Failure to Launch: What’s Really Going On With Your Young Adult

Most parents come to me wanting the answer. Give me the thing that will help my kid move. There isn’t one.

A lot of what gets passed around online sounds right. They have to make their own choices. Let go of your fear. Each of those holds something true, but they’ve been turned into quick fixes. Parents try them, and they don’t work, because they were never meant to work on their own. Yes, a young adult ultimately has to make the choice. But what does that actually look like, and who’s supporting them while they make it? Parents do have to let go of the fear. How, though?

What helps usually starts with a slow recognition, rarely an aha moment. Parents start to see things they’re doing for their young adult that they didn’t realize they were doing, and could stop. They notice emotions driving their own behavior that they’d like to manage, because they don’t like how it feels. Sometimes they realize something else was going on with their young adult all along, feeding the pattern, and what they thought was the issue wasn’t. It’s not relief, exactly, because it takes work. But a kind of hope starts to build.

The things parents do for their young adult are pretty simple, and fairly easy to find once you look. They respond too quickly to every need and supply more than they realize: technology, Wi-Fi, services, food, sometimes comfort. They set up his appointments and take over responsibilities he could carry, and they pay for things he could pay for.

A parent might realize they pick up the phone every time their young adult is upset, and fix whatever it is. Another might realize they keep taking food to their kid, because they’re afraid their kid won’t eat well if they don’t. None of these are fixes on their own. They’re starting points that get some movement going. And the food one isn’t as simple as stopping. The parent has to deal with the fear underneath it first, then stop taking the food.

One example: when “just pause” isn’t enough

This is one example of how it can look with a particular family. The parents landed on what seemed like the obvious move. We just need to pause. If we pause, we’ll have time to think, we won’t react the way we keep reacting, and he probably won’t either. That’s fine, except pausing is a behavior, and you don’t just pause. You get caught in the trap of just pausing. Next time it happens: we should have paused, why didn’t we pause? And it repeats.

What helps is finding what’s getting in the way for the parents, the thing that keeps them from doing what they already know would help. That can take a conversation or two, because we’re all so lost in our own thoughts.

For this family, the pattern looked like this. Their young person had a need, the need turned into something he couldn’t let go of, and he called someone to fix it, usually his parents. His parents felt just as strong a pull to answer and calm him down. So they picked up and tried to fix it, moving fast and reacting, and they ended up acting in a way they didn’t like. Then they felt bad, sometimes they apologized, and the whole thing reset.

Once they could see that cycle, there was a clear place to start. Because this one was an anxiety pattern, I borrowed from SPACE, a parent-based approach developed at Yale for childhood anxiety. Not every situation is an anxiety pattern, but the general idea travels: parents announce that something is going to be different, then follow through. In this case, the announcement was simple. When they’re in the middle of something, they won’t answer. They’ll send a quick text: Is this an emergency? Yes or no. If it isn’t, they reply with something like “Okay, thanks” and tell him when they’ll be free. Naming a time helps manage his anxiety. The gap gives the parents time to recenter, so when they do respond, it’s the way they want to. He has to grow a little and make do in a different way. It won’t go smoothly the first couple of times, and that’s expected.

Once we dig in and find the loop, a common first step is finding some way to respond differently. Whatever the current reaction is, we work to find a different one. That might be a change in tone or energy, fewer words, sometimes not responding at all. Any version of different is enough to start a new loop.

Watching your young adult not progress, and sometimes look like they’re going backwards, is deeply overwhelming. In that state, it’s really hard to take in new information, because everything gets filtered through what you’ve already tried. It feels like you’ve tried everything. So when someone offers a new idea, it can land as one more person lecturing you, or one more person telling you what you’ve done wrong. That guardedness makes sense. After some time working together, as your nervous system settles, you start to see the nuances and what you can actually do. Things stop feeling impossible, and there’s real freedom in that. Once parents see they have some influence, they’re more willing to engage.

Why the label only goes so far

I don’t like the term, and I don’t use it with families. I’m using it here because it’s the concept people recognize. There’s no official definition, and the phrase really caught on after a 2006 movie by the same name. Like any label, once you put it on something, it takes on a life of its own, with lots of different meanings from different perspectives. Every young person is different. It can be hard to even define what launching is for a particular person, how long it takes, how we’d measure that they’re on the path and how we’d know if they’re not.

At its most entrenched, it’s a young person who isn’t leaving the house and is barely functioning. That’s categorically different from the more common version, where they’re doing some level of functioning. Getting up and eating, maybe spending a little time out of the house. In today’s culture, probably gaming for long stretches or watching YouTube, sometimes reading, and doing almost nothing to move forward. The simplest way I’d put it: you’re not seeing measurable steps toward progress.

Then there’s the young adult who is taking some positive steps, working 10 or more hours a week maybe, but still not launching, or functioning but unable to get unstuck. That’s a different situation, and it needs a different kind of work and a different kind of conversation. I don’t want to dismiss those young adults. Left alone, some of them are on a slow path and may launch, but much later than anyone is comfortable with. There’s some motivation, but it might be pointed in the wrong direction, or they don’t know how to turn it up enough to move at the pace they’re capable of. There are ways to grab hold of that energy and point it in the right direction, helping them move faster than they would on their own, without rushing them.

Time matters too. An 18-year-old who’s concerned about not launching is in a different place than a 25-year-old who’s been more or less stuck for seven years. It also looks different depending on whether a young adult is open or resistant, and that isn’t always obvious from the outside.

A big part of coaching parents is understanding how severe it is and how each person sees it, along with the context around it, and then helping everyone talk about it.

