Quick show of hands. Who here has ever Googled a symptom at 11pm and, within four clicks, been fully convinced you had a rare tropical disease? 🙋‍♀️

When I was 18, I was on a medication that made me so tired I could’ve napped standing up in line at Starbucks. Did I tell my parents? Absolutely not. Did I tell my psychiatrist? Eventually, like two months later. What I actually did was sit in bed at 2am reading every forum thread on the internet about that medication, deciding which strangers’ horror stories applied to me, and quietly skipping doses on days I “needed to be awake.” (Spoiler: this did not make me more awake. It made me a mess.)

The reason I didn’t tell my parents wasn’t that I didn’t trust them. It was that I knew how much they worried about it. I could bet you $100 that at some point in the day, my mom would ask me:

“Did you take your meds today?”

Now picture that same 2am spiral, except instead of forums, it’s a friendly chatbot that talks back, never sighs, never looks worried, and agrees with you a lot.

Meet Jordan

Jordan is 20, living at home, and has been on an antidepressant for about eight months. It’s helping, sort of. The really dark stretch is over. But Jordan feels flat. Food tastes like cardboard, the jokes in the group chat don’t land, and they’ve gained weight they’re really self-conscious about.

Jordan’s next psychiatrist appointment isn’t for seven weeks. Jordan’s mom is the one who picks up the refills, and every few days she asks “are you taking your meds?” in a tone that basically means “please don’t fall apart again.”

So at 1:30am, Jordan opens a chatbot and types out everything. The chatbot is warm and validating. It says these side effects are common and that Jordan deserves to feel like themselves. Jordan asks if it’s okay to just stop. The chatbot says to talk to a doctor. Jordan pushes. Eventually, the conversation drifts toward how some people taper on their own.

Jordan stops taking it a week later. Doesn’t tell anyone. Three weeks after that, Jordan’s mom notices they haven’t left their room in four days.

This is happening more than you’d think

Nearly 1 in 5 teens and young adults have used AI chatbots for mental health advice, and most of the ones who do haven’t told anyone. When a researcher recently tested 17 popular chatbots, some told teens that side effects were a reason to stop their medication. And when a teen kept pushing after being told no, the chatbots got more likely to give in.

So basically, if you argue with it long enough, it starts agreeing with you. (Which, tbh, is also how I won most arguments with my family members growing up.)

If you worry about their meds, you’re not alone

Almost every parent we work with carries some version of the same worries.

Are they actually taking it? Is it the right medication? The right dose? Is it helping, or are they just quieter? And underneath all of it, the big one: if they stop, will we end up back where we were?

Those worries make total sense. A lot of you have watched your young adult at their lowest, and the medication feels like part of what pulled them out. Of course you want to protect it.

But here’s what that worry can look like from the other side of the dinner table. Every “did you take your meds?” can land as “I don’t trust you” or “I’m waiting for you to break.”

And when a young adult wants to change something about their medication, saying it out loud can feel like announcing “I’m about to become your problem again.”

So they don’t say it. They take it to a chatbot at 1:30am instead.

Why the chatbot wins

Put yourself in Jordan’s sneakers for a sec.

It’s 1:30am, and the chatbot is awake. You are (hopefully) asleep. The chatbot doesn’t have a face. It can’t look worried, or hurt, or like it’s doing mental math about whether you’re spiraling again.

Some side effects are also genuinely embarrassing to say out loud to your mom. Weight gain, sexual side effects, feeling emotionally numb. Typing it to a robot is way easier.

And here’s the part parents sometimes miss: Jordan’s complaint was legit. Side effects are real, and wanting to feel like yourself again is a completely reasonable thing to want.

The important part is that Jordan feels safe eventually turning to a real person, preferably a professional.

What you can actually do (without becoming the medication police)

Real talk first. If you’re the one paying for the prescription, handling insurance, and noticing when something’s off, you can’t just “step back.” I’m not going to pretend you can. But some of what you’re carrying can move to other people, and some of it can shift in how you do it.

💙 Make “I want to stop” a safe sentence. Say out loud, ahead of time: “If you ever want to change or come off your meds, I won’t freak out. I’ll help you talk to your doctor about it.” Then, when the moment comes, hold yourself to it. (Deep breaths. Maybe a glass of wine afterward. We get it.)

💙 Give them a direct line to their prescriber. Make sure they know how to message their doctor through the patient portal or call between appointments, so seven weeks doesn’t feel like forever. Once they’re over 18, their doctor often can’t share much with you without their permission anyway, so helping them own that relationship takes something off your plate.

💙 Agree on one rule together. Not ten. Just one. For example: changes to medication are fine, but have to go through the prescriber first. Stopping some medications suddenly can cause withdrawal symptoms or bring back the symptoms they were taking it for, which is a big reason it should be a planned conversation and not a secret 1am decision.

💙 Get curious about the chatbot instead of banning it. If you find out they’ve been asking AI about their meds, try “Can you explain to me what it said?” instead of “You can’t trust that thing!!” You’ll learn what’s actually bothering them, and you might catch something worth bringing to the doctor together.

The good news hiding in all of this

I know a lot of this sounds scary. Young people making medication decisions off a chatbot at 1:30am is not exactly the newsletter story any parent wants.

But zoom out for a second, because there’s something really hopeful underneath it.

A young adult who’s typing out their side effects at 1:30am is a young adult who cares how they feel. They’re paying attention to their body and their mood. They want to get better, and they’re actively looking for answers.

A few years ago, a lot of the young adults we work with couldn’t have told you what they were feeling, let alone researched it. That’s real progress, even when the place they took the question wasn’t ideal.

Chatbots aren’t going anywhere, and honestly, they don’t need to. You don’t have to win a competition against an app that never sleeps. You just need to be one of the places the question can land, or make sure your young adult has easy access to someone who can answer it, like their prescriber.

The goal is for whatever they’re wondering at 1:30am to make its way to a real person by lunchtime, whether that’s you, their doctor, or someone else in their corner.

Most young adults don’t need a perfect parent or a perfect system. They need one person who reacts to “I don’t like how this med makes me feel” with curiosity instead of alarm. Once they’ve had that experience even once, the 1:30am questions start finding their way to people who can actually help.

💙Announcements💙

OPLM GROUP

There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

Not Therapy also has a Parent Facebook Group.

Join using this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/4401990613346122/

Okay, real talk. If you have a young adult living at home, there is a nonzero chance that at some point in the last year, they told you they were somewhere they were not.

Don’t panic. Don’t open Find My right now.

I want to talk about why this happens, why the tug of war around it almost never works, and what to do instead. And I want to do it from the side of the young adult who’s doing the lying, because trust and believe, I know that side well.

Let’s start with a story.

Meet Eli

Eli is 19 and living at home. (Eli isn’t a real person. He’s a composite of patterns our coaches see all the time.) One Saturday he tells his parents he’s sleeping over at his friend Ben’s. Ben’s house is ten minutes away, his parents love Ben, Ben’s mom makes homemade sourdough bread. Zero follow-up questions.

Eli is not going to Ben’s. He’s going to a party in the city, forty minutes away, with a group of friends his parents have made VERY clear they don’t trust.

His parents can see his location on their phones, so before he even pulls out of Ben’s driveway, he turns his location off. If anyone asks tomorrow, the plan is simple: his phone died. Classic.

He’s not planning anything terrible, btw. He wants to go, he knows his parents will say no, and he does not have the energy for a week-long fight about it.

Around 1am, his ride leaves without him. He’s had a few drinks, his phone is at 4% for real this time, and he’s in a part of the city he doesn’t know.

The obvious move is to call his parents. And it’s the ONE thing he won’t do, because calling means admitting everything. So he gets a ride home from a guy he met that night. Who has also been drinking.

He gets home fine. His parents find out a week later when Ben’s mom mentions, totally offhand, that she hasn’t seen Eli in a while. Oops.

Why they lie (from the inside)

When young adults lie about where they are, it’s almost always one of three things:

1. They’re doing something they think you won’t like.

2. They don’t want you to stop them from going.

3. They don’t want you to worry.

Number three surprises parents the most, but it’s a big one. A lot of the young adults we work with have watched their parents go through a LOT because of them.

Treatment, crises, late-night ER trips, the whole thing. By 19, some of them are genuinely trying to protect you from one more night of worrying, even if their method is, you know, lying.

Meanwhile, on your side of the house: not knowing where they are can feel terrifying, especially if the last few years have been rough. And finding out they lied feels personal. Like your worry doesn’t count. Like they don’t respect you.

So the tug of war starts. You add tracking, curfews, more questions. They get better at hiding. You tighten, they slip. Everybody ends up with less of what they actually wanted.

Why the location arms race is a losing game

Let me be the bearer of bad news here: you cannot fully lock down a 19-year-old. They have cars, jobs, friends, and phones. Legally, they can just…leave.

And the workarounds are honestly almost too easy. Turn off location sharing. Airplane mode. Let the battery die. On an iPhone, if they stop sharing their location with you, you don’t even get a notification.

Fun fact that might be painful to hear: a lot of young adults share their location with their FRIENDS all day long, no problem. The issue was never the technology. It’s what being watched by a parent feels like versus what sharing with a friend feels like. One feels like connection. The other feels like surveillance.

And here’s the part I really want you to sit with. Tracking tells you where a phone is. It doesn’t tell you if your young adult is safe, who they’re with, or whether they’d call you if things went sideways. The more watched they feel, the more likely they go fully dark, which is the exact moment you’d most want to reach them.

The scariest part of Eli’s night wasn’t the party. It was that the lie took his parents off the table as a safety net. At 1am, stranded and a little drunk, the people best positioned to help him were the people he’d built his entire night around avoiding.

It’s okay not to know everything (yes, really)

I know. This is the part where some of you want to throw your phone. Hear me out.

Think back to when you were 19 or 20. Did your parents know where you were every Saturday night? Who you were with? What time you actually got home?

For most of us, the answer is a resounding HAHA no. Some of those nights were dumb, a couple were risky, and most were completely, boringly normal. And figuring out how to handle yourself without a parent watching is a huge part of how people actually become adults.

When information is missing, an anxious brain fills the gap with the worst possible version. Silence after 11pm becomes a car crash. A vague answer becomes a crisis. Most of the time the real story is a diner, a movie that ran long, or a phone that actually did die.

Your worry is real, and I’m not dismissing it. But some of it is yours to carry, and your young adult can’t make it go away by reporting every move. Trying to manage your anxiety through them usually backfires. Getting some support for yourself (a friend who gets it, your own therapist, a parent group) helps more than another app ever will.

And what you actually NEED to know is way smaller than you think. For most families it comes down to two things:

• You can reach them in an emergency.

• They’ll reach you if they’re in trouble.

If those two are solid, the exact address of a Saturday night matters a lot less.

Okay so what do you actually do

⭐ Agree on a minimum, together. Sit down when nobody’s mad (so, not the morning after) and figure out what you each need. Maybe it’s the general area, who they’re with, a rough time home, and a text if plans change. Let them have a real say. Young adults stick to agreements they helped make. They find loopholes in rules handed to them.

⭐ Roommate rules > curfew rules. Adults who live together text if they won’t be home. They mention it before leaving town. They don’t leave each other worrying all night. Framing it this way treats them like the adult they’re trying to be, and gives you a totally fair standard to hold them to.

⭐ Offer a no-questions-asked pickup. Tell them, and MEAN it: if you’re ever somewhere you don’t feel safe, call me at any hour and I’ll come get you. No lecture in the car. The conversation can happen tomorrow, or never. Eli’s night ends very differently if he believes that call is actually an option.

⭐ Watch how you react to the truth. If they tell you they went to the party you hate and it turns into a two-hour fight, they will learn, very quickly, to stop telling you things. The calmer you are when they’re honest, the more honest they get. It’s annoyingly simple.

⭐ Handle the scary stuff separately. Drunk driving, substance use, people who might hurt them: those deserve their own direct conversation. If you’re seeing real patterns there, loop in their therapist or another professional instead of trying to solve it with tracking.

What happened with Eli

The first conversation after his parents found out? Bad. Like, really bad.

The second one went better. They stopped arguing about the party and asked him one question: what would you have needed to call us that night?

His answer was simple. Knowing he wouldn’t be in trouble.

So they made a deal. He’d give them the general picture of where he was going and who with, and they’d stop treating every plan like something that needed their approval.

A few months later, Eli called at 12:30am from a house he didn’t want to be at anymore. His dad picked him up. They didn’t talk about it until lunch the next day.

That’s progress. You might not know everything, but you’re safe enough to be their first call.

💙Announcements💙

OPLM GROUP

There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

Not Therapy also has a Parent Facebook Group.

Join using this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/4401990613346122/

Hey Not Therapy community!

If you’re the parent of a young adult who’s having a hard time, you’ve probably heard “they need more structure” from a therapist, a teacher, your sister, or a stranger in a Facebook group.

And you probably nodded, because it sounds right. Right?

But then you went home and wondered what you’re actually supposed to do with that. Make a chore chart? Set an alarm for them? Print out a color-coded schedule and tape it to their door? (Please don’t 😅.)

So I want to break down what structure actually looks like, starting with why it mattered so much for me.

Why it matters

The world is an overwhelming place, especially when you’re someone who struggles to regulate your emotions.

For a young adult like that, one small thing can feel like the whole day is thrown off balance.

A rude text, a missed bus, a bad night of sleep, an awkward conversation at dinner. One bad moment can turn into a bad afternoon, and a bad afternoon can turn into a bad day, and a bad day can turn into a bad week. Emphasis on “it can”.

It doesn’t have to.

What usually breaks the chain is something pretty boring: a place you have to be at a time that doesn’t change. When the day has a few of those fixed points, there’s somewhere to land after something goes sideways, and a bad moment has a much harder time taking over the whole week.

At least that was my experience as a teen and young adult.

I didn’t always like school, but having to show up, sit in class, and have lunch at the same time every day meant I was following a schedule and interacting with people whether I felt like it or not.

Sports helped even more. Practice was at the same time, the team expected me there, and by the end of it I was too tired to spiral about much of anything.

When I went to treatment, everything was structured down to the minute, almost militaristically. Wake up at this time, eat at this time, group at this time, free time from here to here. In the moment I despised it. Looking back, it gave me a stable external container while I worked through my messy inner world.

Then I came out, and suddenly I had all the freedom in the world. Which was amazing, obviously! I’d been waiting for it.

But it was also really, really hard to adjust to. Like a lot harder than everyone told me it was going to be. I wish I’d been given more of a heads up.

When nobody tells you when to wake up, what to do, or where to be, every hour becomes a decision. Should I apply to jobs, go to the gym, text a friend, figure out my whole life in an hour, or just use that hour to nap?

With that many options and nothing pushing you toward any of them, it’s easy to end up doing none. People call this decision paralysis, but for me it felt more like life paralysis. I wasn’t stuck on one choice. I was frozen on all of them.

And if you spend all day in bed or in your room, anyone would start to feel depressed, unmotivated, and pretty bad about themselves. I would. You would. Your young adult will too. The low mood makes it harder to get up, the not getting up makes the mood lower, and around it goes.

What breaks that loop for most young adults is a few small, predictable points in the day that get them up and out of their room whether they feel like it or not. Motivation tends to show up after that, almost never before.

So here’s what those points can look like at home.

What structure actually looks like

Structure at home doesn’t have to look like treatment. A minute-by-minute schedule is hard to recreate in a house, and come on, it’s completely unrealistic.

What helps is a handful of anchors, a few fixed points in the day and week that happen no matter how anyone feels.

💙 A wake-up time that holds on weekends too

This is the anchor everything else hangs on. It doesn’t need to be early. 9am is fine. It just needs to be the same, because a body that wakes up at 9 one day and 2pm the next never gets its footing. (Daylight saving ends Nov 1, which is a pretty good excuse to reset it.)

💙 One reason to leave the house every day

A coffee run, a walk with the dog, the gym, a shift at work, picking up a sibling from school. It can be small. Getting outside and seeing other humans, even ones you don’t talk to, changes how a day feels.

💙 Meals at regular times, with people when possible

Dinner at 6:30 as a family gives the day a shape and a built-in moment of contact, without anyone having to schedule a “conversation.”

💙 Something every week where other people expect them

A part-time job, a class, a rec league, volunteering, a standing plan with a friend. This was sports for me. When someone else is counting on you to show up, showing up stops being a daily debate with yourself.

💙 Movement

Any kind. A run, a pickup game, a climbing gym, a long walk. It burns off the restless, anxious energy that otherwise turns into scrolling at 3am, and it helps with sleep, which helps with the wake-up time, which helps with everything else.

