, one dropped out and went abroad. By the time she came home, she had `found herself' and was all fired up to start university all over again at the age of 23. The youngest is having second thoughts about his university course, over two years after starting it. Sean didn't, as some college guidance counsellors suggest, push his children into courses they didn't want.

Now Sean, who dearly loves his children and is proud to say they've grown up into nice people whom he likes, looks a little enviously at families where it has been all plain sailing. He wonders could he have done it differently?

It's true that some parents rear children who follow the expected path, go straight from second to third level, with no repeat Leavings, no I need a year out', no flunking first year, no course changes, their young minds focused firmly on getting employment, even as they pursue higher degrees.

But even having a brainbox of a child who has enough points to do actuarial science in UCD is no guarantee that he/she will successfully make the transition into the real world: thousands of parents have children of 25, 26, and older doing exotic MAs and doctorates, but who are still semi dependent on their parents.

PARENTS who grew up in a world where they expected to get jobs, get married, and get a life of their own in their early twenties are still adjusting to modern life where children expect understanding parents to subisidise them as they continue their education, emigrate, return, come home after having a child, or when a marriage breaks down - children who assume the nest will always be there, along with the long suffering parents who run it.

The abolition of college fees has helped, of course, but even when children work part time to help earn their passage, parents will find they have to subsidise them until they eventually get something like a real job. So is there any way of making your children independent some time before they have their midlife crisis?

The consensus among parents is that they should get a bit tough. Both Sean and Brigid, a mother of seven who has two twentysomething sons still struggling with third level education, feel they should probably have been a little less understanding, a little more hardline when their children were switching courses, repeating years, taking time out on the assumption that mam and dad would go on subsidising it all.

Sean and his wife don't underestimate how difficult it is for children nowadays to get through the years between the Leaving and finding their place in the world. "A lot of students have big problems in first year at third level," says Sean. "It's such a big change for them. College life can be very lonely, hard to adjust to."

EVEN so, he and his wife feel that they were too sympathetic when their two eldest children decided to opt out halfway through their college careers. Both then worked abroad before returning to take up new courses.

"Our policy of being open and understanding backfired, and the children would probably agree. Now if I heard `Please, Dad, I want to change courses' I wouldn't let them off the hook easily. I'd make them wait and really think it through. If you do, you might easily find in six months time they're saying `why did you let me do that?'"

Sean and his wife are very conscious of the pressures on children nowadays, and the difficulty of getting decent jobs, even in our `tiger' economy. That's partly why they've been so easy going up to now. "You know how many kids commit suicide, it's a big fear, " says Sean.

Brigid echoes those sentiments: two of her children (one 24, one 28) sailed through third level and have good, well paying jobs. Two more are floundering, which suggests that her parenting isn't the problem. One child, aged 22, who struggled through a difficult course, repeating at least one year, will be 24 at best, and more likely 26 before he gets his primary degree.

Another dropped out in first year, and is living at home while pondering going back to college. The family live in the country and it costs Brigid and her husband up to £2,000 a year - plus food which she sends to him - to help pay the living expenses of the son still at college.

"A little bit of toughness would have been no harm although I would still find it hard: if you told them they had to stand on their own two feet by a certain age - say, 24 or 25 - and they were out there with no job you'd feel guilty."

Maeve was practical: when her daughter failed first year at third level, she more or less harried her into taking a practical computer course in a PLC, insisting that at the very least, the girl would have a practical skill to fall back on, and one which would help her pay her own way through college.

Her daughter was reluctant, but acceded when Maeve simply insisted. Maeve believes in the importance of third level education, but believes her daughter should now look for a job, possibly returning to third level at night. "She still isn't realistic about what she wants to study, and until she is, I think she'd be better off working."

PARENTS should make their expectations clearer to children, suggests Kathleen Kelleher, senior clinical psychologist at the Mater Dei Institute, in Dublin. "Start young, talking about the time when they'll grow up and move away to live on their own." And, although unemployment, ongoing education and the economic situation are a factor, "parents should have in their own heads from the outset the concept that their children will be going away". They might also make it a little clearer to their children that the family home is, in the end, the parents' home, not somewhere they can assume they can run to forever.

We can't do much to change the world our children live in, a world where people move in and out of education, part time jobs, temporary McJobs, until they find their feet. But we could make it clearer that we do expect them to find their feet, oh, sometime before they're thirty.