Kate Gosselin is getting real about how she “survived” empty nest syndrome after her children left home for college.
“I remember when Mady and Cara went to college, I unhealthily pretended for the first three months that they were just upstairs sleeping,” Gosselin, 50, said in a Friday, August 15, TikTok video of her eldest daughters. “[I acted like] they were home, but they were upstairs sleeping. I couldn’t accept the fact that they had left, they were gone and I wasn’t gonna see them until the holidays.”
The Kate Plus Eight alum shares twins Mady and Cara, now 24, with ex-husband Jon Gosselin. The now-exes are also parents of sextuplets, now 21.
“I unhealthily coped, and that’s how I dealt with it,” Kate recalled on Friday. “Every holiday, little or big, I sent them really nicely decorated boxes to make it exciting for them and help them miss home less. That was fun for me, and it was really fun for them to get mail.”
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Mady and Cara went to separate colleges and would call Kate via FaceTime, “crying every night” for the first few weeks.
“After that, they slowly found friends and I didn’t hear from them as much, which scared me,” Kate said. “I wanted to make sure they were safe, and I wanted to make sure they were OK.”
The former TLC star eventually learned to “let go of” those overwhelming feelings by the time her younger children — Hannah, Alexis, Leah, Joel, Aaden and Collin — went off to college.
“They go to college closer to home, which is nice,” Kate, who is estranged from Collin, added. “It was a little easier because they could come home on the weekends. It didn’t feel so final. By then, I already had a trial run of kids leaving home.”
While Kate has learned to deal with being an empty nester, she looks forward to the holiday season when most of her children return home.
“They’re all catching up,” she said. “They all live in different places or go to different colleges, so I get to listen to them catching up and be a part of that. We cook big meals together. It’s really loud here, and I love it.”
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She added, “I love hearing their laughter, and they get along really great. It’s really wonderful. So, I guess what I wanted to say is in all of this empty nest stuff, don’t forget what our goal is as a parent [to] prepare our kids to be functional, productive members of society. When they go to college, it’s a good thing!”