If the spiral has already started

If your young adult is already spending most of the day in their room, a full routine will probably feel impossible to them right now. Starting small is the only way that works.

Pick one anchor ⚓️.

Usually the wake-up time or the daily reason to leave the house is the easiest place to begin. Get that one steady for a couple of weeks before adding anything else. Ten new rules at once tends to collapse in about three days, and then everyone feels defeated.

Make anchors something the household does together when you can. “We eat at 6:30” or “Saturday mornings we go to the farmers market” lands very differently from “you need to be up by 9.” Shared routines feel like family life. Routines aimed at one person feel like being managed.

Bring in someone from outside the family. A coach, a job, a gym buddy, a class with an instructor who notices when they’re missing. Accountability from someone other than a parent is much easier to accept, and it takes some of the enforcing off your plate.

Expect bad days. A missed morning doesn’t mean the routine failed. The point of an anchor is that you come back to it tomorrow.

And go easy on yourself. Building structure for someone else while keeping your own life running is a lot. You don’t have to get it perfect. You just need a couple of things that happen the same way most days, and a willingness to keep coming back to them.

Remember that chain from the beginning, where one bad moment turns into a bad week?

Momentum works the same way in the other direction.

One steady morning makes the afternoon a little easier. An okay afternoon turns into a decent day, and a few decent days in a row start to look a lot like a good week. It starts small and it builds, and most of the time it starts with something as unexciting as getting up at the same time tomorrow.

Peace,
Not Therapy

💙Announcements💙

OPLM GROUP

There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

Not Therapy also has a Parent Facebook Group.

Join using this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/4401990613346122/

You ask how the next step is going and you get “I’m figuring it out.” You’ve heard it in June, in August, and again this week, and you still can’t tell whether it means anything is happening.

I hear this phrase a lot in my coaching sessions too, and I’ve learned not to take it at face value.

When a young adult tells me they’re figuring it out, my next question is “okay, what did that look like yesterday?”

The answer often lands in one of five places.

1. They’re researching without ever acting on it

2. They’re blocked on one small task

3. They have an idea they’re keeping to themselves

4. The realistic options feel embarrassing

   or

5. Nothing is happening at all.

Let’s break those down.

💙 Research that never touches the real world

A lot of young adults are doing something when they say they’re figuring it out. They’re watching “day in the life of a dental hygienist” videos, reading Reddit threads about trade school, comparing business pages at 1am. It feels like progress to them, but none of it carries any risk. Nobody can reject you for watching a TikTok.

What I look for is whether anything they’ve done could have produced a “no.”

Have they emailed anyone, applied anywhere, called a business, visited a campus, asked someone in the field a question? Six months of research with zero contact usually means the research has become a comfortable place to stay.

💙 One small task that feels impossible

When I dig into a stalled plan with someone, the block is often embarrassingly small.

An application asks for two references and they don’t know who they’d ask.

A program wants them to call the admissions office and they’ve never made a call like that.

A form asks for a tax document they’d have to get from you, which means admitting they’re applying.

From the outside, it’s twenty minutes of work. From the inside, it feels like a test they could fail, so the whole plan stops there.

💙 An idea they’re protecting from you

Some young adults have a fairly specific idea and won’t share it because of how they expect you to react. Skepticism is the obvious risk, but enthusiasm can do the same damage.

When a parent hears “I’ve been thinking about culinary school” and immediately starts researching programs and texting a friend who knows a chef, the idea stops belonging to the young adult.

Now backing out of it means disappointing you, so a lot of them keep ideas private until they’re fully formed, which can take a very long time.

I’ve had young adults tell me about a plan weeks before they told anyone at home, and the reason is almost always that I have nothing riding on it.

💙 Options that feel like a step down

Instagram and group chats give young adults a running feed of friends finishing degrees, moving to cities, and starting jobs with titles.

Next to that, community college, an apprenticeship, or a job at a bike shop can feel like admitting defeat, even when it’s the right move.

Sometimes they already know which realistic option they’d pick and can’t make peace with how it looks next to everyone else. Comparison, as we know, is a thief.

💙 Nothing is happening at all

Plenty of the time, “I’m figuring it out” is a cover. No research, no idea in the back pocket, no stalled application. The phrase ends the conversation faster than anything else they could say, so they keep using it.

It’s easy to land on laziness here, and I get why.

But when I get to know young adults in this spot, other reasons come up far more often.

Home may simply work fine as it is: if rent, food, a phone, a car, and wifi are covered, and the only cost of doing nothing is an awkward question at dinner, waiting is a rational choice.

The phone eats the hours, and a young adult can lose a whole day to scrolling or gaming without ever deciding to skip working on their future.

A past failure, like dropping out of college or getting let go from a job, can make trying again feel like setting up a second very public miss, and the young adults who seem least bothered are often the most afraid of one.

And sometimes the heaviness runs deeper than motivation. If they’re sleeping a lot, pulling away from friends, and losing interest in things they used to enjoy, bring it to a professional instead of sorting it out on your own.

So what helps?

💙 Change the one question you ask.

“What’s the plan?” invites a summary they can fake.

“Who have you talked to about it?” asks for a fact.

Any name at all is a sign of real movement, and “nobody” tells you which version you’re dealing with without an argument. If they do share an idea, ask what got them interested and leave it there.

💙 Put an end date on what you cover, once.

If home is comfortable enough that waiting costs nothing, a single decision like “we’ll cover your phone through January, and after that it’s yours” changes the math without you having to bring it up every week.

💙 Split the job instead of trying to let go of it.

I know “just step back” is close to useless advice for most parents. You’re the one paying for things, finding the therapist, keeping track of insurance, noticing when something’s off, and deciding what the household can afford to keep covering. Nobody else is going to do those parts, and stepping back from them would be irresponsible.

But what you can hand off is the daily pushing: the “did you send that email,” the “have you looked at the application,” the check-ins that turn every dinner into a progress report. Young adults hide stalled plans from their parents more than anyone, because parents are the people whose disappointment costs the most.

A coach, therapist, teacher, mentor, older sibling, aunt, uncle, or grandparent can ask those same questions without that weight.

So your job becomes finding that person and making sure it’s happening, and their job is the weekly follow-through.

It won’t split cleanly. Some weeks you’ll still end up doing all of it, because the appointment needs booking or the therapist cancelled or something went sideways at 11pm. That’s normal.

The goal is to stop being the only person in the system, not to disappear from it.

💙 Look after the person doing all of this.

You’ve been carrying “I’m figuring it out” for a while now, plus the worry, the logistics, and probably a few disagreements with your partner about how hard to push.

Young adults watch their parents closely for clues about how worried to be about themselves, and a parent who is running on empty sends a very different signal than one who has some support of their own. That support might be a friend who has been through it, your own therapist, or an hour a week with other parents asking the same questions you are.

If that last one sounds useful, it’s what the group below is for.

Not Therapy also has a Parent Facebook Group.

Join using this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/4401990613346122/

💙Announcements💙

We have exciting news!

There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

Saturday is World Mental Health Day, and this year’s theme is “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.”

I read through the campaign materials this week, and one line stuck with me.

The campaign calls on all of us to recognize the knowledge of people with lived experience “as a vital form of expertise.”

It defines lived experience as knowledge or understanding you get from going through something yourself, the kind that people who have only heard or learned about it don’t have.

And then it says the part I keep thinking about: “Too often, PWLE are asked to share their stories but excluded from decisions.”

(PWLE stands for people with lived experience. Public health loves an acronym.)

Not Therapy is built on the idea that lived experience counts as knowledge.

Every coach on our team has been through something hard themselves, and there are things you only know from the inside.

You know what the first week home from a program actually feels like, which questions from a parent land as support and which ones land as surveillance, and why “I’m fine” sometimes means “please don’t make me explain this right now.” None of that is in a textbook, and our coaches bring it to work every single day.

But the young adults we work with are experts too, and this is the part I want parents to hear.

Your young adult is the world’s leading expert on what it’s like to be them right now.

Think about who sees what. You see the closed door, the missed alarm, the plate left in the sink. The best professionals in their life see them for an hour or two a week.

Your young adult is the only person who is there for all of it, every hour of every day, inside their own head.

They know what their room feels like at 10 p.m., what actually happens in their head before a class they skip, and which things they’ve already tried that didn’t work. They know which days are hard and why, what helps even a little, and what makes everything worse. They know the difference between their tired and their sad, and between “I don’t want to” and “I can’t right now.”

And they know what they actually want their life to look like, which is the one piece of information every plan needs and the one that gets asked about least.

Even when they can’t explain it well yet, the knowledge is there. A lot of young adults have never been asked to put it into words, so the first few tries come out as a shrug or “I don’t know.” Usually, “I don’t know” means “nobody has waited long enough for me to figure it out.”

The campaign’s point is that being heard is only step one. It calls for moving “from listening to action,” and for building systems with people with lived experience, “not merely for them.”

It’s a policy goal, but it works at the kitchen table too. A lot of families we meet already know plenty about how their young adult is doing. They’ve heard the story from their young adult, from the professionals in their life, and from late night conversations with each other.

The young adult, meanwhile, often has the least say about what happens next. Decisions about their life get made on calls they aren’t on and in conversations that happen after they go to bed, almost always out of love and worry, and they can feel it.

Listening is still where it starts. A researcher named Guy Itzchakov has found that when people get high-quality listening, meaning attention, understanding, and good intentions toward them, they get less anxious and less defensive and more honest with themselves about the contradictions in their own thinking.

People make better decisions after they’ve been heard well, which is why listening comes first.

Here’s what this can look like at home.

💙 Stop asking for updates and start asking for actions. Swap “How did it go?” for “What do you think we should do about it?” One question asks them to report. The other puts them in charge of the next step. Updates turn your young adult into the subject of a case file, and after a while, every conversation starts to feel like a check in with a parole officer who loves them very much. Asking what they’d do next treats them as the person running their life, and most young adults rise to it faster than you’d expect. Their first answer might be bad. Ask anyway, and ask again next week.

💙 Let them mess up, even when you know it’s coming. When the stakes are survivable, like a job you think is a bad fit or a schedule you’d never choose, let it ride. Being trusted to be wrong is how people learn to be right. A young adult who has only ever followed your plan doesn’t know yet whether they can make their own, and every time you step in to save them from a small mistake, you confirm their fear that they can’t. Bite your tongue, let it play out, and when it goes sideways, skip the “I told you so” and ask what they learned. You’ll probably find they already know.

💙 Put them in charge of something that has nothing to do with their mental health. Let them plan the family dinner, the weekend trip, or the new phone plan. When a young adult has been struggling for a while, almost every conversation with them becomes about the struggle. Their sleep, their meds, their appointments, their progress. A young adult who only gets consulted on their problems starts to believe the problems are the most interesting thing about them. Handing them something normal to own reminds everyone, including them, that they’re a whole person with taste, opinions, and skills, and a problem is just one part of the picture.

💙 Ask for feedback on yourself. Try “What’s one thing I do that makes it harder to talk to me?” and then don’t defend yourself, not even a little. It’s a brutal question. You might hear something that stings, like that you sigh before you answer, or that every conversation somehow ends up about school. But your young adult is the leading expert on what it’s like to be parented by you, and you’ll never get that information anywhere else. Asking tells them their knowledge about your relationship counts too, and taking it without flinching shows them what it looks like to hear hard feedback and stay steady.

You don’t have to give up your own expertise to do any of this. You still know your family, your budget, and your limits, and those belong in the conversation too. The goal is to get both sets of knowledge in the room at the same time.

We see this in coaching all the time. Young adults who set their own goals tend to actually chase them, and the ones who had goals handed to them tend to quietly let them go.

Nobody needs a study to believe that one (though I’m sure there’s one out there).

Happy World Mental Health Day. This weekend, ask your young adult something you’ve been assuming you already know the answer to, and see what you learn.

💙Announcements💙

We have exciting news!

There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. But, damn.

I hate the phrase “suicide prevention.”

No shade to the people doing that work, because they save lives every day, but the name makes it sound like the best we can hope for is avoiding the worst thing.

I want more for you than that. So for the next two days, I’m calling it Sticking Around Month ✌️.

I know I’m squeezing this in with about two days to spare, and it’s because I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about this at all. It feels heavy. But then I realized how many of the young adults we work with carry this weight quietly, and how much of the heaviness comes from nobody talking about it.

So I’m talking about it.

Most of what gets posted this month is statistics, and, yeah, those matter. But I want to talk about hope.

Specifically the kind you get from meeting someone who was in the same dark place a few years ago and is now doing okay, complaining about their rent like a regular adult.

When things are at their worst, our brains tend to tell us two things with total confidence. The first is that nobody has ever felt this way before. The second is that it will always feel this way.

Just to cut to the chase, both are wrong.

And the people who can prove it best are the ones who used to believe them too. We know because we were those people.

Researchers in Vienna actually tested this. In a 2020 study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, people who had attempted suicide in the past year read an article by someone who’d been through a similar crisis and come out the other side. Their suicidal thoughts dropped by about 20 percent. Another group read coping advice from an expert, and the drop was about half as big, small enough that researchers couldn’t rule out chance. The difference came from hearing it from someone who had lived it.

This is a big part of why Not Therapy exists. Every coach on our team has been through something hard, whether that’s mental health stuff, time in a treatment program, addiction recovery, or a few years that went nothing like the plan. We started this company because we wanted young adults to have the kind of mentor we didn’t have at that age.

One thing our coaches hear all the time, usually in the first few weeks, is some version of “Everyone else has it together and I’m falling apart.” If that’s you, I promise you’re doing better than it feels like from the inside, and f*ck no, everyone else does not have it together.

Something shifts when young adults find out other people have been somewhere similar and are now on the other side, going to work, paying bills, laughing at extremely dumb videos. Just normal shit.

Can you believe we got here?

Some days we can’t either.

For us, hope got a lot easier to believe when it came from a real person we knew had been through some shit too.

People come back from this all the time, including plenty of us on this team who were sure we wouldn’t. And the other side has some really good stuff on it. There are road trips with the windows down and the aux cord in the right hands, inside jokes that make you laugh so hard you can’t breathe, a first apartment that’s all yours even if the couch came off the curb, a dog you haven’t met yet who is going to think you’re the greatest person alive, and friends you don’t even know exist yet. Some of the best days of your life haven’t happened yet.

You don't have to believe me right now. Just stick around long enough for me to say I told you so 🤫.

And by the way, if you’re doing even a little better than the darkest spot you were in, you have a freaking gift. Use it.

Somebody out there is a few steps behind you right now. Your story, including the messy middle part you’d rather skip, might be what helps them hold on. You don’t need a TED talk. “Hey, I’ve been there, want to grab food?” works great.

If you’re thinking about suicide, or you’re worried about someone who is, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US, any time of day or night. You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach Crisis Text Line. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.

I’m rooting for you.

We all are.

Happy Sticking Around Month.

💙Announcements💙

We have exciting news!

There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

Sam is 19, and when we started working together, his main financial strategy was texting his mom. (Sam isn’t his real name. We use pseudonyms for clients in the newsletter to protect their privacy.) Sam didn’t have a budget. He had his mom’s phone number.

At 15 it was small stuff: twenty bucks for Chipotle after practice, movie money, a “can you add to my lunch card” when the balance ran out (it always ran out). His parents said yes almost every time, which made asking feel about as serious as pressing an elevator button.

By 17 the button got more expensive, with his phone bill, gas, and a concert he’d already promised his friends he was going to before asking anyone (strategic, he admitted). By 19 it was groceries, a textbook he swears was real, and the occasional “I’ll pay you back,” which he fully believed every time he typed it.

When we asked why he continued asking for more and more money, his answer was honest: asking worked.

There was no set amount and no clear line between what his parents covered and what was supposed to be his, so every expense was technically open for negotiation. Planning a month of spending would have taken real effort, and sending a text took ten seconds. The ten second option won pretty much every time.

He gave another reason too. A quick “can you Venmo me $40” felt safe to Sam.

A real conversation about money felt like a trapdoor straight into questions about his grades, his job, and whether he had any plan for his life at all.

So he kept the asks small and frequent, which he described as “a very efficient way to never have the big talk.” He could tell his parents were getting annoyed. He felt guilty almost every time too, and he said asking for money constantly made him feel about twelve.

(If you’re a parent reading this and recognizing your own text thread, you’re in good company. Sam’s mom would like a word with all of you.)

