In the program "Sans Rendez-Vous", on Europe 1, the sexologist and psychoanalyst Catherine Blanc responds to a listener who has seen her sexual appetite increase tenfold after her children have left the family nest. She doesn't know how to explain it.

>> How to explain a sudden increase in libido in parents, from the moment the children leave the nest? In the program Sans Rendez-Vous , on Europe 1, a listener questions this phenomenon which she has observed since her three children left home to live their own lives. According to the sexologist, this can be explained by two factors: the rediscovery of her role as a lover, and a physiological mechanism of "restarting" reproductive functions.

Babette's question

I have been with my husband since I was very young. From the moment I had my three children, sexuality went into the background. But since they left the house overnight, my sexual appetite has increased tenfold. How to explain this change?

Catherine Blanc's response

"There are two reasons for this. The first is because we can divide the role of parent and the role of lover. When we are completely at our role of parent, we can find ourselves in the difficulty of leaving our imagination and his bodily freedom to express himself for a free, peaceful, fulfilling and creative sexuality.

Another reason for this: when the children leave, the desire found can be increased tenfold because, the mother having no more children, she naturally resumes her function to fill the nest again (even if she doesn 'has no more child project). Her sexuality then finds a new echo: since this sexuality is not going to be gratified by babies, the woman will meet her lover as, perhaps, she has never met him.

Also, to explain this revival of libido, we must not overlook the decline in freedoms that is that of parents in our time. Today, proximity is important, relations between parents and children are quite close. All of this greatly inhibits adult sexuality when children are at home. However, this flashback is not a constant. Other women, on the contrary, are in a re-expressed "baby blues". They are very sad to no longer have a function and this can, conversely, worsen their sexuality.

Men are not to be outdone. They can find in the availability of their wives a wonderful opportunity to be able to occupy all the space that had been nibbled on by the children in the home. However, there may also be men who, having become accustomed to another mode of operation, may be surprised and destabilized by a request made to them.