Soiling the Nest: The Weirdly Comforting Reason Kids Gets Awful Before They Leave Home with Dr. Sheryl Ziegler

Two and a half weeks after dropping her daughter off at college, psychologist Dr. Sheryl Ziegler joins Whitney to talk about the messy, unfiltered reality of watching a kid leave the nest — including the fight at breakfast, the tissues in her purse, and the psychological reason her daughter picked their last morning together to be completely impossible.

In this episode, we get into:

• "Soiling the nest": the psychological term for why sweet kids suddenly turn prickly right before a big transition (and why it's protective, not personal)
• Why the 18-year-old version of pushing you away looks so different from the 14-year-old version — and what both are really doing
• Why parents of neurodivergent kids may have an advantage when the teen years hit
• "Future tripping": Dr. Sheryl's term for the anticipatory anxiety that steals parents' present moments, and how to catch yourself doing it
• A simple gut-check for deciding which social accounts, sidelines conversations, and parenting rabbit holes to walk away from

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Mentioned in this episode:

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