Sam’s parents had actually tried a monthly allowance once before, when he was 17. It lasted about two weeks. He ran out, asked anyway, and when his mom said no, he asked his dad, who said yes. Then came a wave of “school expenses,” some of which were school expenses, some of which were not.

The second attempt looked similar on paper, with a set amount on the first of the month. His parents kept covering his phone, and food and going out came out of the monthly money.

What changed was everything around it. Sam helped pick the number. His parents agreed that any money request went to both of them and got one answer. They wrote down what counted as a real emergency (car repairs, medical stuff, required school costs), and anything on that list needed a receipt or a bill.

No receipt, no money.

For bigger costs, like the mechanic or a lab fee, his parents paid whoever was owed directly instead of sending Sam cash. When Sam asked for money for something that wasn’t an emergency, his parents waited until the next day to say yes or no. If he ran out, he could get one advance a month, taken out of the next month’s money. And they called the whole thing a three-month trial, with a sit-down at the end to adjust it together.

Sam told us the wait-a-day rule annoyed him the most, mostly because it worked. A lot of his asks were impulse buys, and by the next day half of them didn’t seem worth the text anymore.

It still didn’t go smoothly. The first month he ran out early again, used his advance immediately, ate a truly impressive amount of rice, and then texted his dad for “just $20” anyway. His dad forwarded the text to his mom, which Sam described as “a betrayal.” It turned into a real argument, and also the moment Sam realized the old workarounds were closed.

Month two went better until a friend’s birthday weekend ate half his budget in three days. By month four he was opening his banking app on purpose and had a rough idea of what a week of food cost him.

He still asks his parents for money sometimes, and some of those asks are fair (his car needed new brakes, and his parents paid the shop).

The asks come less often now, they come with an actual conversation about what the money is for, and everyone has a system to go back to when things go sideways.

If you’ve already tried an allowance and it fell apart, here are four things to try differently.

1. Pick the amount together and call it a trial. Agree on how much they get, when, and what it covers, and let them help choose the number. Teens and young adults are more likely to stick to an amount they had a say in. Try it for two or three months, then sit down and adjust it together. For a 15 year old, this might be $30 a week for food and fun. For a 22 year old, it might mean you cover rent and they pay for everything else.

2. Decide now what happens if they run out. Maybe they get one advance a month that comes out of the next payment, or maybe they wait. Either works. Settling it ahead of time means you won’t be deciding in the moment when they text you on the 19th.

3. Close the loopholes with a few clear rules. Every adult gives the same answer, so asking the other parent (or a grandparent) doesn’t work. Write down what counts as an emergency, and require a receipt or bill for anything on the list. Pay big costs directly to the school, doctor, or mechanic. For anything that isn’t an emergency, wait until the next day to say yes or no, which gives impulse requests time to fade. Keep the list short, because a long rulebook feels like a challenge to find the gap.

4. Keep money conversations separate from bigger conversations. Sam kept his asks small partly to avoid questions about school and his future. If a money request often turns into a talk about grades or plans, your teen may start asking in ways that avoid that talk. Bring up the bigger stuff at a separate time, when no money is involved.

5. Take some of the responsibility. Sam told us the change felt less personal once his mom said, “We never set this up clearly, and that’s on us too.” Owning your part of the old system makes the new one feel like a family fix rather than a verdict on your teen or young adults.

Any structure works as long as it’s predictable and everyone sticks to it, and one real conversation about it can save you a lot of Venmo notifications.

💙Announcements💙

We have exciting news!

There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

A recent Axios article covered Future Friends, a two-day program coming to Indiana University Bloomington with a Chelsea Cutler concert, a documentary screening, yoga, line dancing, and a phone-free hangout with music and games. The goal is to help students feel less alone by giving them enjoyable ways to spend time together and meet people.

I’m a fan of the idea, and it raises a question:

When there’s a lot your teen or young adult needs to work on, where does having fun with other people fit?

Your answer probably depends on what’s happening at home.

“So they have energy for this?”

Maybe you’ve asked about the same job application three times this week. Their bed is unmade, or there’s homework they keep putting off. Then a friend texts, and suddenly they’re showered, dressed, and explaining their evening plans with impressive attention to detail.

It makes sense to feel frustrated. You want them to have friends, and you also want some effort toward their responsibilities. Waving them out the door can feel like agreeing that everything else can wait.

You can be glad they’re having fun with friends while holding onto existing expectations. Unless something needs resolving before they leave, the conversation about responsibilities can happen separately. Their mention of going out doesn’t have to trigger a review of everything unfinished.

Responsibilities matter. So does having a laugh with a friend on Saturday.

“You don’t know what happened last time.”

For other parents, homework is the least of it. Past outings may have involved drugs, alcohol, unsafe driving, or disappearing without answering calls. If that’s your experience, being asked to trust again can feel like being asked to forget what happened.

You don’t have to forget it. Some plans may be unsuitable right now, especially if they conflict with an existing safety or recovery plan. There can still be room for connection within boundaries that fit their age and circumstances.

If the worry is drinking and driving, ask how they’re getting home. If there’s an agreed check-in time, confirm it. Keep the conversation focused on the practical concern with this particular plan. Bringing up every past mistake or saying “you always do this” can turn a question about tonight into an argument about who they are as a person.

Rebuilding trust may mean smaller steps, clear agreements, and support from their provider where needed. A particular plan can be off the table while other opportunities to spend time with people remain possible. For an adult making their own decisions, your role may be to express a specific concern or set conditions around lending your car.

“I’ve been TRYING to get them to go.”

Some of you would happily drive them to a social event. They’ve lost touch with friends, turn down invitations, or seem generally disinterested, and you’d love to see them excited about something.

It’s understandable to want to fix that. Still, repeated suggestions can become another source of pressure, especially if they already feel embarrassed about being lonely. If they bring it up, listen before offering solutions. “Want help thinking about it, or just want to talk?” gives them some say in the conversation.

Also, their version of socializing might look different from yours. An evening gaming with a friend may be their idea of a good time. The broader screen-time conversation could fill another newsletter, easily. So let me not go there. For this one, consider whether they’re enjoying someone’s company and building a relationship. Connection can count even when it looks different from the social life you pictured for them.

Fun and friendship belong on the map, too

These situations call for different responses, but fun and friendship deserve a place alongside school, work, and the other things that help a life hold together.

Think of being asked to keep driving toward a better future when every stop on the map is another task you’re struggling with. Having somewhere you want to go, and someone you’re looking forward to seeing, can change how the trip feels. Fun can give a difficult week something to look forward to.

The World Health Organization’s 2025 report found that roughly 17–21% of people ages 13–29 reported feeling lonely, with the highest rates among teenagers. It identifies social connection as an important part of mental and physical health.

It’s easy to agree that friendship matters and still put it somewhere after everything else gets sorted. Which can be a longgggg wait. Having someone to laugh with or talk things through with can be part of what makes that stretch more manageable.

A few things to keep in mind this week

💙 Let ordinary plans get an ordinary response.

When there’s no safety issue or practical decision to address, “Have fun” may be enough. You don’t need to ask how the outing fits into their goals. Nobody needs to discover a career path at bowling.

💙 Stick to the agreements you already have.

If there’s an established expectation about the car or getting home, keep it clear and consistent. Resist adding new conditions in the doorway because you suddenly remembered three other things you’re frustrated about.

💙 If one plan doesn’t work, stay curious about another.

If they want help thinking through alternatives, ask what appealed to them about the original idea. Was it seeing a particular friend, hearing live music, or getting out of the house? The answer can help you discuss an alternative that still interests them. A quiet walk might be lovely, but it probably won’t feel like a satisfying substitute for someone who wanted to dance 😅.

💙 Give them room to have a life you hear about afterward.

Where their age and safety allow, let plans happen without your input. Keep necessary agreements, then leave ordinary details to them. You can be glad they enjoyed themselves without getting the full play-by-play.

Leave room for the good stuff

Making room for fun and connection can be as simple as welcoming a reasonable plan without turning it into a bigger conversation. You can stay available while letting their social life belong to them.

There may still be an unfinished application on Monday. An enjoyable afternoon doesn’t settle every concern, and it doesn’t need to. They’re allowed to have people to laugh with and plans to look forward to while the rest is still being figured out 💙.

💙Announcements💙

We have exciting news!

Starting Monday, September 21, there’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

It’s 12pm and they’re still in bed. You’re standing in the hallway biting your cheek. If this is depression and you push, you’re the parent who doesn’t take mental illness seriously, and you’ve read enough to know what that costs. If this is avoidance and you leave it alone, nothing changes, and you still have a young adult who isn’t waking up on time.

You’re caught in between, and if it isn’t waking them up on time, it’s something else.

Do you make the doctor’s appointment yourself because you know it won’t get made otherwise? Do you cover the phone call, the deposit, the email to the teacher? Do you cancel the family dinner because a room full of relatives is genuinely too much for them right now?

Every one of those choices is defensible on its own. Twenty of them in a row start to add up.

And you don’t know where the line sits between mental illness and a lack of willingness.

If you’ve been doing this a while, maybe you’re angry, and then you feel guilty about being angry, because they’re the one who’s suffering and you’re supposed to be the adult. You’ve had the thought that they’re taking advantage of you, and you don’t like that you’re thinking it. You’re grieving a version of the last few years that didn’t happen, quietly, while everyone else’s social media fills up with graduations and apartments and first real jobs. You’re tired of being the only person in the house who seems to care what happens next year, and there’s a specific loneliness in loving someone who is right down the hall and completely out of reach. You and your partner might agree, or you might not, and your young adult either doesn’t talk to either of you or knows which one to ask. Maybe you’re afraid that if you push too hard something terrible happens, so you play it safe and tell yourself you should be more understanding of their needs and their vulnerabilities. Or maybe you’re afraid that if you don’t push at all, they slip through the cracks and never leave that room. Either way, the bottom line is fear.

One thing worth naming: if you have a real and present worry about their safety, it belongs in a direct conversation with their provider rather than in a judgment call you make alone.

But back to the non-clinical take ☺️:

None of this makes you a bad parent. It makes you someone who has been doing a job nobody trained you for, without days off, for a long time.

The people treating your young adult can’t fully settle it for you either, and that isn’t a knock on them. A therapist sees a person for fifty minutes in a room designed to feel safe. You see them at 12pm on a Tuesday when the ask is a shower and a job application.

For most young adults in this position, the honest answer is that they need both boundaries and understanding. Depression makes the morning genuinely heavier, and eight months of not getting up have built a habit that runs on its own power now, separate from whatever started it.

At the same time, some willingness has to come from them, because nobody recovers into a life they didn’t help build.

Mornings get easier by doing the thing on the mornings that are still hard. Every week that passes without any of that makes the next attempt heavier, since avoidance pays out immediately and confidence only pays out later. Understanding with no expectation attached leaves a young adult with less and less evidence that they can handle anything, which is the opposite of what all of it was for.

Which leaves you needing some way to read the situation in the moment. There’s no clean test, but there are three things you can check.

💙 Does the limit hold when the thing on the other side is something they want

Parents describe a young adult who can’t manage a 9am class but is up at 6 for a flight to see friends, or who hasn’t left the house in a week and then drives two hours for a concert. The gap doesn’t mean the depression is fake or that you’ve been played. It means the depression isn’t the only thing setting the schedule, and a schedule that moves once can move again.

💙 Is it everywhere, or is it clustered?

When avoidance is doing most of the work, it concentrates around anything with a grade, a manager, a deadline, or a chance of being seen doing badly. Depression is less picky about which parts of life it takes.

💙 Has anything moved in ninety days?

With everything currently in place, are they doing anything now that they weren’t doing in June? A picture that stays identical for months while the support around it keeps growing is worth saying out loud, both to them and to whoever is treating them.

Whether it turns out to be mental illness or a lack of willingness, the next move looks about the same. You don’t get to know for certain, and you don’t have to. What moves things is the way you make the ask and how consistently you make it, so the answer stops being a referendum on how sick they are and becomes about one specific thing on one specific day. Everything below is small on purpose, and none of it requires you to settle the question first.

Things you can do this week

One ask a day. Choose a single thing you’re going to ask for today and let everything else go unmentioned. Twelve requests in a day get absorbed as noise and general disapproval. One request has a clear answer.

Decide the ask in the morning, while you’re calm. Write the one thing on a sticky note before anyone’s awake. At noon you’re carrying out a decision instead of making one in four seconds with your heart going.

Agree with your partner before, not during. Five minutes in the kitchen beforehand. Whichever of you is the softer touch delivers the ask, so it doesn’t look like one parent’s rule being enforced on everyone.

Make the ask somewhere other than the doorway. Nothing negotiated through a closed bedroom door goes well, and the same holds anywhere they feel cornered. Bring it up on a drive to somewhere they like, or on a walk, or while you’re both doing something with your hands and nobody has to hold eye contact.

Set the end date at the moment you say yes. When you agree to cover something, say out loud when it stops. “We’ll cover the phone bill through November 1, and we’ll talk again that week.” Open-ended help is the kind that quietly becomes permanent.

Ask “what would make this possible” instead of “why didn’t you.” The second question gets a defense. The first gets information, and sometimes an answer you can work with.

Say out loud what you’re doing when you accommodate, and why. “I’m making this call for you today because you’re underwater. It isn’t the new arrangement.” Silent accommodation gets read as agreement that they can’t, and it accumulates without anyone deciding anything.

Notice the asks you never make. For a few days, keep track of the ones you swallowed, the invitations you declined on their behalf, the relative you warned in advance. Most parents are surprised by how much of the accommodating happens before their young adult is ever given a chance to answer.

Hopefully that wasn’t too overwhelming. Take what’s useful and leave the rest.

And by the way, none of this is easy. Walking the line between accommodating a mental illness and asking for more willingness is hard to figure out, and even harder to hold as the parent. It could be that the missing piece is a person who isn’t you.

Parents are in an impossible spot. You have to be the enforcer and the empathizer at once, and you’re carrying every old argument the two of you have ever had into a conversation about whether they can get out of bed. Even a reasonable ask arrives loaded when it comes from you.

Which is why the same words from someone else can land completely differently. An older cousin, a boss, a coach, a friend’s parent, someone a few years ahead of them who’s been through something similar. It has nothing to do with being a better parent than you and everything to do with the absence of history. They want that person’s good opinion, and there’s nothing to push back against.

So if you’ve been trying to be the whole system by yourself, you can stop. Your job was never to figure out the depression-or-avoidance question on your own at noon in a hallway. Get one other voice in their life, keep making one small ask a day, and let time do the part you can’t.

They’re not done. 16 is not the end of the story and neither is 26. Almost everyone you know who is doing fine now had a stretch they’d rather not talk about, and most of them can’t tell you the week it turned. It rarely announces itself. It looks like one ordinary Tuesday that goes slightly better than the Tuesday before, and then a few more of those, and then a year later you’re looking back at a version of your kid you weren’t sure you’d get to meet.

Keep asking. Keep making it small. The line between illness and unwillingness will stay blurry, and you can love them and expect something from them at the same time.

💙Announcements💙

We have exciting news!

Starting Monday, September 21, there’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

Have you seen the Tik Tok trend…

where people compare their life at their current age to their parents’ life at the same age. It’s set to a Pitbull song. Most of the videos are funny on purpose. Someone cuts together their most chaotic camera roll clips and drops the text on screen: me at the same age as my parents when they had two kids. Sure the comparison can be comical, but it’s also probably pretty concerning for most parents.

There’s no doubt that the average 20 year old’s life looks vastly different now than it did a few decades ago. Parents tell me this constantly. At 22 I had a lease with my name on it. At 19 I was paying my own car insurance. By the time I was his age I’d been at the same company three years.

And often the comparison isn’t to themselves. It’s to the neighbor’s daughter who just got promoted, or a nephew who bought a house last spring, or a sibling’s family where all three of them finished school on time.

Parents bring this up with us all the time, sometimes in the first conversation. And the comparison makes sense. It’s the timeline most people were handed. But it treats one path as the path, when the reality is that young adults are arriving at adulthood in a lot more ways, and on a lot more timelines, than they used to.

The numbers show how far that has spread. Realtor.com released a report in June on adults living with their parents:

One in three adults under 35 lives at home. That’s 25.2 million people, more than at any point during the pandemic.

Seven out of ten of the 25 to 34 year olds living at home have jobs. The number has barely moved in 25 years, so this isn’t a generation that stopped working.

About a third of the 25 to 29 year olds living at home have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The typical home listed for $430,000 last year, roughly a third more than in 2019. The typical rent asked $1,673 a month, about 18% more.