What’s usually underneath

The explanations I hear most are technology and gaming. Sometimes anxiety. Sometimes, said out loud or not, that they’re lazy. I don’t often find that the primary issue is what we think it is. We also tend to treat failure to launch as something new. It isn’t. It’s been around a long time, and there may or may not be more of it now.

Labels don’t explain it either. Anxiety, ADHD, autism, all of them show up in people who launch just fine. If anxiety alone were the cause, everyone with anxiety would be stuck. There has to be something else. What I usually find is some combination of the label and the way a young adult experiences and interprets the world, most of it happening below the surface. Most of it isn’t intentional.

Parents often describe their young adult in therapy words, too. He’s anxious. She’s depressed. Fear of failure. He sabotages himself. Those labels run into the same problem as the diagnostic labels. Plenty of people with depression move forward, and plenty of people with a fear of failure keep functioning, so it can’t be the whole answer. And when parents say it, they don’t realize how much pressure they’re putting on the word. She’s depressed, so she needs a therapist who will fix it. Severe depression is a different situation, and it needs its own care. For most families, though, getting them undepressed probably won’t fix things on its own, because it usually isn’t the whole problem. Could trouble managing emotions be getting in the way of other things? It could be a linchpin, but we don’t know yet. Throwing labels at it doesn’t help. It’s often just more scrambling to answer a question that feels overwhelming.

I’m a strong believer in Ross Greene’s idea that kids do well if they can. I think it fits the vast majority of young adults I work with. That sounds simple. It also means consequences built on the idea that they could if they just tried harder often miss the barrier entirely. When a young adult isn’t doing well, there’s some barrier, some obstacle they can’t figure out, and usually one their parents can’t figure out either. Part of the problem is that we often think we already know the answer, and that can be just as blinding.

Sometimes the barrier comes down to one thing. With one young man, nearly everything his parents were worried about traced back to a single constraint: problem-solving in certain areas of his life. He could problem-solve just fine in many others, which is part of why it was hard to see. Framing it as a skill he could build, instead of something broken in him, gave the family one target instead of dozens.

It’s easy to miss because of how much goes into launching. Years ago the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day posted a video of a backwards bicycle. Turn the handlebars left and the bike goes right. Turn them right and it goes left. Most people watching assume they could ride it, because they have no idea how many neural pathways and connections it takes to ride a regular bike. Launching is like that, only bigger. The skills and emotions it takes for most people to launch add up to more than any of us could count.

We tend to see it as pass or fail. When I ride a bike, I don’t think about everything going into it. When I see someone who can’t, I might judge, without realizing how many processes are running behind the scenes that I can’t see. Then we reach for categories of explanation. Moral labels, like lazy or not trying hard enough. Ability labels, like they just can’t figure it out. And labels of brokenness, like depressed, fear of failure or some diagnosis.

For a lot of these young adults, the part that isn’t working is getting started and keeping going. That takes skill, like keeping a ball moving over tricky terrain, up hills and down them and around obstacles. It doesn’t roll on its own. Once it’s rolling, you can learn to steer it.

My job is to help parents figure out their young adult’s constraint: the barriers in the way, and the skills that would help them get moving.

I’ve spent 27 years working with adolescents, young adults and families, including years inside programs for teens and young adults.

Most families meet with me by video. If you’re in the Boise area, we can meet in person. Once a week works for most, and we can meet more often when that helps.

What the process usually looks like

Change with a stuck young adult tends to be slow and uneven. Still, it usually moves through a few phases.

First, we look for the pattern the family is stuck in. A common one: growing up, this young adult needed a lot of correction, redirection and encouragement. By now the parents have either frozen, feeling like they can’t say anything, or they keep correcting. Over time, anything a parent says can start to feel like correction, and everyone feels trapped.

So we start by looking for a way out of that trap. One family felt they couldn’t bring up expectations at all, because anything they said sounded like they were treating him like an adolescent. We worked on how to word things. Another family started using text messages so they could take their time crafting what they wanted to say. Families practice different ways of saying things, avoiding the usual lines, until they find something that fits them. The goal is for the young adult to experience something different, something that tells them this isn’t the same old thing.

Once that’s in place, things loosen up a little, and we move into small experiments. One family went through the fairly long process of mapping every way they were accommodating their young adult. Then we picked the one change that would be easiest for them to make. It created some tension at first, and it also opened things up further. For some families that approach doesn’t fit, because they’ve already done it or because their kind of stuck doesn’t respond to it, and we find a different starting point.

Sometimes what comes next is a young adult who starts to get curious. That’s where we move with caution, not fear. People often confuse the two. Caution is how you slow down on the finishing touches of an art project. You’re not afraid of ruining it. You slow down because you notice things you’d miss working fast. A young adult might say “I want to get some help” or “I want to get a job,” and often they aren’t ready to follow through the first time. We don’t run with it. We keep making small changes that move things a little further, and the hope is that they start initiating on their own.

That’s also where parents need the most support staying steady. Hope can pull parents back into old patterns as easily as fear does, and hope is one of the most common ways we put pressure on our young people. A big part of my job is helping you stay steady, so you don’t slip back into fix-it mode.

From there, the focus is follow-through: helping your young adult learn to make mistakes and recover from them, getting comfortable with the ups and downs, keeping the relationship intact through all of it, and not sliding back into the pattern that got everyone stuck.

Getting started

How long we work together depends on you. We meet as long as I’m helpful. When I stop being helpful, you can fire me.

I also work directly with young adults when they’re open to it, either alongside parent coaching or on its own.

Coaching is private pay, which means I don’t bill insurance.

The first step is a free consultation. We’ll go through a short version of my process to get an idea of what the constraint might be, and I’ll tell you how I’d work with it for your family.