Gordon Ramsay was surprised by the extent of his sadness when his son moved out. It is a loss that all parents must face – but it can be a new beginning, too

He is the culinary tough guy, known for getting as heated as the casserole he has just put into the oven and infamous for giving everyone around him a verbal roasting. But this week Gordon Ramsay revealed he is as soft as a souffle somewhere inside – at least when it comes to his children leaving home.

This revelation came courtesy of an appearance by the chef on James Corden’s Late Late Show, during which the host asked him how he was dealing with his 18-year-old son’s departure to the University of Exeter. The easy thing would have been to have laughed it off, with a few throwaway comments about how these days they are back before we know it – the boomerang generation are never gone for long.

But instead, Ramsay was refreshingly upfront: he was “gutted” at having to say goodbye to Jack, and revealed that he had recently gone into his boy’s bedroom, opened his drawers and put on a pair of pants he found there. At this point Corden, who a few seconds earlier had been admitting he could already feel the tears welling up at the thought of his baby leaving home, turned to good-natured mockery. Was Ramsay, he asked, sitting there all on his own in his kid’s underpants, glass of wine in hand, listening to All By Myself by Céline Dion?

There was a slight sense of no one quite knowing what to make of Ramsay’s confession of pure anguish, but it is an anguish that every parent going through the stage of children leaving home will recognise, and I’m sure I’m not the only one cheering him on for being honest about how incredibly tough it can be.

Celia Dodd, the author of The Empty Nest: How to Survive and Stay Close to Your Adult Child, is certainly with me. Her three children are aged between 26 and 33, but she still has vivid memories about how tough it was when they moved out. “It was a real physical wrench,” she says. “I found it a very difficult time. People say, ‘Get a life,’ and of course your life will go on – but what was at the centre of your life isn’t there any more. You feel something is missing – it’s really visceral.”

Clinical psychologist Bhavna Jani-Negandhi agrees; she too is touched by Ramsay’s revelation. “My heart goes out to him,” she says. “It’s a new beginning for him as well as for his son – it’s the end of a chapter. It’s not changing everything: they still love you, you still love them. But the relationship will change – and there’s the question of where it leaves you as a parent.”

My eldest daughter, 26, left for university eight years ago and now lives in the Netherlands. I still mooch around her room, looking at the books on her shelves and the photos on her wall, squirting perfume from the almost-finished bottle on her dressing table and occasionally trying on one of her outfits (they don’t fit me, alas). I am almost shocked by the realisation that it’s over: that period of intense, demanding, physical parenting that you once couldn’t see the end of. This is the moment of truth: it doesn’t last for ever. Your children go, and you must carry on without them.

My second daughter, 24, lives part of the time with me and part of the time with her boyfriend, but is moving out in the next few months to live with friends; my third is at university in Scotland; so I’m down to just my youngest, who is 16. Like Ramsay, I’m acutely aware of how precious the next couple of years with her at home will be. He too has a 16-year-old daughter, and told Corden he has suggested to her that she postpones leaving home until she’s 25.

He is joking about that, of course, because searing though it is, the thing we all know inside is that we can’t hold our children back. It is the fundamental paradox of parenthood: we bring them up with one ambition, which is to let them go. The better they leave, the more able they are to cut the strings and have fun, live well and enjoy their lives, the better we’ve done – but the bigger the loss, because the less they need us now. I remember dropping one of my daughters off at the airport at some unearthly hour for her first trip to join friends on a dubious-sounding beach holiday in the Med, and seeing her walk away from me at the security gates. She didn’t look back once. I took it as a good sign, but it still broke my heart.

In effect, we are making ourselves redundant from the most important, life-affirming and meaningful job we’ll ever do: the job of raising the next generation of human beings. And it’s definitely a good thing that Ramsay is busting the myth that it is just homemaker mums who feel the sharpness of the pain when their kids move out. Whether you are a celebrity with a busy schedule or a parent who has given up your career to care for your children, the fallout is the same.

Because children leaving home is a very big and poignant moment. It is a culmination of so many feelings, all of them pretty crucial to what your life story is all about. The overwhelming emotion, on the day you drop them off at university and the days and weeks that follow, is sheer sadness that they’re not around any more. After all, you’ve got through the bad bits of adolescence; they’ve come through and you’ve realised that you’ve got a pretty good kid after all. He or she is funny, wise, friendly and caring – and, suddenly, gone.

It is all too easy to have the occasional wallow, as Ramsay confessed. There is the agony of being without your child, and there is the getting your head around being, if not unnecessary in their life, then certainly far less necessary than you once were, and there is the identity switch it brings. If being a parent is the most important thing I am, then what am I going to be once my children are gone? There is also, for some parents more than others, the loss of control.

Once they’ve left home, they have to make their own mistakes: you can’t stop them and you shouldn’t even try (because we all learn from our mistakes and our children need to go on learning). Dodd says that once they have flown, our job as parents is like that of the lifeguard at the local pool. We have to stay watching and we have to be ready to jump in to help when they need us. “They carry on needing us in different ways, and at unexpected moments,” she says. “You have to be ready to drop everything.”

Ramsay will, of course, be there on the side of the pool for his kids – now and way, way into the future. Dodd’s advice, to him, me and other empty-nesters, is to do exactly what he is doing: acknowledge how much it hurts. It is a powerful emotional cocktail and we are not foolish or weak to feel this way. And although with our kids’ departure comes a kind of liberation, let’s be honest: if that was all we wanted, we wouldn’t have devoted the past 18 years to raising them. It is the end of an era and, like Ramsay, we are all the better for marking it honestly, and for being open and truthful about what it means – even if that does mean wallowing in their room, wearing their clothes.