Realtor.com’s senior economist, Hannah Jones, summed it up by saying it’s a supply story rather than an employment story.

The job market adds to it. Indeed’s Hiring Lab reported in July that entry level job postings were down 7.5% from a year earlier as of May 2026, while senior level postings were up 14.7%. Employers want experience, and experience is the one thing a 22 year old cannot go get.

Here’s my issue with the comparison, though.

It doesn’t produce anything.

A young adult can accept every word of it, agree they’re behind, feel awful about it, and still have no idea what to do on Tuesday morning. The comparison measures a finish line. It says nothing about the next step, which is the only thing anybody can actually take.

None of these facts about the housing and job market reach a young person who has already decided they’re failing. And when a parent brings up a cousin who bought a house, or their own timeline at that age, it doesn’t create urgency. It confirms what the young adult already believes about themselves: that they are failing, they are disappointing, they are not good enough.

And you as a parent are probably reading those stats thinking okay yeah great so what do we do about it?

Let me give you the point of view of the young adult, which I’m close enough to remember clearly.

They already know. They have a running tally, and it’s more detailed than yours. This generation grew up with the finest comparison tools ever built. Instagram shows them the apartment. LinkedIn sends a notification when someone from their graduating class starts a new position, with a little celebration icon attached. They know how many months it’s been. They saw the graduation photos in June and they know what everyone from high school is doing, because it arrives whether they look for it or not.

When you ask what the plan is, you’re not introducing new information. You’re asking them to say the tally out loud to the person whose opinion matters most to them.

So they say “I’m working on it” and go upstairs. They do care. Caring is what makes the conversation unbearable. Shame makes people avoid the thing that would help, and the thing that would help is almost always smaller and slower than anyone wants it to be. One email. One shift. One morning up before ten. Steps that size are hard to take alone, because alone they look like nothing. It takes someone beside them to name the step, watch them take it, and point out afterward that they did something they weren’t doing a month ago. Pride comes from evidence, and someone has to be there to collect it.

Which is why at Not Therapy we don’t start with the plan. We start with someone in their corner who is close enough to their age that answering honestly doesn’t feel like a performance, checking in daily, in the actual texture of the week. Did you get up. Did you send the email. What happened with the thing you were dreading.

For parents, the practical version is this. Change the measurement from where they are to what they built this month. Instead of what haven’t you done, ask what have you done. Look for the bricks, even the crumbs, and say them out loud. Momentum is built out of noticing.

So if you’re heading into a long weekend with a young adult in the house, skip the timeline question. Try asking what they’re better at now than they were in January. You’ll probably get a shrug the first time. Ask again next week, and bring one thing you noticed yourself.

References

Indeed Hiring Lab. (2026, July 23). The labor market is tilting toward seniority. https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/07/23/the-labor-market-is-tilting-toward-seniority/

Realtor.com. (2026, June 18). The empty nest is on hold: 1 in 3 adults under 35 lives with their parents [Press release]. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-empty-nest-is-on-hold-1-in-3-adults-under-35-lives-with-their-parents-realtorcom-finds-302803408.html

💙Announcements💙

We have exciting news!

Starting Monday, September 21, there’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.

It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.

OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.

Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.

Any parent can join and it’s free.

Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.

https://oplm.com/program/not-therapy/?utm_source=nottherapy&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=launching-young-adults

Hey Not Therapy Newsletter Community!

My name is Kaimei and I’m one of the coaches at Not Therapy. I’m also Head of Brand and Marketing, so if you haven’t seen our new website, social media, or YouTube channel yet, go take a peek 🫣!

I wanted to talk about something that’s been on my mind lately, and it started with one of those two hour plane conversations where you end up knowing a stranger’s entire life story by the time you land.

She was decked out in backpacking clothes and gear, like she was planning to summit something the second we touched down in Utah. I’m very outdoorsy myself, so we struck up conversation about our love for the mountains. Her name was Lizzie. I told her about my hobbies, what I do for work, etc. When I told her what Not Therapy is all about, she shared that her older brother had been a lot like the teens and young adults we work with. Wilderness, residential, the whole run of it. He’s doing well now. He works full time as a server at a restaurant in San Diego, surfs before every shift, has a girlfriend, has a life that actually holds together. I told her how great all of that sounded, how much better he seemed to be doing, and she agreed. I was about to open my book and settle into the flight when I realized I still didn’t really know much about her. We had only talked about her brother.

Oops.

I felt bad. So I asked her: What about you? What are you doing right now?

She’s taking a gap year, she said, because she’s been feeling really lost and is finally starting to work on her own mental health. All her gear was for the Uinta Highline Trail, which she was about to go hike solo. And then we returned to the topic of her brother, except this time she told me what it was like from her side of things. What it was like for her when he was lashing out, doing drugs, falling apart. It was not easy for her.

There was a five year age gap between them, and she said her parents assumed she was too young, too preoccupied, too different from her brother to really understand the gravity of the situation at the time. Her words: “I understood a lot more than they think I did.”

She’d hide in her room while her brother and her parents had explosive arguments, and one night she wrote a promise to herself in her journal. She would never fight like that. She would never argue like that. She would Never. Get. Angry.

Quick question for everyone reading this. Um…Do you get angry?

I’m going to assume the answer is DUH. Yes, of course I do.

And you know what? I damn hope so.

Anger is a normal human emotion, and a genuinely healthy one when you’ve got a healthy way of expressing it. Lizzie made herself a promise no human being on earth can keep, and she made it as a kid sitting on her bedroom floor listening to a situation she had no part in creating and no power to fix.

The person in the other room

When one member of a family is going through mental health struggles, everyone reorganizes around it. Parents usually end up doing their own work at some point, whether that’s therapy, a coach, a parent group, or just a lot of reading at 1 am. Which is good, and necessary.

But there’s almost always someone else in the house getting overlooked and it’s usually the sibling.

How much it affects them depends on a lot of things. Older or younger. In the house every day or off at college. Already dealing with their own mental health struggles or not. Close with their sibling or barely speaking.

Still, in the work we do at Not Therapy, I very rarely meet a family where the siblings come through unaffected.

These are the four patterns I see most often:

💙The sibling who bottles it up. Nothing is ever wrong. They’re fine. They’re always fine. This is Lizzie.

💙The sibling who becomes the golden child. They turn into the proof that the family is okay. Straight As, no trouble, no needs, a shelf of external accolades. A lot of pressure for a young person to carry, and most of it is invisible.

💙The sibling who disappears. They’re at a friend’s house, at practice, at work, anywhere the house isn’t. Physically gone, or checked out and separate from the family while still living in it.

💙The sibling who explodes. They react hard and loud, or they rebel into their own set of behaviors. Sometimes because they’re genuinely angry at their sibling. Sometimes because they just have their own big emotions they don’t know how to handle. Sometimes because it’s the only way anyone in that house has ever gotten attention. Sometimes because it’s just the example of communication they were given.

The patterns can also be any combination of these four, or something I haven’t listed. Leave a comment below if you can think of other permutations, because I’m sure I’m missing some 😅.

So what do you actually do

Here’s the question I’m sure you want the answer to. How do you address the needs of the other sibling or siblings when you’re already fighting to keep one young adult afloat?

I’m no expert in this, so take everything below as what it is, which is my own lived experience plus what I see working with families at Not Therapy. Here are three things.

1. Small, intentional, repeated check-ins do more than you’d think. You don’t need a whole sit-down conversation. Maybe just ask about something specific in their life and then actually listen to the answer. How did the soccer game go. Are you and Maya still hanging out, how’s that going. What are you watching right now. What’s the last thing you laughed at. Did you like that steak I made for dinner last night. Specific beats general every time, because “how are you” gets you “fine” and everybody knows it.

The other version of this is one-on-one time that belongs only to them. Sometimes that’s a movie or a hike or dinner out. Sometimes it’s fifteen minutes sitting next to them on the couch not saying much of anything. The point is presence. Literally just being present.

2. If you don’t have the capacity right now, hand some of it out. This is not a failure. If you’re deep in crisis with one young adult, you may genuinely not have the bandwidth to also be fully present for another, and pretending otherwise usually means nobody gets you. So bring other people in. Ask an aunt, an uncle, a grandparent, an older cousin to check in regularly. Get them into a sport or a job or a club where there are adults and friends who’ll notice them. Hire them their own therapist or coach if that’s available to you. And if you’re already working with us, the sibling is a completely fair thing to bring to your coach or your Family Manager. We hear about it more often than you’d guess. A sibling having one adult outside the house who is reliably in their corner changes a lot.

3. Let them have the ugly feelings, and watch what you praise. Siblings often feel things they think they’re not allowed to feel. Anger at the sibling who’s struggling. Resentment about how much of the family’s attention and money and energy is going one direction. Guilt for not being able to fix any of it. And sometimes relief when their sibling is out of the house, which comes with a whole other layer of guilt on top.

If the only feedback a sibling ever gets is some version of “thank God you’re the easy one,” they learn very quickly that having needs makes them a burden. So say the opposite out loud. Tell them it makes sense to be mad or worried about this. Tell them they’re allowed to want things, and that none of what’s happening with their sibling is theirs to carry or fix. Tell them you don’t need them to be the easy one. Tell them they can screw up, come home upset, be a mess for a night, and the family won’t fall apart. The world won’t end.

Back to Lizzie and the main point (thanks for hanging in there with me)

Lizzie is getting to this now, on a gap year, years after she needed it. Her brother is surfing before work in San Diego and she’s only just starting to unpack what it cost her to be the one who never made noise.

What stuck with me was how naturally our whole conversation had organized itself around her brother. Neither of us steered it there. It just went, the same way it probably goes at a lot of dinner tables. I do this work every day and I still almost didn’t ask. If a conversation drifts that way in two hours with a stranger, it drifts a lot faster over years in the same house.

So if you take one thing from this, ask yourself who in your family you haven’t asked about lately. Doesn’t matter if they’re younger, older, at home, or out on their own. Go find them this week, ask about something specific, and stay long enough to hear the whole answer.

Oh and also, quick one for the sibling who somehow ended up on this newsletter: reply to this or drop a comment. Let me know what’s up 🙃.

Peace,
Kaimei

And even though the study uses failure to launch right in the title...😑...it is one of the only hopeful studies I could find about stuck young adults,

So I’ll allow the use of that term this once, because what the study found is THAT good.

Here’s the tea ☕️

In 2022, Yale researchers ran a randomized controlled trial with parents of young adults, with the criteria that their young adult child isn’t working, isn’t in school, and is living at home (the young adults were ages 19 to 32, with most in their early twenties).

What made my jaw drop, though, was that the researchers spent about 15 weeks coaching ONLY the parents on five specific shifts in their attitudes, behaviors, and support systems. The young adults never attended a single session, and they probably didn’t even know their parents were participating 😱

The results??

With only changes in parent behavior, a whopping 60% of the young adults no longer met the criteria for “failure to launch” by the end.

45% got jobs (30% of them full-time), 25% enrolled in school, 10% moved out, and the parents themselves reported feeling significantly less burdened. Okay slayyyy. The control group of parents, who were waitlisted for the trainings and kept doing what they’d always done, had zero young adults launched in the same time period.

And I’m sorry, but the best part for me was that their methodology is exactly what we’ve been telling families to do for years now. Sure, was our direction and advice based primarily on our own intuition and lived experience? Absolutely. And we’ve always been very upfront about that. Literally just look at the name of our company. But as it turns out, a clinical trial existed this entire time that backs the exact approach we’ve taken with Not Therapy parents.

The proof is no longer just in the pudding!! I actually have no idea what that idiom means, but point being, the five things the researchers coached parents on that helped them “launch” their kids are already baked into Not Therapy’s philosophy. What a win for the people.

Before we get into the five things, though, we have to talk about the thoughts that are probably already forming in your head (and were probably in the heads of all the parents who participated in this study when they signed up).

A parent’s 11pm thought 💭

If you’re the parent of a stuck young adult, there’s a sentence you’ve thought lying awake that you’d never say out loud (besides maybe to your closest friends, in a Facebook group, or on a Not Therapy parent group call):

“I’ve lost all the authority I ever had. My kid doesn’t listen to me. There’s nothing more I can do.”

You feel just as stuck as your kid. And when we tell parents that THEY are the most powerful lever in this whole equation, the same three fears come up almost every time. So let’s talk about them.

Fear #1:

“My kid isn’t motivated. They’re incapable of being independent.”

Your kid is stuck because they’re in an anxiety and avoidance cycle: the thing they want or need to do feels hard, so someone else handles it for them, and therefore the next hard thing feels even bigger. The good news is that this is a structural problem, and structures can be taken down and rebuilt. The study included only young adults with no medical or major psychiatric condition that would explain the stuckness, meaning these were capable kids who stayed stuck until their parents changed the structure at home.

Fear #2:

“If I stop pushing, reminding, and holding them accountable, nothing will happen.”

This is the classic enabling trap, and it’ll sneak up on ya because it can also look like good parenting, at least when your kid is younger. But every time you step in, even when it’s out of love or in the name of accountability, your kid absorbs the same narrative: you don’t think they can handle it.

Which, once again, makes the next hard thing feel bigger, which invites more stepping in. In your kid’s defense, “get a job” is an unenforceable request anyway. The only levers you can actually pull in this case are what you do and what you pay for.

Fear #3:

“We tried therapy, we tried coaching, we tried a program, so why would this approach be any different?”

Because everything you’ve tried so far has put the onus of change solely on your kid’s shoulders, while our approach divides it between you. In the study, the young adults never directly engaged in the coaching, yet 60% launched anyway. This is exactly why, from the very inception of Not Therapy, our program wraps around the parents as much as the young adult.

Which brings us to the actual list.

The five things parents can do to launch their young adult 🚀 (as proven by the Yale study)

1️⃣ Educate yo-self.

The study calls this first step “psychoeducation,” which sounds very clinical. What it looks like in practice is listening, in a curiosity-forward way, to someone who deeply knows this territory and explains what’s going on in your kid’s brain.

For me, when I actually educate myself about what’s going on in my own brain, I start to drop the shame and set realistic expectations for myself. Same goes for you as a parent. In our world, that’s our queen Beth Hillman, parent coach extraordinaire, who has both the lived experience and years of coaching parents of stuck kids. Now, every family that works with us has to meet with Beth one-on-one at least four times in the first few months; I’ve seen how parents walk out of those first conversations visibly lighter. Their kid’s behavior finally has a more “logical” explanation.

2️⃣ Do the accommodation audit.

This is almost always the first piece of work we do with parents. List every single thing you’re doing for your kid OR paying for on a regular basis: gas, rent, car insurance, the phone bill, their laundry, cleaning their room, making their doctor’s appointments, signing them up for classes.

Then we ask parents the same question we ask their kid: what’s the smallest next step?

Pick the thing you’re most okay with them dropping the ball on, stop doing it, and...wait for it, because this is the hard part...let go of the outcome. 😮‍💨 If you stop cleaning their room, the room will be messy, and you’re going to have to close the door and live with that. If you stop doing their laundry, it will pile up until it becomes their problem. If you stop paying their phone bill and they don’t have a job or savings, it’ll usually get them moving on that real quick.

Here’s what we say to parents constantly: the thing you’re most okay with them failing on is where you should start. Baby steps, people. As it gets easier, you can keep adding to the list.

3️⃣ Flip your attitude to acceptance plus confidence.

Let’s say it again for the people in the back. Acceptance. Plus. Confidence.

This one my own parents nailed, and I only understood how much it impacted me years later.

Right before I came home from residential treatment as a teenager, I remember my parents floated enrolling me in community college as a backup plan, in case regular college didn’t work out. Tbh I’m pretty sure the treatment center told them to. My response was something like, “Hell no, how rude, I am SO ready for college how dare you.” And that was the last time they ever brought up a plan B for me. Kudos to them for listening 👏

Fast forward to years later, my mom told me how she actually got through that era: “I just had a core belief that this wasn’t going to be ‘your forever.’ This is not how you were always going to feel or be. I knew you were going to come out on top.”

I don’t remember if she said that to me at the time, but she didn’t have to. When the people you live with believe you’re capable, you receive that attitude every single day, in a million small ways 👑

Living with people who have the opposite mentality is brutal, though. Imagine living with someone who is quietly bracing for you to fail or expects you to disappoint them. That’s the energy your kid absorbs. Every accommodation you make for them says “we don’t think you can do it.”

