The 'Stress Cost' of the Empty Next

I suspect this is why the death of Beau Biden at age 46 felt so gut-wrenching, even to strangers. As parents of young children, we are responsible for their well-being and their safety. We can never protect them entirely, as the car accident that took the life of Joe Biden's first wife and infant daughter cruelly demonstrated. Yet at the outset we have, or imagine we have, some degree of control: the sleeping on the side (or is it the stomach?); the well-fortified car-seat; the preservative-free mashed peas.

The arc of parenting is the process of increasingly accepting the futility of managing risk. You have to let them out into the world -- into a car driven by someone else, onto a playground where another child might be cruel, into a classroom where they might stumble. Beau Biden survived the accident; he made it safely through deployment in Iraq; he seemed to have beaten the brain cancer. And then it got him.

Eternal vigilance is the price of parenthood, but it is insufficient. As I write this column, my family is asleep upstairs, awaiting our younger daughter's high school graduation this afternoon. I am exquisitely mindful of how increasingly elusive those together moments will be. Our older daughter is working in New York this summer and studying in London next semester. The younger will be off to college in August, a two-hour-and-40-minute plane ride away.

So I look at the shoes strewn across my front hallway and the pile of dirty dishes in her room and try to leaven my exasperation with wistfulness. Soon enough, I will mourn the absence of mess. (OK, not really.) But I will miss the life force that accompanies the mess.

Buddelmeyer, Wooden and Hamermesh advise that my "time constraints" will diminish, although not quite to an extent that is statistically significant. "Births tighten the constraints much more than departures loosen them," they write.

Indeed. We deride helicopter parenting; we vow to avoid it. Yet our hearts cannot help but hover.

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.