You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

As always, we are joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, everyone, and welcome back on today's episode.

We will be discussing college, and beyond you know Jessica you've

already done this before my oldest is almost 14 in my mind I've already got the

countdown going and I'm not that excited about it so I know I know It feels like the end of your journey and you're looking

forward to it because there are good things with it. But there are also some really tough things

that come with sending your kid off to college. Last year when I dropped my son off at college,

he's nine hours away from home. I really grieved. I mean, it was true grief. I was an emotional wreck.

You know, I was super proud of him and loved seeing so much potential. But I was so scared to leave

him to be responsible for himself and feed himself. And I was also, well, you know, I, nobody does it like mom does it. And so, and I was so scared to leave him alone and so sad to have his childhood behind us. And so my husband, of course, had different feelings. He was a little less emotional. And he kept telling me, this is what he's supposed to do.

You know, and I said, but I don't like it. So it's hard. And there are a lot of emotions involved with

sending your son or daughter out the door and on their way. So I want to encourage parents who

are doing this this week or the next couple of weeks sending these kids out the door to their

future. I know that this

is a tough time for all of us. Yeah, it is. And it's really both of those things, you know, to balance.

There's no reason to try to get rid of the grief because it's a good thing. You can do both.

And to be honest, as a dad, I can tell you that your husband was

not saying he didn't have the feelings. We as men tend to think more about, well, you need to be

thinking about this to get this job done. But I promise if you had stopped him and said, seriously,

you're not feeling any sadness about this. He would say, well, no, I am. I mean,

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