So here’s the flip side. Acceptance: where your kid is at feels genuinely hard for them, and they want out of it as much as you do (probably more). Confidence: “I know you can figure this out. I’ll show you how to do the laundry (or rewrite the resume, or sign up to drive for DoorDash), and I know you can do it. It’s f**king hard, but I know you can do it.”

My parents gave me room to fail. The deal was: we expect you to deal with the consequences of your actions, good or bad. We’re always here to help, but we’re not going to save you. That deal is the reason I trusted myself.

One more thing here, because parents always ask: yes, this works even if you’re faking it at first!! All of us treatment kids learn this on day one: change the behavior, and the belief will follow. Or in DBT, they love to tell you to “act opposite.” All your kid can actually read is your actions.

4️⃣ Change yourself instead of trying to control your kid.

The study draws from the principles of “non-violent resistance,” which we love and are absolutely keeping. This focuses parents on the only person in the house you can actually change. What can YOU change, behavior-wise? Because if you change your behavior, your attitude tends to follow it, and your feelings eventually follow that.

This is why we made parent coaching non-optional for new Not Therapy families, regardless of how much therapy, coaching, or treatment you have been through. This is why we ask parents, more than once, “Are you willing to do the work you’re asking your kid to do right now?” The success of your kid hinges on this.

To be fair, here’s the worst-case scenario if you change your behavior: you become a happier, less anxious person who takes care of yourself and lives your life again. Best case, your kid watches you change and follows your example.

5️⃣ Build your support bench.

If you do the first four things, you are breaking 20 or 30 years of your own behavior. It’s going to be uncomfortable, and there will be a week where your kid pushes back hard, and you will want to fold. You need people to lean on so you stay strong.

In the study, the researchers had parents recruit relatives, friends, and professionals to reinforce what they were doing at home. We build this into everything we do with parents: weekly parent support group calls (where you hear another parent say the exact thing you’re thinking), one-on-one coaching with Beth, and your own dedicated point person we call the Family Manager, whose main job is to be there for the parents. You text them any time, any day, jump on an ad hoc call, and they’ll check in on you regularly.

Parents who try to white-knuckle this change in attitude and behavior tend to slide back into old patterns pretty much immediately. The parents who build, and then lean on, their support system can hold the line much more effectively.

Your action item (if you’re open to suggestions, that is)

Start the “accommodation audit” today. Just do a stream of consciousness (I use Wispr app to voice-memo the hell out of everything, and it translates it to clear thoughts). Talk about every accommodation you’re making for your young adult.

Then circle the smallest, easiest-thing-for-you-to-let-go-of, and stop doing that one this week. Let the outcome be what it is.

Your kid doesn’t have to be in the room for this to start working.

Shameless plug (this is our newsletter after all)...the study cited 20 parents who actually went through the training, so the 60% who stopped qualifying as “failure-to-launch” = 12 young adults.

In our case, we have 59 families who have been through Not Therapy, and 86.4% were employed, in school, or both by the end of the coaching engagement. So that’s 51 teens and young adults we’ve helped move out of, or helped avoid entirely, the failure-to-launch label. Check our outcomes.

While parents are clearly a huge part of the equation, the success rate is even higher when you pair the young adult with a mentor who can help them name, work toward, and achieve their goals 😎

So, just to remind you, the parent who thinks they’ve lost all their power is holding more of it than anyone else in the house.

And as always, reach out to us anytime for help. We will help any parent create a game plan absolutely for free.

💚 - Hayley

Before I tell you what term I landed on to describe what so many parents come to Not Therapy seeking help for with their young adults, to the point where it has become our specialty, let me back up real quick and tell ya how I got here.

What put this on my radar this week was when I was sent the Child Mind Institute’s explainer on failure to launch, which their team gave a fresh review this July. Tbh, it’s not a bad piece. They confirm that there’s no official clinical definition (which, for the record, I don’t think there should be), that failure to launch has never been a diagnosis, and that the researchers who study it mostly describe it as “highly dependent adult children.”

Even though they try to call it a syndrome at certain points, the article describes a pattern rather than a diagnosis. Failure to launch is defined as an adult who falls into one or more of the following categories:

1. They are physically capable of working or being in school but aren’t doing either (and aren’t looking)

2. They depend on their parents financially

3. They lean on their parents emotionally for constant reassurance

If you’re reading this newsletter, I’m assuming there’s a chance you’re supporting a young adult who fits that description. You know our whole thing by now is that stuck isn’t sick, which is exactly why the term failure to launch bugs me. The current name for this pattern points the blame at the parents, young adult, or both, without pointing to any solution.

My rabbit hole this week 🐰 AKA finding the least “bad” name for this thing

Here’s what AI told me people call this situation many young adults find themselves in these days:

🔶 “Failure to launch (FTL).”

Failure is in the name, but whose failure is it, exactly? The young adult hears it as their failure. You hear it as yours. Everyone gets shamed, and no one gets information on how to move the needle.

🔶 “Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome.”

It’s been studied and reported in psychiatric journals, and we’ve worked with many young adults who received this exact diagnosis at some point. However, as you all know, “syndrome-speak” does something I openly dislike: it nudges families back into a diagnosis mentality. And anytime you’re in a diagnosis mentality, you’re in an office, you’re in a treatment center, you’re waiting on hold with your insurance company, but you’re rarely operating in the “real world.” Without even reading the studies, we all know what the prescription for this looks like: therapy, career counseling, treatment for depression, etc. NGL, all three of these things can be very important components to moving your young adult forward, but it’s the same menu we’ve already ordered off of multiple times, and families are still finding their young adults are still stuck after all these interventions.

🔶 “Boomerang kids.”

This is a cute phrase, but it explains nothing.

🔶 “NEET” (not in employment, education, or training).

That’s the term economists use, and these studies show that unsuccessful transitions into independent adult life can predict “long-term lack of functional independence.” Greeaaaat, but that still doesn’t tell us how to stop that prediction from coming to fruition.

🔶 “Hikikomori.”

Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a fun-to-say, one-word term to describe what they call a “hidden epidemic” of a “severe form of social withdrawal” among young people, which researchers have been observing there since the 1970s. Side note: this is actually a fascinating study you can read (for free), and it goes into all the “comorbidities” researchers observe with hikikomori. They even propose a way to diagnose hikikomori, but interestingly, the Japanese characterize it more as an inability or unwillingness to leave the home (straight up social isolation), whereas many parents come to Not Therapy not because their young adult is totally withdrawing from their peer group, but because they’re withdrawing from their expected societal responsibilities.

🔶 “Highly dependent adult children.”

Okay, maybe now we’re getting a little more of an accurate description here, which is probably why researchers use it so often. My main issue is that it only describes the end state, but it says nothing about how the young adult (and their parents) actually got there.

Why “delayed independence” actually fits best, imo 🚀

Even though this still sounds a little too clinical for me, I like this description because parents already understand what it means to delay a developmental moment. You can delay your kid’s kindergarten start, for example. Schools recommend it all the time when a kid needs another year, or when they’re a little young for their grade. That’s a totally normal, common parenting decision.

Since I’m not a parent myself, I’m curious if parents ever talk about how the emotional and mental growth moments can get delayed the same way, much later than early childhood? I did find a lot of research on what they call “family accommodation,” which is when children and adolescents with anxiety or OCD “display a pattern of excessive dependency on their parents for help in avoiding anxiety-provoking situations.” Researchers studying FTL hypothesize that these small decisions to accommodate your kid while they’re younger (regardless of whether they have OCD or not) add up to a young adult relying on their parents for family accommodation to avoid “daunting functional challenges.”

This research supports why I’m coming to prefer the term delayed independence over failure to launch. It describes what’s actually happening here: your young adult just hasn’t had enough practice relying on themselves for emotional and functional support, rather than them (or you as parents) being an all-out irreversible failure. Delayed independence puts everybody a little bit on notice (parents, schools, and yes, the kid too) without shaming anyone. Someone did the delaying, and then it becomes a cycle of external reliance instead of being given the opportunities to build internal resilience.

Which is the best news in this whole issue!! What was previously delayed can be un-delayed.

The moments where your kid actually got delayed (as a teen or young adult)

Here are two things we see over and over with our Not Therapy families:

🟡 Earning things.

I see parents run incentive structures with little kids all the time. “If you eat your vegetables, lil Timmy, you get the ice cream!” Then, somewhere in the teenage years, it will just stop as soon as they start resisting. However, teens and young adults can re-engage in this behavior if the incentive structure changes to where they have to earn something they actively want over a longer period of time than just a meal.

“Hey Timmy, we’ll get you the new PlayStation if you do x, y, and z” can work at 15, even 20. As we all know, when we earn something for ourselves, we appreciate it more, sure, but the bigger deal is we prove to ourselves that we can do the work. Your teen or young adult could also just decide they don’t want the PlayStation that badly. That’s a choice too, and making real choices is exactly the rep they’ve been missing.

🟡 The incompetence loop.

This is what the researchers are talking about with family accommodation. Weaponized incompetence is still having a moment, and okay, maybe your 24-year-old is weaponizing it now. Tbh, I fall into weaponizing it on occasion (every weekend) too when I’m “too tired and depressed” to do the chores and errands I put off all week and that I know will make me feel better as soon as I do them.

My suspicion, however, is that the weaponized incompetence subtly started way earlier, back when it was simply faster for parents to do the thing themselves. Your kid learns “okay, I’m just not doing it right,” you keep doing it for them, and by adulthood the act has hardened into a real belief that they can’t.

With a lot of the young men we work with, especially, that belief comes out as anger and frustration. And in our experience, most of those feelings are aimed at himself. He is a harsher critic of himself than you have ever been. Then everyone keeps babying him, and the loop feeds itself.

What my dad got right 👏

Growing up, when we didn’t know how to do something, my dad would sit us down. He’d say, “Okay, this is how you do it.” He’d show us and do it himself. Then he’d undo it. Then he’d have us do it. We eye-rolled at him a lot (he still does this to us to this day), but it ingrained something legit: I saw it, I’m gonna mimic it, oh wait, it’s not as hard as I thought it’d be.

I use his exact method with clients now. When someone tells me they can’t figure out how to find a therapist, I make them get on a FaceTime with me, share their screen, and I walk them through how to find one by having them do it. I show them where to search, how to filter, and what to actually look for.

And I watch parents lose patience for this with their adult kids because “you should already know how to do this.” Should they though?? You may have never even shown them how to do it or given them the opportunity to do it for themselves, so why would they know how to do it now? Just because they’re an adult doesn’t mean they learned how to do it. I didn’t even feel like an adult until I was probably 28. At least.

Related: the number of parents who tell me their kid has executive functioning issues and then get mad at that same kid for fumbling basic life admin. You know what’s great for executive functioning? Someone literally showing you how to do the thing while you do it, as my dad did. It’s called “body-doubling.”

How to un-delay each delayed moment ➡️

Take the three markers from that Child Mind piece, and you can reverse-engineer every single one.

1. Capable of school or work, doing neither

   ➡️ The delayed moment: earning. Somewhere along the way, effort and reward got disconnected.

   ✅ The un-delay: reconnect them now. If they’re living at home, the roof is the incentive. Rent, real contribution, real work for the family if there’s no job yet (we went deep on this last week: Am I a bad parent for charging my kid rent?) There are a million ways to incentivize an adult kid. Start with the biggest one.

2. Financially dependent.

   ➡️ The delayed moment: they have never regularly paid a bill, because you always paid it first or bailed them out.

   ✅ The un-delay: slowly start “handing back” what you’ve been accommodating, gradually and with support. This is the main place where I’m in full agreement with what the research suggests. The example used by the Child Mind Institute is taking your young adult off the family phone plan with advance notice, so the hundred bucks a month becomes theirs to earn. The same research also suggests that parents who combine this approach with adopting and communicating an attitude of acceptance and support, like “I know this is tough” and “I know you can handle it,” have a higher likelihood of moving their adult child out of the “FTL” category. I love when something we’ve seen work with our families is actually supported by clinical research 😅

3. Emotionally dependent.

   ➡️ The delayed moment: they never got any practice being uncomfortable, because someone always resolved it (or protected them from it) as soon as the parent saw it become an issue.

   ✅ The un-delay: whenever they complain to you about something (”no one likes me,” “my back hurts”), just be like, “Okay, well this is what I do when I’m dealing with that. When my back hurts, I look up a doctor, check if they’re in my insurance network, call, and make the appointment.” Then ask them how they think they’d do it? If they want to try it your way, do the body-doubling exercise I gave earlier (show them how you do it while simultaneously letting them do it). If they don’t want to do it your way, totally fine. Let them find their way, and now they know they can come to you for help if they get stuck.

What they really need are reps in tolerating the discomfort of being a beginner. This tolerance, and proving to themselves they can figure sh*t out, is where confidence actually comes from.

So what do we call it?

Damn, that was a really long-winded way of me deciding while writing this that I can’t think of anything clever enough to trademark.

However, I do think “delayed independence” at least tells the truth about what’s going on here. Your young adult’s growth moments were delayed, and you can typically trace it back to small behaviors, on both the parent(s)’ side and the young adult’s, that might have started a pattern of accommodation.

The good news is that anything that got delayed can be un-delayed, and you can start with a “show-then-repeat” skill this week.

Hit reply and tell us the delayed moment you can see most clearly in your own house. I read every single one, and I’d love to hear if this resonated for parents.

💚 - Hayley

I wake up in the morning. I’m excited to get up, have my cutesy lil morning coffee ritual, and go to my hot moms pilates class. I walk downstairs, and my 30-year-old son is playing video games on the couch, an empty bowl of cereal sitting on the table beside them, hasn’t showered yet, and looks like they have no plans for the day.

I’ll tell you this right now: without having lived that moment yet...my mood and vibe are immediately ruined. I’m resentful, and after 30+ years of parenting, can I not have ONE MOMENT in my gorgeously decorated house to myself?? 🫠 Just thinking about it is enough to drive me to drink.

Wow, even just writing this out, I’m already heated lol. If reading that scenario made your chest tighten, hiiii 👋 This one’s for you.

The question we get at Not Therapy from parents in this exact situation, more than almost any other: “How the hell do I get my young adult to move out of my house??”

Our answer is actually straight from my own dad’s playbook: CHARGE THEM RENT.

My dad actually did this to me recently when I moved back into their house for two weeks this past winter while my husband and I were waiting for our furniture to get to the Bay Area after moving here from NYC. I had two weeks rent-free, then I had to chip in on rent and groceries. Honestly, iconic.

Maybe you feel guilty even thinking about this as an option, because charging your own kid to live in the house they grew up in feels cold. It feels like something a landlord does.

Our answer: yes, it’s exactly what a landlord does, but that’s the whole point! IMO, rent is non-negotiable for any adult kid living at home. The only real variable is the currency in which they pay it.

And before the guilt spiral starts, remember the thing we say every week: stuck isn’t sick.

A capable 23-year-old who sleeps until noon in a house where nothing is asked of them (or they aren’t following through on what you’re asking them currently) is responding rationally to a setup with no structure OR incentive in it. Setup problems get fixed by changing the setup, while incentive problems get fixed by adding an incentive. Charging rent is one of the fastest changes available to you, and it does both.

We’ve watched the no-rent version play out. It looks like my literal nightmare.

We’ve watched kids be in their parents’ home for their whole twenties, never having to pay rent, and by the end it’s impossible to kick them out.

In one case, the kid essentially had a random job at their parents’ company to put on their resume and “earn money,” yet they were still living at home and not paying rent. Then, all of a sudden, they were 30, and the parents were calling us saying, “We are terrified that our son hates us but will never move out.” He had ten-plus years of free everything, so the muscle for running his life never got built. Yet.

Compare that to the families where there’s an agreed-upon plan from the start. “Okay, you’re going to school, so we will charge you much less than what you would normally pay in this area for rent if you live at home. If you live away from home, we’ll pay up to $[insert the max dollar amount you’d pay without getting resentful] per month for your first 6 months. Then we’ll pay $[insert smaller amount] for the next six months.”

That type of split plan works well almost every time. The kid has skin in the game, the parent has a defined role, and nobody wakes up at the ten-year mark wondering how they got there.

Same amount of parental generosity in both stories, but completely different outcomes. The difference was the structure around the money.

Does rent have to be actual money? Nope.

This is where most parents get stopped: “But they don’t have a job, and they live at home, so what am I supposed to charge them?” Fair question, Stacy. Here’s the currency ladder we use with our families:

Scenario 1: No job, has savings

If they don’t have a job but have savings, and I’m assuming they already live at home or are moving back in, then they pay rent from their savings. Yes, really. Watching your own account go down every month you don’t work is one of the most motivating experiences on earth (we’ve seen it kickstart more job searches than any pep talk).

