It's OK to Not Miss Your Kids

Don't listen to the guilt that tells you otherwise.

The other day, a good friend of mine texted me. It was the day before she was due to pick her son up from overnight camp.

“I missed him but also didn’t,” she wrote. “I feel pretty guilty about that.”

My 10-year-old daughter is now starting her third week of overnight camp, and I also don’t miss her very much, if at all. I think about her and hope she’s doing well, but I don’t miss her. I don’t wish she were back home with me, and I don’t feel lost or incomplete without her.

Does that make me a terrible parent? Should I feel guilty? I don’t think so. We can love our kids immensely and want the best for them and also not wish they were with us all the time. We can enjoy our time apart because we know that they are being well cared-for and having meaningful experiences without us.

If our primary job as parents is to help our kids grow into independent humans who can thrive without us, then we certainly don’t need to feel guilty when our kids are off having experiences that will help them get there. We should feel good about that, not bad about that. (This said, if you do miss your kids, that is totally okay too!!!)

I remember the first day I dropped my son off at daycare when he was eight months old. Everyone had warned me that I’d miss him like the devil. But honestly …. I didn’t. I was so grateful for some space. Yes, I thought about him constantly, wondered how he was doing, and was excited to pick him up at the end of the day — but I sure didn’t wish he were home with me instead.

I think we sometimes confuse anxiety and fear with longing. Last year, when my daughter went away for her first two-week camp session, I worried about her a lot. She had told me in the weeks leading up to it that she was nervous about making new friends. When we dropped her off, she seemed unsure. I kept wondering if she was lonely or homesick. I sometimes interpreted my feelings of worry as feelings of missing her — wishing I could see her — in part because if I saw her, she’d have the chance to tell me that she was doing okay. Sometimes, what we are longing for is reassurance more than anything else.

This year, though, I had few concerns about my daughter when I dropped her off. She had told me, over and over again, that she was excited for camp this year. She knew she’d be okay. I knew she’d be okay. Still, did I scour the camp website every day looking for photos to confirm to me that she was alive ? Of course. Did I get so excited every time I got a letter from her? Absolutely. But did I long for reassurance, or miss her in the sense of wanting her back home instead of at camp? Definitely not. I was glad she was having so much fun without me, and I’m not ashamed to say I have been glad to have some time away from her. There is a misconception that if you don’t miss someone when you’re away from them, you must not really love them. But love is not the same thing as longing.

Another misconception is that if you’re not constantly fretting over your children, you’re a bad parent. (These expectations are especially salient for women: if you’re not constantly catering to your children, you’re a bad mother.) The intensive parenting movement tells us that our lives should revolve around our children — that everything we do should be in the service of nurturing them and enriching their lives. Of course, summer camp and daycare and preschool are typically enriching experiences — but they still sometimes feel like cheating, because they do not involve a massive degree of parental self-sacrifice. (I mean, but they certainly require plenty of financial sacrifice.) We live in a society in which we are told that if we’re not sacrificing our own time and sleep and independence for our kids, we are not doing enough. This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous — both for us and our children, as I’ve written here before. What’s good for us isn’t, by default, bad for our kids. It’s far more common for the opposite to be true: What’s best for us is often best for our kids.

So if you don’t miss your kids while they’re at camp, or school, or wherever they may go, remind yourself that your lack of longing it is not a sign of a lack of parental love. The guilt you may be feeling is also not a sign that you’ve done anything wrong — it’s a sign that our culture has been feeding you lies about what it means to be a good parent. None of us are immune to these pernicious messages, but I believe that the more we talk about and recognize these feelings as products of our culture rather than reflections of our failures, the more we can rise above them, and the more we can actually enjoy our time away from our kids — which is something we all deserve.

What are your thoughts? Share in the comments!

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