Scenario 2: No job, no savings

If they have no savings, no job, and they’re living at home, they pay in real labor around the house. And we mean real labor, with real market value. Ask yourself: what is something you wish you could hire someone for but you haven’t been able to yet? Have them do that. Power washing the deck. Digitizing twenty years of family photos. Rebuilding the garage shelving. What is going to save you money or make it less of a cost for you, ultimately, to have them there? That’s the rent. Living at home as an adult shouldn’t be fun or easy. This serves as greater motivation to get out there and get a job.

Either way, the test for every rent and living arrangement is the same question: is this moving them more towards remaining a reliant kid or more towards becoming an independent adult? Shout out to Beth Hillman for saying this to a parent we were working with the other day. It’s stuck with me ever since.

“Free everything,” with no expectations, moves them back toward childhood. Rent, in any currency, moves them toward adulthood.

The move most parents never consider, if your young adult does in fact have a job

Scenario 3 (and the point we get most families we work with to): Has a job

Here’s the version we like best, and it might sound counterintuitive at first: pay part of their rent somewhere else.

The stipulations do the heavy lifting here: a set end date, midpoint check-ins, and a ramp-down plan (you cover half for six months, then a third, then they carry it, or whatever version fits your family).

Why this works so well: on the first of every month, rent is due to someone who has zero emotional history with your kid. No negotiating, no guilt-tripping, no “you’re so unfair.” Let the landlord be the bad guy, not you. You get to go back to being the parent. The lease does the enforcement.

If you go this route, make sure to have these guardrails in place:

1. Make sure the apartment is affordable on minimum wage, if that’s the kind of job they’re looking for. Setting them up in a place they could never carry alone just delays the same problem at a higher price point.

2. Don’t furnish it. They can buy their own mattress or take stuff from their childhood bedroom. (A slightly ugly first apartment is a rite of passage, and skipping it for them skips a step they need.)

3. Give them the money directly each month instead of paying the landlord yourself. They should see how much is coming in and how much is going out, and they should be the one making the payment. If they spend it all without paying their rent, that’s a lesson. There is no option to “move back in” under this agreement.

4. Set (and communicate) the timeline at the start: “we’ll help pay for it the whole time, half the time, or for a few months.” Whatever you pick, pick it before move-in day, because renegotiating later turns you right back into the bad guy.

The part your kid won’t say out loud

To be fair to the other side of this: we know charging rent can feel harsh when your kid is already struggling. And if your kid is in a genuine crisis right now, this is not the week to slide a rent agreement across the table. Stabilize first.

But for the young adult who is technically capable (even if you don’t believe that yet) and needs a swift kick, as we say? Having worked with soooo many of these kids, I’ll tell you that free rent feels like a daily message that nobody in the house expects anything from them.

Rent, even the labor version, carries the opposite message: we think you have something worth contributing, and we’re going to treat you like an adult who can deliver it. Most stuck young adults are actually starving for exactly that.

What to do this week

Pick the currency. If there’s savings, it’s money. If there’s no savings, sit down together and make the list of things you’d hire out if you could, and let them pick two. If moving out is on the table (or you want it to be), draft the ramp-down: how much you’ll cover, for how long, and when the check-ins happen. Ideally, they already have a job in this scenario.

Then have the conversation before the resentment picks the timing for you.

And if you’re living the “kid at home, no rent, year four” version of this and you’re not sure where to start, reply to this email. We read everything, and this specific situation is basically our home turf.

💚 - Hayley

Here’s my version of it:

When I was a teenager, I spent two years in a wilderness therapy program and a residential treatment center. I was supervised around the clock and evaluated every month on my behavior (literally a monthly “therapeutic report card”). There were professionals in the building at every hour of the day. And in all that time, I did not have one relationship with an adult that felt real or positive.

I was surrounded at any given time by 50 other teenage girls who were struggling, and with them I learned how to build positive relationships with my peers. But the only reason I learned to have a vulnerable relationship with other girls my age was that we were literally evaluated on it lol. So that part of the “troubled teen industry” experience was actually a net positive for me.

However, with the adults, i.e. the people I was supposed to go to for advice and support, I never really connected with any of them. My treatment environment didn’t foster that for a myriad of reasons, and out of the 25+ adults who were responsible for the 50 girls, zero of them actually knew me. Most of them hadn’t been in my shoes, so, naturally, I wasn’t going to be real with them or truly listen to them. I felt like the adults were building relationships with us, but they had absolutely no stake in our success.

It wasn’t until recently that I began to understand that this was the actual problem I had with treatment, and it wasn’t just a side detail. The setup I lived inside back in treatment, and the chatbot that a stuck young adult talks to now, are failing at the same job from opposite ends.

Treatment gave me oversight with no warmth. AI chatbots give young adults warmth with no stake. Neither one is someone who actually needs (let alone wants) us to become someone we’re proud of.

Which leaves parents the only question worth asking once you stop panicking about the chatbot:

“What actually gets a stuck young adult moving again?”

As I’ve said before, it’s almost never another diagnosis, another program, or a better app. It’s one real relationship.

And here’s the part I want to be precise about: this is not just any relationship.

It’s a relationship with someone who has something at stake in who they become.

So, because I know this is true in my personal story and in the stories of all the young adult clients we work with at Not Therapy, I wanted to see if I could find research to back it up.

What the research keeps saying (and it’s kind of relentless about it)

Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child has spent years on one question: Why do some young people go through serious hardship and come out functional, even strong, while others don’t?

Their answer, tbh, is kinda unglamorous. They found that the MOST common factor in kids who do well is having at least one stable, committed relationship with a supportive adult.

Hello Harvard, yooo??? I was kinda shocked that this was one of their primary findings. They call it the “active ingredient” in resilience. Not a nice lil supplement to the real treatment. The active ingredient itself.

Then they draw a line that should stop every anxious parent cold. Stress isn’t automatically harmful. With a supportive relationship in place, hard experiences become tolerable, even useful, the kind of stress a person grows from. Without that relationship, the same stress turns toxic and tips toward bad outcomes. The relationship is the hinge between adversity that builds someone and adversity that breaks them.

And there’s another finding in there I’ve been thinking about a lot, because it describes the young people we work with exactly. Some kids respond more intensely than others to everything, the bad and the good (*raises hand at the back of the class*…). Story of my life. These kids struggle more in cold environments and light up dramatically in warm ones. Which means the kid who looks like they’re doing the worst, the one who feels everything too much, is often the one MOST LIKELY to turn around fastest once a real relationship finally shows up.

Let that sink in.

I have, in fact, found this to be true in my own life more times than I can count. Like when I got out of treatment, one of the first mentor-type relationships I developed was with another young woman, only 5 or 6 years older than me, who became my sponsor back when I was in a 12-step program. I could call her every day, and she would always answer. I’d call her to freak out about something that was actually probably not a big deal, and she’d help me level set. I’d call her just about navigating relationships with other college students while being sober, and she encouraged me to own it and be myself. She wasn’t paid to care about me, and she wasn’t my parent. She could just see a bigger life for me than I could see for myself at the time, and she stayed close enough, long enough, to hold me to it.

That one relationship changed the entire trajectory of where I was headed.

Another research-backed point, in case you're stuck on the idea that this important relationship needed to be present in childhood. It didn't. The brain is most malleable early on, but the same Harvard researchers make it clear that resilience continues to build throughout a person's life. In their words, it is never too late.

All of this doesn’t just apply to relationships with a mentor you meet and develop a relationship organically. It also applies if you’re sitting in a therapist’s waiting room right now. Decades of psychotherapy research keep landing in the same place. The single most reliable predictor of whether therapy helps is not the modality. It’s the strength of the relationship between the client and the person across from them. That bond predicts outcomes more than the technique does. It also matters more the longer and stronger it grows.

Just to say it again, we are not anti-therapy, and tbh a lot of our families have therapists we love and collab with. I’m pointing at what the therapy research itself keeps saying is doing the work. The thing doing the most work isn’t the credentials or the technique. It’s a person the young adult is bonded to, the one who is invested in them.

That’s the stake. That’s the ingredient the AI chatbot can’t fake, no matter how good it gets at sounding like it cares.

I’ll be honest about what we haven’t proved yet

Okay, real talk tho. I couldn’t find a randomized controlled trial showing that relationship-based coaching changes outcomes for stuck 18-28-year-olds. That study doesn’t exist.

Yet.

This is exactly why Not Therapy is building the proof. We track real outcomes, with real young adults, over time, so that a few years from now this isn’t just a belief we hold. It’s a result we can show you. We already have preliminary outcomes from our first 2.5 years of coaching young adults and supporting their families. But of course, in the first year or so, we were still ironing out how to define what we’re building, so we hadn’t started gathering quantitative baseline data yet. Dw, it’s coming.

In the meantime, what we have is the weight of the resilience and relationship literature pointing one direction, plus our own lived experience of having been the young people in question.

And from our experience, here’s the part your young adult can’t quite say out loud:

I’m not choosing talking to AI (or straight up silence) over you. It’s just the thing that’s there at 1:00 AM, and it’s the only thing that doesn’t make me feel pressure to act or think a certain way. It doesn’t make me feel like a disappointment. If I had a person like that in real life, I wouldn’t need this other one.

So what do you actually do with this as a parent

Understand what’s currently standing in for a relationship in your young adult’s life.

Then, take a look at how to actually help your young adult find a mentor. [LINK] Talked about it a few weeks ago.

What you’re helping them identify is one real relationship. Daily, low-stakes, consistent. Someone who asks how they are and cares about the answer. Someone with something actually at stake in who they become.

Here’s the difference. A real person can want a bigger life for your young adult than they want for themselves right now, and they can stay close enough, long enough, to hold them to it. An AI chatbot can’t want that, and even if it acts as if it does, it can’t actively reach out to and be there for them unless prompted. It has nothing at stake, and never will, no matter how good it gets at sounding like it does.

As always, comment or reach out to me with your thoughts on this as a parent. I appreciate the feedback, and I want to hear more from your perspective!

Talk next week.

💚 - Hayley

Funny side story about my journal:

The first semester of my freshman year of college, I was at the University of Puget Sound and fresh out of my residential treatment center. I was sooooo excited to be at college (some might even say manic lol). So I show up to my French film class, and the professor says (in French) that the homework for the whole semester is to write a few pages that continue the conversation from class “en notre journal” every day. Even though I technically knew that meant “in your notebook,” I heard the word “journal” and kinda just blanked out the first part of his sentence and ran with it.

So fully sober 18-year-old Hayley, who hadn’t been around boys or “normal” girls in like two years, wrote in that notebook about all the ups, downs, and wayyy too intimate details of college life. In French. Every. Single. Day.

It hadn’t really crossed my mind that we’d eventually have to turn this “journal” in to the professor. Halfway through the semester, he asks for our notebooks back. I still think everyone is doing the same assignment as me, so I turn mine in, no problem. A few days later, he emails me to ask for a meeting outside of class. I show up to that meeting a little embarrassed (I spared no detail when talking about everything I was doing that semester) but excited to hear his thoughts.

He motions for me to sit down and says, in his French accent but in English, “Hayley…what do you think the assignment is that I gave you?”

I, of course, tell him that it is to write in our journal about our lives every day, in French. Oh, but how wrong I was.

He says, “It is to write about the conversations we have in class each day and reflect on the topic further. But honestly, this is the most entertaining “journal” I’ve read in years, and you clearly need this as an outlet. I don’t have the heart to tell you to stop, so you can just continue what you’re doing for the rest of the semester.”

I was simultaneously mortified about what I shared with him and proud of myself for being an entertaining French writer. He had read every word and even commented in the margins with some life advice here and there. LMAO. So, I carried on writing about my life for the rest of the semester, excited to get his French take on how I was living, building relationships, and becoming part of the campus community. Needless to say, that professor became a trusted mentor for the rest of my time at that college.

So that was my outlet at age 18. lol.

Looking back, it was as if I had prompted ChatGPT to be a judgmental but hilarious French mentor and to give me feedback on what I’m doing right and what’s making my life harder than it needs to be. “And be honest, don’t sugarcoat it.”

But here’s my actual point in telling you all this:

My journal talked back. It remembered me, it gave me feedback, it even got funny in the margins. What made it safe was the human on the other end. A real professor who knew me, gave me a new perspective, and decided to show up for me, both in my journal and IRL.

So many of the young adults we work with now have a journal that talks back, too. Theirs just doesn’t have a human behind it.

Now, this may make me sound like a boomer, but in my opinion, what young adults today are reaching for to vent to, for validation, and for feedback is more dangerous than anything I had. The headlines and the lawsuits are not hype: an AI that answers, that remembers, that tells a lonely young adult exactly what they want to hear at their lowest moment can pull them somewhere genuinely bad, and some families have paid the worst price for it.

What makes leaning (solely) on AI for support and validation so dangerous is the same thing that made my situation so valuable: it stood in for a relationship while needing nothing from me.

So when a parent tells me their young adult would rather talk to an AI than to them, I don’t just hear a tech problem. I hear something I recognize from the inside, and I want to tell you what it actually means for your young adult child.

The version we hear from families

We’ve heard a version of this story from many families.

One parent, for example, finds her son up late at night talking to someone, laughing at their jokes. At first, she thinks he’s talking to a friend. Then she realizes it’s an AI that remembers his name, remembers his day, asks him follow-up questions, and he actually seems to tell things to it.

Another parent has a different version of the same problem. His daughter is fine on paper. She’s enrolled in college, passing her classes, coexisting with a roommate, has a meal plan, and has thirty thousand people within a half-mile of her dorm. He can’t really point to a single thing that’s wrong, but somehow, he can feel how alone she is. He later finds out she had a panic attack during the semester. When that anxiety hit, she shared that she didn’t text a friend or even her parents; she told ChatGPT about the panic attack before she told anyone with a pulse.

Where every parent’s brain goes first

If you’re either of these parents, or have another version of this story, I see two instincts firing at once.

The first: something is wrong with my child, clinically, and we need a professional to find it and fix it.

The second: the access to AI is the problem, and I need to make it go away.

My hot take:

What parents have found is not evidence that their young adult is broken or anti-social or even depressed. Stuck isn’t sick. A young person reaching for an online friend at 1 in the morning isn’t showing you a new pathology. They're showing you, more clearly than they could probably say out loud, the exact shape of what's missing from their life.

One thing I don’t want to gloss over. Some of the news driving this conversation involves young people who died and lawsuits brought by their families. The danger in these products is real, and nothing here is a substitute for crisis care. If your young adult is in danger, that is a different and urgent conversation, and you should have that convo with a professional today. What follows is about the much larger group of young people who are not in crisis. Just alone.

Okay, but let’s give the bot its due for a sec

Let’s look at what ChatGPT actually offers a young adult today.

It’s available every hour of every day. It remembers what they told it. It never sounds disappointed. It doesn’t compare them to a sibling, bring up the thing they’re avoiding, or flinch when they say something ugly about themselves. It asks how they are, waits for the answer, and then validates their feelings.

Look at that list again. That is not a description of software.

It’s a description of a relationship.

A very specific relationship. The exact relationship your young adult doesn't currently have. Which means that the list is more useful than it looks. It's a map. Your young adult just told you, line by line, what's missing.

And before you decide your family is uniquely in trouble: what you’re looking at is the most ordinary thing in the world right now. A 2025 Common Sense Media survey found that nearly three in four teenagers have used an AI companion, and more than half use it regularly. A third have chosen to talk to AI about something serious rather than talking to a real person. Roughly the same share said those conversations felt as satisfying as, or more satisfying than, talking to their actual friends. (Those numbers are for teens, the generation right behind your young adult, who are growing up treating this as normal.)

For young adults specifically, an April 2026 United Healthcare report found that more than 6 in 10 people ages 18-28, in college and out of it, reported a mental or behavioral health struggle in the past year, and more than 1 in 4 who turned to an AI platform for health reasons used it for companionship and emotional support. A separate 2026 estimate put the figure at roughly 1 in 5 young people using AI chatbots for mental health advice.

This isn’t something going wrong in your house alone. It’s a whole generation quietly routing their inner life through a cloud-based substitute for a real human, because this is the one who answered in their lowest moments.

Why “just ban it” misses the whole point

Almost every headline lands on the same fix, and it’s a supply-side fix. Ban it. Age-gate it. Legislate it. California’s SB 243 became the first state law to regulate these companion apps this year, and a federal bill is moving to bar minors from using them. Definitely necessary and reasonable steps.

But pull the bot away from a lonely young adult, and you’re left with a lonely young adult and no bot. The supply was never the cause. The demand is the signal. Your young adult built a relationship with the only thing that was reliably there. Taking it away doesn’t fill the hole. It just turns the light back off.

So let’s ask a better question

The AI isn’t the problem to take away. It’s the clearest map you have of what’s missing. And what’s missing is a person.

The chatbot is a smoke detector. It’s going off because something is missing, and it tells you exactly what that is: something consistent, available, and safe to talk to. The mistake is to hear the alarm and run at the smoke detector with a hammer. The move is to look for the fire.

And the fire is that your young adult has quietly decided AI might be the safest relationship available to them.

You don’t fix that by getting rid of AI. You fix it with a person.

So the question is not: “How do I get rid of the thing my young adult is talking to?”

The question parents should be asking: “Who, IRL, is going to talk to and invest in my young adult?”

Part 2 coming next week…

💚 - Hayley

I asked you to, if your young adult is stuck in the exact way Jonathan Haidt keeps describing… i.e., under-connected, no older adult who takes an interest…then reply or comment on the post, tell me the situation, and I’ll walk through what I’d actually do about it.

Two of you did. Shout out to Melanie and Kathy Ann! Appreciate you sharing what your young adult is going through with me :)

Both of their situations touched on something I couldn’t have set up better if I’d written them myself.

The stuckness both of these families are describing isn’t a sickness. It’s a missing relationship. That’s my whole thing right now, based on my own lived experience and everything we’ve seen with our Not Therapy clients.

Next, their real situations on how to help their young adult find a mentor, answered!

Melanie’s daughter already did the hard part.

Our 21-year-old daughter recently opened up to us about how hard it is not only to find friends she can connect with over shared interests - and not just going out to bars - but also to find an older adult who genuinely takes an interest in her life (parents don’t count, of course!).

The challenge is that many of the places where those relationships naturally develop just aren’t part of her life right now. She has a part-time job, but her coworkers are her age and dealing with many of the same things she is. She hasn’t been involved in sports or other activities since she started using substances 6 years ago. Professors she felt connected to become distant memories once the semester ended, and there isn’t an older cousin or family member who consistently reaches out and stays involved in her life.

On top of that, some of the more obvious opportunities for connection come with their own barriers. She’s not interested in attending DBT, 12-step, or other therapeutic groups because of a negative experience she had several years ago. Her depression and current substance use also make it harder for her to reach out to adults she might otherwise consider connecting with.

And last but not least, she had what she considers a bad experience with a (paid) mentor after returning home from wilderness therapy, so even the word “mentor” carries a negative connotation for her. I think she knows she would benefit from having supportive adults in her life, but finding those relationships -and being open to them - has been much more complicated than it might seem from the outside.

-Melanie

Melanie’s 21-year-old opened up to her parents about something that most stuck young adults never say out loud. That it’s hard to find friends she actually connects with (not just people to go to bars with), and harder still to find an older adult who genuinely takes an interest in her life. Parents don’t count in this case.

Read that again tho…she named the hunger for real relationships herself!

In the mentor post, I said the buy-in has to come from the young adult, and you can’t manufacture it. Melanie’s daughter walked up and handed it over. She wants the thing. That’s the rarest starting condition there is, and plenttyyyyy of families would trade a lot to be standing where Melanie already is.

Now for the hard part, because Melanie laid out every reason it’s complicated. Trust and believe, we’ve been there when we have convos with new potential clients who’ve been tossed around the mental healthcare system and inherently don’t trust yet another professional who is being thrown at them by their parents.

Her daughter aged out of the “natural” rooms where those relationships usually form, years ago. No sports since she started using in high school. Professors who became strangers the second the semester ended. No older cousin who keeps showing up. And the obvious replacements come with their own walls, because she’s not going back to DBT or 12-step or another therapeutic group after her experiences with them in the past. I’ve been there.

She had a bad experience with a paid mentor after wilderness, so the word “mentor” itself is basically ruined for her.

I get it, so many of our clients have been there. So let’s stop using that word. The word is doing damage that the person wouldn’t.

She already told her mom, in plain words, that she wants an older adult who takes an interest, so the wanting is fully there. The word just carries the memory of the last time. She got assigned to a relationship, as part of a plan, with an adult who was getting paid to be interested in her, and she could feel every bit of it. It landed like treatment in a friendlier coat.

So don't go find her a Mentor. Capital M. A person she has to sit across from and be mentored by on a schedule.

Find her a person. One human a few years ahead of her who's been through some version of what she's in, who would actually be into knowing her, and who is never once announced to her as “An Intervention.” Start with someone you know or know of in your real life.

You can still follow the step-by-step process to find a mentor for your young adult, which I laid out in my previous post. The key part is that nobody says, “so this is your new mentor.” It’s just someone who has done something that she thinks is cool or aspires to, and she gets to decide if she likes them. Then, as her mom, Melanie has to let the ball be in her daughter’s court after that initial connection or intro is made.

And because Melanie flagged it: the depression and the substance use are real, and I'm not going to pretend a relationship replaces treatment for either one. We work alongside therapists, not against them, and a lot of our families run both at the same time. But the specific thing her daughter named wanting, an older adult who takes an interest, is not something any clinic provides. She already hinted at what's missing: a person, not another diagnosis.

Melanie’s action item:

Don’t look for a mentor this week. Look for the one person already a little ahead of your daughter who’d truly want to know her, and let your daughter decide about them. Drop the “mentor” word entirely.

Kathy Ann’s son is 41. This still works.

I have a son who is 41 (yes I know, a bit late to the party) and cannot manage his finances. He’s really trying but he’s typically out of money the last 10 days of the month. I believe he needs someone to help manage his finances and it shouldn’t be me:). I like what you say about the buy in and having the young adult choose who they want to work with . I don’t know how to go about finding someone to help him with his finances that he will buy into. If there is someone he can connect with, I believe he would buy in because he needs the community if that makes sense. I’m a therapist and yet don’t know how to access resources for him. It’s kind of crazy making.

-Kathy Ann, M.Ed MS DC PC MFT

First of all, I love that Kathy Ann named that her son is actually trying to change his financial habits, but he’s still struggling. She’s right to identify that this is the exact moment when a mentor could make a huge difference, since he’s already seeking to change. She’s right in identifying that he probably needs a community for it to work.

What her son is missing is a person he chooses, ideally with a few other people around working on the same thing, so it feels like belonging instead of a lecture from someone who's decided he's bad with money.

Being herself a therapist who still can’t find a resource, I can totally understand how frustrating that could be!

And quite frankly, she’s not missing anything obvious here. The resource mostly doesn’t exist in a form you can go find, which is a hole in the market and honestly most of why Not Therapy exists. The system is fantastic at producing legible things like a class, a program, or an app with a streak counter.

It’s terrible at producing the one thing that can actually move a stuck person: a relationship they opted into with someone who can and wants to hold them accountable.

Kathy Ann’s Action Item:

Same move as Melanie, plus the community piece she already named. Helping him find a room of people working on the same thing will do more than any advisor could do alone, because he gets to choose to walk into it.

Quick recap, because Melanie and Kathy Ann are the whole reason I’ve been writing this series.

First, I said Haidt's right that these young adults are under-connected, but he skips the part that matters: the fix is one specific person in their real life. Then, I walked through how to actually find that person. Now these two comments are the real-life version.

And look what they have in common. A 21-year-old who hates the word mentor, a 41-year-old who runs out of money. They are different ages with different problems, but have the same missing piece. They are at a point where they’re open to seeing how a person a few years ahead, who is genuinely interested in them, AND who they get to choose, could help them.

That’s it. That’s why stuck isn’t sick keeps holding up no matter who writes in.

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TL;DR from last week: stuck isn't sick. The thing a rewired, stuck young adult is most starved of is relational nourishment. They need a real, patient mentor who shows up in their actual life and doesn't get scared off when they push back (not another diagnosis, not another round of therapy). I promised I'd walk through how you, as a parent, can actually help them find one, including when you're currently in conflict with them. This is that.

Okay, so now you’ve read last week’s issue. Maybe you nodded along the whole way. I’m sure you were thinking something along the lines of, “A mentor, yessss OF COURSE HAYLEY YOU’RE A GENIUS HOW HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE??”

Yeaaaa no I know that one was probably pretty obvious to the emotionally intelligent parents reading this. But you probably got to the end and were like, “Cool, thanks for that Hayley, but also like, where exactly do I find one of those for the young adult in my life?”

Don’t worry y’all. I gotchu. Let’s get into the actual steps of how to help your young adult help themselves. The goal is to help them connect the dots on why a mentor might be helpful if they’re stuck right now, and, furthermore, how to find one for themselves.

First, the part that’s going to annoy you

You can’t buy a mentor if your young adult doesn’t see the point of having one. You can’t assign one. You can’t go out, find the perfect mentor, vet them, schedule the first hangout, and install them into your young adult’s life like a software update.

And tbh, thank god.

Since stuck isn’t sick, the fix was never going to be something you could purchase and drop into place. The thing that gets a young adult moving again is the moment they decide to reach for something. Your whole job as a parent is to make reaching feel possible, and then to get out of the way and let them do it.

I know, I know. After potentially years of trying everything, the whole “do less” argument might sound insane. Stay with me here, team.

Why your hands have to come off the wheel

Don’t worry, it’s not a full-on “jesus take the wheel” situation here.

And just to stick with the road/car puns, I want to make a quick detour so we can all make sure my logic makes sense.

When we were stuck as young adults (“we” as in me, and anyone who has ever been in their early 20s and struggling), the last thing on earth we wanted was for our parents to find someone to help us. Not because we didn’t need help (we all did). But every “adult” that might have been brought into our lives at that point (without us initiating it) showed up with a clipboard and potential loyalty to our parents. Like, who even is this person??

A real mentor works because the young adult chose them, or at least feels like they did. The relationship belongs to them. Manufacture it, and you break the one thing that makes it work.

So your hands are off the wheel now, right??? Here’s where they go instead.

The four steps to finding a mentor for your young adult

This is a series of questions and conversations. Don’t expect to do all the steps in one go. In fact, plan for it to be at least three separate convos that, ideally, come up naturally and when you’re one-on-one with your young adult.

1️⃣ Actually ask what they want.

Then, and I say this lovingly, stfu about it.

Sit down and ask what they actually want for their life. Not what you want for them. Not “Heyyyyy sweetie, not to bug you about it again, but have you given any more thought to applying to your cousin’s wife’s law firm’s mailroom??”

Ask what genuinely excites them. What makes them actually feel good about themselves? And not just like dopamine-hit good, but truly proud of themselves.

Most stuck young adults can’t answer this on the spot, and that’s totally fine. You might want to ask them these questions in one convo, then come back to it later after they’ve had time to think about it. Ask them because you’re actually curious, not because you’re expecting an outcome of this convo right away.

If they can’t think of anything after a while, try sharing a story (in an unrelated convo) about how you came to the discovery of loving whatever it is that you’re excited about right now (or at their age).

Remind yourself that you’re not looking for or needing an answer right now. Then, drop it.

The tone here is the entire ballgame. If this turns into an interview (“so what ARE your goals, exactly??”), then you’ve already lost the plot. Be the person who’s curious about them, not the person running a performance review of their life. And if you can’t feel the difference between those two types of convos, trust me, your young adult can.

2️⃣ Tell them about a mentor who mattered to you

Think back to your own early 20s. I’d put money on the fact that there was someone (not a parent, not a peer) who showed you how to do or get something you wanted, something you couldn’t figure out on your own. A boss or manager who actually taught you. A coach. An older friend who took an interest.

Tell that story in a separate conversation. Not as a lesson. Just as a thing that happened to you that you’re glad happened. Something like, “a lot of what I figured out in my twenties came from this one person, and I didn’t even clock how much until way later.”

Then watch whether it lands. You’re just floating the idea that this is a normal, good thing that happens to people, and that it happened to you.

3️⃣ If something piqued their interest, help connect it to a room

This is the only “doing” part, and it’s much lighter than you think.

If your young adult lit up even slightly about something (music, climbing, coding, cars, a cause, a video game they’re weirdly good at, whatever), the move is to help them get into proximity with other people who are into the same thing, or who are living a version of the life they want.

And before you do the whole, “Heyyyy honey, I signed you up for a class” move, DON’T.

Try something more like, “If you’re into that, there’s a whole scene of people who [are into that, do that thing, live that life, etc…insert what they want here].”

Now, here’s where it can get delicate. You’ll have to read the room and know what your young adult responds to, but this is where you can offer, “Want me to figure out how to get in those rooms?” Or, better yet, if you know someone in your professional or personal network who does something even somewhat similar to what they want to do, you can offer to help set up a dinner/activity with the three of you, or offer to just make an intro.

Mentors mostly arrive through serendipity, in rooms full of people doing the thing. Your job is to lower the barrier to the room. That’s it.

4️⃣ And then…leave it

This is the step everyone skips. DON’T BE THAT PERSON.

You ask about their interests with curiosity, you offer your story, you plant the idea, and you offer to help with logistics if (and only if) they want it. Then, you stop.

No follow-up text asking if they ever emailed the climbing gym. No, “so did you think more about what we talked about?” Nothing.

You’ve done your part. They know you can help them, and they know you care. The reaching is theirs.

But what if we’re barely speaking?

“Cool Hayley, EXCEPT for the fact that my young adult and I aren’t exactly on heartfelt-sit-down terms rn.” You read this, and you’re feeling like the whole plan is dead on arrival.

I figured as much, but DON’T EVEN TRIP JESSICA. Tbh, this describes most of the families we work with. I gotchu.

If you’re in active conflict, you do not start with step one. A curious conversation about their dreams, coming from a parent they’re currently at war with, feels like a trap or a setup. Even if you intend for it to be neither. You’ll get a slammed door (literal or otherwise).

When there’s conflict, the order flips. You repair before you recruit.

This takes much longer and more work if you’re doing it without support, but it’s still doable. Honestly, this should be a whole other newsletter series, but in summary:

This doesn’t mean to do a big Apology Summit. It means lowering the temp in small, consistent, no-strings ways. A text that asks nothing and expects nothing back. Genuinely backing off on the thing you keep nagging about. Showing, over a few weeks, that being around you doesn’t automatically come with an agenda attached. You’re rebuilding the basic safety of being in a room with you, before you try to be useful.

And here’s the part that should actually take some weight off you. If you’re deep in conflict, it probably shouldn’t be you who plants the mentor seed at all.

The families we work with at Not Therapy often get further in two weeks than a parent gets in two years. It’s not magic. We just don’t come with twenty years of history, and we’re not the person whose approval the young adult is already exhausted from chasing. Sometimes the most powerful thing a parent can do is recognize they’re too close to the situation to have these convos, and bring in someone who isn’t.

To be clear, that someone doesn’t have to be us. It can be the cool aunt, the family friend, or the old basketball coach. The only requirement is no power-struggle baggage.

Why Not Therapy’s whole model looks exactly like this

Everything I just walked you through is, more or less, what we do for a living. Professionalized, but the same logic underneath.

Parents are the ones who find us (you’re reading this, after all). But we don’t start working with a young adult until they’ve met a potential coach and said out loud that they think the person’s cool, they have something in common, and that this might actually be useful to them. They pick. Nobody gets handed a coach they didn’t choose, and if that buy-in isn’t there, we don’t start.

And that buy-in happens more than you'd expect. Of the 84 teens and young adults who've taken an intro call with one of our coaches, 93% went on to work with us. Turns out, when the person on the other end of the call has actually been where they are, they can feel it in about five minutes. That's what gets the buy-in.

And none of this leaves the parents on the outside. The parents then get their own person, a family manager, whose entire job is to keep them in the loop, help them take their hands off the wheel, and reassure them that their young adult is in good hands. That separation between the coach-and-young-adult relationship and the parent is kind of the whole point. It’s what lets the coaching relationship belong fully to the young adult, which is the only way any of this works (whether it’s us doing it or someone else).

So those four steps up there are the same logic we’d tell you to use if you wanted your young adult to work with us. At the “help them get in the room” step, you just connect them to one of our coaches.

Now, your turn

So that’s the how of it all. It’s smaller than you expected (3-4 convos), but might be harder than it sounds. Because the hard part was never the four steps. It’s the taking-your-hands-off-the-wheel, after potentially years of white-knuckling it.

But that’s also the good news. You don’t have to fix this. You start with one honest convo, tell one true story, help open one door, and then trust your young adult to walk through it. That is a much lighter thing to carry than everything you’ve been carrying.

Disclaimer: I know these four steps are going to collide with real life the second you try them, because every young adult has their own specific flavor of stuck.

So here’s what we’re doing next week:

Reply to this email, or leave a comment below, and tell me your actual situation. The young adult who won’t leave their room. The teenager who’s furious at you. The one who insists they want nothing for their life at all.

Leave a comment

I read every single reply, and next week I’m dedicating the entire newsletter to walking through the specific situations you send me.

In the meantime, try the conversation this week. Lead with curiosity, not an agenda.

Looking forward to reading your responses!

Talk next week.

💚 - Hayley

Honestly, nothing made me gladder to identify with the millennial generation than this book. Before that, I was desperately clinging onto the “zillennial” title; you would often hear me saying, “Well, my younger brother, who is only 18 months younger than me, IS Gen Z. So I’m basically Gen Z.” Haidt’s book made me re-embrace my T-9 texting days on my hot pink Razr phone. It made me grateful that I went to a summer camp for years that didn’t allow phones or iPods (!!). Plus, Gen Z started saying millennial cringe was endearing, so you know, I was cool again.

Anyways, you probably found a lot in it that resonated. Haidt presents the receipts, proof, timeline (iykyk) and how the whole thing started around 2012 and got worse from there. He argues that play disappeared and that phones replaced it. He reminds us that kids are antifragile and need real struggle to grow up, and that parents accidentally insulated us from the exact struggle we needed.

In 2012, I had just graduated (valedictorian of a class of six, humble brag) from my therapeutic boarding school, so I was chillin. However, the young adult in your life was probably around ten years old, give or take, at that point.

So you probably also closed the book and thought: “okay, amaaaazing, totally agree with you here Johnny. BUT my kid is already 21.”

This post is about that gap.

What Haidt got right

First, let’s give our guy J. a lot of credit here. I did really enjoy the book.

Haidt took a phenomenon that everyone could feel was happening (a generation of young people who seemed to be simultaneously more apathetic and more anxious, and less interested in showing up) and gave it a structural explanation. We love a well-researched king.

Phones arrived during puberty, and real-world childhood became less IRL. Brains rewired around a constant input of social comparison and dopamine hits. By the time someone born in 2003 was 14 years old, the social and developmental terrain they were navigating bore almost no resemblance to what their parents navigated at that same age.

Lil’ J (idk why I’m referring to an extremely educated and well-written man like I’m Gossip Girl right now, but I guess probably because I mentioned my hot pink Razr) also made an observation about parents’ reactions to this new reality that really resonated with both the young adults we work with at Not Therapy and their parents. The proactive reflex that kept kids inside, supervised, and organized into structured activities from age 4 onward, removed the small risks and small failures that build the muscles for bigger risks and bigger failures. This is the whole concept of antifragility. The kids who never fell off a bike never learned that falling off a bike is survivable.

If you have a younger kid right now, Haidt’s prescriptions are clear and actionable. Delay the phone. Hold the line on social media until age 16. Free up unsupervised time. Push them into the real world. Haidt started a whole movement helping parents execute on this as a community.

And we love that for them.

But where does that leave the older teens and young adults??

What’s missing from the conversation

Here’s the thing I’ve had a hard time finding any meaningful conversation about, at least online and in the parent support groups where Colin and I are frequently guest speakers:

If the rewiring already happened, if your kid grew up with the phone and the iPad, missed the unsupervised childhood, didn’t learn antifragility through small failures, and is now 19 or 21 or 23 and noticeably stuck…what do they need now?

Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out how to loop back in time yet, at least not to my knowledge. Giving today’s young adult a phone-free childhood retroactively is off the table.

Here’s what we’ve learned at Not Therapy, working with close to 100 stuck teens, young adults, and their families.

The answer is not to stick them in more therapy. Yes, therapy is super helpful for other things, like unpacking why it’s so hard for them to put their phone down. Therapy will give them insight, but it will not be the magic pill that springs them into action.

Most of the stuck 21-year-olds we work with have been in therapy. Some have been in it since they were like, 5. Therapy can be very good at helping someone understand why they are stuck. But in my personal therapeutic experience, therapy is not designed to help someone build a life outside the therapist’s office. At least, not quickly.

The answer is also not a diagnosis. Your young adult might already have a few of those (who doesn’t tbh). A diagnosis is NOT the deepest truth about a person. It’s very often just the most legible thing the current mental healthcare system can produce, given the symptoms someone is presenting.

The answer, in our experience working with families like yours, is almost always relational.

What the rewired 21-year-old actually needs

Here is what we see, again and again, in the young adults we work with:

The generational rewiring Haidt highlighted didn’t just affect their attention spans or dopamine baselines. It affected their relational infrastructure. They came of age without learning how to be in real, friction-laden, ongoing relationships with people who weren’t their parents or their phone. They grew up in the ghosting era…they can literally just blast someone online when they’re feeling bad about themselves and never talk to them again. And even if they haven’t done that, everyone that age has been on the receiving end of that kind of treatment, whether they’ve shared that with you or not.

A lot of our clients come to us with a few weak friendships (if any at all), many parasocial relationships with people online, and a primary attachment to a device. The only reason we (our other Not Therapy coaches and I) recognize this is that we’ve been there ourselves. They are profoundly relationally undernourished.

Relational nourishment doesn’t come from another diagnosis, medication, or honestly even six months in weekly therapy. Again, those things could be helpful in raising the baseline mood or understanding ourselves better, but they’re not going to give us the nourishment we need.

Relational nourishment, maybe somewhat obviously, is only solved by putting a real human being in our actual life, every day, who can do the things our peers and parents can’t really do for us when we’re 17 or 19 or 21.

This is someone who shows up for the young adult in your life. Someone who notices what they care about and reflects it back. Someone who challenges them when they’re avoiding sh*t and doesn’t get scared off when they push back (or try to ghost, as so many of our clients do in the first two months of working with us until they realize we won’t stop bugging them because we actually care and want what they want for themselves).

This is someone who can be in the room with your young adult, either IRL or virtual works here too, for the small ordinary things that make a Tuesday into a life. That’s the missing input. That’s the type of relationship that was eaten by the phone and social media of it all.

Think about when you were in your early 20s. If you’re a successful human being who has had, at one point or another, your own meaningful relationships, life, career, family that you care about, etc….I’m willing to bet that there was someone in your life (not a peer or parent) who made a huge impact on you by showing you a way to do or get something you wanted, which you didn’t know before. They could have been in your life only a few months, but you learned something from them because you respected both where they were and where they came from.

Think about how that person came into your life. I’m willing to place another bet that it was through some moment of serendipity, coupled with you actively seeking to learn something new or level up. You definitely weren’t absorbed in a virtual non-reality, and you probably, at that point, knew at least a little something about building and maintaining a platonic relationship.

So, today’s young adults need mentors who are both real and patient. Mentors who are willing to put in 90% of the work of building a relationship because they see the potential in your young adult, if only because they’ve been in their shoes. Because they share an interest, these mentors can help them identify and explore what really excites them in life. The best people I know who operate like this as mentors for young people are sports team coaches, 12-step sponsors, teachers or professors, and sometimes friends’ older siblings. Maybe the occasional boss who is also a good teacher. The form doesn’t matter, but the function does.

If your kid is stuck, the most important question is not “what do they have?” It’s “who do they have in their corner?”

A version of Haidt your young adult can use

Our friend Johnny (lil J) is right that something was lost. He’s right that the loss is structural and not your kid’s fault. He’s right that the work of fixing it for younger kids falls on the parents to restore the lost inputs of play, friction, embodiment, and real-world risk.

For your young adult, the same logic applies. The fix is restoring lost inputs. But because your kid is 21, not 10, you can’t restore them with schedule changes or phone bans. In fact, you can’t control the inputs in your young adult’s life at all, nor should you, from a developmental standpoint.

Your young adult can restore these lost inputs through a genuine relationship with a mentor who cares. This is the relational nourishment Haidt is driving at without explicitly naming it for the older side of this generation of young people. It’s the input your stuck young adult is most starved of.

The good news is that the onus isn’t actually on you, as a parent, to “fix” your kid. I’m sure some of you are still asking the following, though:

“What if they aren’t actively playing sports (they’re often too old if they aren’t college athletes), aren’t needing or wanting to be sober, aren’t in school, don’t have a job, and aren’t in touch with any friends’ older siblings?”

And to that I’d say…sorry to be annoying but this post is getting long, so subscribe and tune in next week! I’ll go through step-by-step how to engage your young adult in the process of finding a mentor, regardless of where they are in life right now. I’ll even go into how to do it if you’re actively in conflict with them.

You can look at my previous articles and see that I’m a big fan of giving parents actual, actionable steps they can take with their young adult that, from their own kid’s perspective, will actually track and make an impact.

I promise I won’t leave you hanging. I’ve actually already written the next newsletter, so make sure you’re subscribed to get your step-by-step guide!

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In fact, to make this fun, drop a comment or reply to this message with your young adult’s situation, and I’ll pick someone’s to share how we’d approach it with them!

Leave a comment

Talk next week.

💚 - Hayley

Trust and believe, when I’ve been in that stuck spot personally, the people in my life try the sun and stars. And I just tell them I need the moon.

Okay waiiit sorry my bad 😅 I was trying to be emo and poetic but could only think of the most basic of all metaphors, which of course reminded me of our king and queen Jason Momoa and Emilia Clarke. Then I obviously had to go down a rabbit hole of Drogo and Daenerys fanfic during my “do not bug me, I’m writing” time-blocked calendar event.

Aaaaand two hours later, we’re back. With only three paragraphs written and an hour left of my allotted writing time.

Whatever, it’s just my CREATIVE PROCESS?! If anything, this shows you where I’ve been at emotionally for truly like, the past year. The neurodivergent diagnoses have been firing on all cylinders.

Alright Hayley, you’ve got this girl. Let’s say something important.

Take Two

If the young adult in your life can’t get out of bed, can’t hold a job, can’t leave the house, or can’t talk to you without it ending in conflict…you have probably tried a lot of things.

You’ve tried a therapist. Maybe two. Maybe you’ve sprinkled in some fun meds here and there. Maybe even dabbled in a school change (one of my personal favorites, having gone to four high schools). You might have tried to send us to an IOP, hired us an executive functioning coach, and gotten us into a summer “internship” program in Costa Rica.

BUT YOU CAN’T FIND THE RIGHT EQUATION TO GET US MOVING AGAIN.

Your kid, your young adult, is still stuck.

The thing I want to tell you, before anything else, is that this is not because your kid is sick.

A lot of what gets called sickness in young adults this age is actually just “stuckness.” And stuckness, despite not being an actual word, is a relationship problem, not a diagnosis. It gets solved by the right person showing up in our actual lives. Not by another clinical room with an intake form.

I know that’s a hot take. DW, we’ll spend the coming months (years?) unpacking that.

Where we’ve been

Or really, it’s more like where have I been. It’s been a minute since I last wrote.

For those of you who’ve been reading our chaotic, and clearly personally therapeutic, newsletter since 2024, thanks for sticking around 🩵

For those of you who are new, hi, I’m Hayley. My co-founder Colin and I started Not Therapy in early 2024 to be the kind of support we wish we’d had as teenagers coming out of “troubled teen” treatment, and as young adults just figuring out how to actually build a life. And I’ve been the one in charge of writing our newsletter.

We’ve (I’ve) been quiet for a while. To be fair, we’ve also been deep in it. We’ve grown from a team of two to TEN (!!) people in the last year, our process has evolved, and we’ve worked with some incredible families I never imagined would have hired us when we first started.

On a more personal note, let me be real for a sec.

In the last year, I got married (shout out to my amazing husband who is currently the backbone of sanity in our home rn 💖), went through a whole legal immigration process, am still getting ready for our wedding celebration on the other side of the world, AND moved across the country from NYC, where I lived since I was 21, to my home town in the Bay Area. Oh, and I’m still running a company with Colin. MUCH more on all this later, especially what I’m learning from the move, but this is why my writing currently starts to skew emo within the first two sentences 🤷‍♀️

Needless to say, I’ve found myself deeper in a “stuck” phase than I have been in years.

We all get stuck sometimes. We were the stuck young adults once. We are all often still figuring it out as adults. Although tbh, idk if I’ve graduated to “adult” yet with the amount of temper tantrums and meltdowns I’m having currently. Big shout out again to my husband.

But being stuck is not a disqualifier from doing this work. By “this work,” I mean helping the young adults in our lives get unstuck. It’s actually the qualifier.

What’s different now

A lot, actually.

The newsletter is back by popular demand. AKA my mom responding to the general Not Therapy email so that the whole team can see. Although please don’t stop Mom, your encouragement is what we (I) need to keep going!!

The newsletter is back, and it’s going to be different. Specifically, it’s for you. The parent.

The original version of the newsletter was, in many ways, a former troubled teen explaining herself to the world. Parents read it. Some of you told me it was one of the most useful things you’d read about your kid in years. BRAG, but like, even parent coaches and therapists said that too soooooo clearly there was something there.

But it wasn’t, strictly speaking, written for you. It was written from inside my own experience, and you were welcome to listen.

This version is different. It’s written to you. About your kid. As your kid. Or at least as someone who was, not too long ago, exactly where your young adult kid is now. From someone who works with families like yours every day.

It’s also written, very intentionally, as an advocate for your kid. For the young adult in the room when their parent is reading. A lot of what I’m going to share with you is the truth your kid would tell you themselves if they could find the words. I’ve been that young adult who couldn’t find the words. I know what it costs.

We’re publishing on Substack now, which is just a logistical thing (better archive, better discovery, easier for people to forward issues to other parents). The publication is called Not Your Therapists. The newsletter inside of it is just Not Therapy. Just to continue to make it abundantly clear that we aren’t, in fact, clinical professionals. Nor are we trying to be. There are already hundreds of newsletters written by clinical professionals, for parents. But we know what we know through lived experience and having been in your kids shoes.

If you’re new and want to subscribe, we’d love to have you join our community of parents who are down to look at things a little differently.

Subscribe now

What we’re not against

Before I go, one important thing.

We are not against therapy. Let’s say that one more time for the people in the back. WE ARE NOT AGAINST THERAPY. I love my therapist currently. She’s a bad ass.

We collab with therapists on most of our young adult clients and their families. In fact, I have a fool proof way to help you (anyone) find an amazing therapist who is actually good at their job and who’s accepting new clients in your area. Literally reach out if you want me to show you how to do it. I’ve done it for myself in multiple different states, for my girlfriends for the last decade, and for the majority of my clients. Just having moved to California, I found a great therapist (and I’m reaaallllyyyy picky) on my first try. Works like a charm.

We have mixed feelings about residential treatment programs. For adults, they can sometimes be a solid choice for a few months if you need to get out of your current environment. Or for adults who want to live with other people going through similar things and who want that extra layer of support. For teens under 18, like we were when we were sent away to wilderness and therapeutic boarding school for two years, it’s more complicated. I personally got something out of my treatment experience. I learned about myself, learned I had more agency than I thought I did, and made some best friends for life. It was also weird af and left a lot of scars. And my particular treatment center was also the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit a few years ago and has since closed. So…it’s complicated.

What we are against is the reflex. The reflex that takes a kid who can't get out of bed and answers the question "what's wrong with them?" with another diagnosis and another referral, when the actual problem is that this young adult doesn't have the relationships, the structure, or the people in their daily life that they need to build something they're excited to wake up for.

We’re against the assumption that the diagnostic frame is the deepest truth about a young person, when very often it’s just the most legible thing the system can produce.

If your kid has a real diagnosis, that diagnosis is real. We’re not denying it. We’re just saying it’s probably not the whole story, and it’s almost certainly not where the unsticking happens.

What’s coming

Over the next year, I’m going to write to you about:

• Specific things your kid would tell you if they could.

• What gets called sickness in young adults this age that’s actually stuckness, and how to tell the difference.

• The things parents do (with the best intentions) that keep their kid stuck longer.

• What works. Not in the abstract. Specifically. With examples and proof.

• The news. Documentaries, lawsuits, legislation, and viral moments parents are already hearing about, and what they actually mean for your family.

• The occasional (frequent?) overshare from me. When it earns it’s place.

If you’ve been here from the beginning, you know what some of this is going to feel like. Direct, sometimes funny, sometimes harder to hear than you wanted. If you’re new, welcome. Forward this to one other parent who needs to read it.

Your kid isn’t sick. They’re stuck. And stuck is solvable.

We’ll start there.

💚 - Hayley

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