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!

Subscribe now

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

Hear from more coaches at Not Therapy

Colin and I both have at least six friends from our respective troubled teen residential treatment centers - TEN PERCENT of the people we knew while we were there - who have passed away due to mental health-related issues in the years since we left treatment.

When we mention this two-data-point statistic to anyone who has worked in - or been admitted - to youth treatment programs, most don't bat an eye. They might not have the actual data in front of them - in fact, I don't know who has the complete picture - but this anecdotal stat mirrors what many of us have seen in programs for troubled teens and young adults across the board.

Disclaimer: Today is not the day we're getting into all the arguments we hear as to why it's not the programs' fault: "The death rate would be much higher for all those young people had they not gone to a program;" "programs are dealing with high-risk youth with mental illness," etc.…we understand the nuances! We're not trying to place absolute blame.

Instead, we are trying to understand why the percentage of young people who pass away in a few short years after leaving residential treatment hasn't seemed to decrease since we were in treatment twelve years ago.

Or wait…maybe it has???

Not Therapy’s First Year 📆

I promise this is all related…

For those who have been reading our newsletter for a while, you know how much I love labeling a blatant brag as a humble brag. But if you're new here, here's how far Not Therapy has come in precisely a year since we started:

In January of last year, 2024, Colin and I had just launched our website. We walked into the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP) annual conference as total unknowns—armed with a dream and a handful of stickers.

Today, we have collectively worked with 40 teens and young adults, about 75% of whom started with us immediately after leaving residential or wilderness treatment. Our clients represent 8 of the 10 NATSAP wilderness programs, 15+ NATSAP residential centers, and numerous IOPs and PHPs.

Over a year, Colin and I have built a multiple six-figure business with zero dollars from investors, friends, or family. Okay, shout out to my dad, who covered my student loan payments for 4 months, and to be fair, he still pays my cell phone bill at 30 🙏 (please don't read this and cut me off, Dad!) We didn't hire anyone to help us do anything until last month. As we tell our clients - or really, they tell us - "That's a slay."

We met an important handful of people through last year's NATSAP conference. Thank you for all the opportunities you gave us to appear on your podcasts and parent support groups. You know who you are - thank you for being welcoming and taking a chance to hear from the outsiders. You helped us reach so many families to ensure their child has success after your programs 😊

To circle back to my "where's the data, tho" comment → here's what we found through working with more than 40 teens, young adults, and their parents:

Not Therapy 3-month Coaching Outcomes:

• Job Placement: 85% of clients secured jobs within the first 2 months of coaching.

• Personal Development: 74% pursued new passions or developed skills (e.g., art, music, sports.

• College Transitions: 45% successfully transitioned to or transferred colleges (the other 65% successfully re-enrolled in high school, are enrolled in trade school, or are working full time).

• Neurodivergence: 68% had been diagnosed with Autism and/or ADHD before working with us, and 0% of those diagnoses prevented them from having these same outcomes

Now, we have the opportunity to hire more coaches and expand our business. We want to maintain our high-quality, results-oriented offering, but there's only so much we can do ourselves. While we've turned to hiring, this also led us to turn to the national stage…

Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act 🏛️

At the end of a successful year, Colin and I were delighted to see that my bestie and follower on TikTok, Paris Hilton, get her bill - Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act - passed unanimously in the Senate, passed with bipartisan support in the House (373-33), and signed into law on December 23, 2024. Yes sis 👏

We appreciate the emails NATSAP and other programs sent us last month expressing their support of this bill. This is the energy we're here for!

Okay, so those of us who only read the articles or Reddit thread and didn't read the actual bill, I gotchu.

The only thing it requires is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services (right now, the interim secretary) enters a contract with the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (National Academies) "to conduct a study to examine the state of youth in youth residential programs and make recommendations," within 45 days of its enactment. So like, now.

But literally, that's it. It's not so much a law as it is a mandate for a comprehensive federal survey of the "state of the industry." The study aims to identify the prevalence and severity of child abuse, neglect, and fatalities within these settings.

Based on the findings, the National Academies will provide recommendations to build a federal database, improve coordination, and implement best practices concerning the health, safety, care, and treatment of youth in residential care. Additionally, the act emphasizes the development of educational and training resources for professionals in healthcare, law enforcement, social work, and child protection to better prevent, identify, and address child abuse and neglect.

Okay, we love all of this!

I think everyone reading this would agree that the intention of the act - at least how it's written - seeks to improve the quality of care programs are delivering.

Correct me if I'm wrong, tho. As I've stated in previous newsletters, Paris Hilton and this bill do not seek to "shut down the troubled teen industry;" instead, it requires treatment centers to improve the conditions and quality of care for teens and young adults whose parents or who the state deems need out-of-home treatment.

🔥 Our Hot Takes

NGL, I’ve been trying to publish this newsletter for weeks. Just ask Colin, lol.

I keep diving deeper and deeper into the minutia of the implementation, the people who wrote and sponsored this bill, the private equity firms who own treatment center's parent companies, and the advocates who went back to Capitol Hill year after year to make enough noise to mandate a comprehensive survey and study on this traditionally insular and opaque industry.

What’s a hyper-fixated girl to do??

Besides DM and email about 37 people involved in the passage of this bill to see how I can get on the National Academies’ SICAA study committee. Which, trust and believe, I have 💅 And when she sets her mind to something, she does it.

As a former data scientist who feels they’ve transparently navigated being in the middle-ground (see my TikToks I made years before starting Not Therapy, and read all the blog posts from the last year), here are my HOT TAKES on the implications of the SICAA bill:

…not to be taken as legal advice. obviously…

1️⃣ The federal government is coming for youth residential treatment centers’ data. And it’s going to skew negative.

The National Academies have been asked to identify the "nature, prevalence, severity, and scope of child abuse, neglect, and deaths in youth residential programs." They define "youth" as up to age 22. They need to identify private and public funding sources for youth residential programs, risk assessment tools, and data collection sources. All the questions they must answer skew negatively toward treatment centers' outcomes. No question in there reads something like, "How many of your former students are business owners? Doctors? Lawyers? Generally alive and content with their lives?" I know many young women from my treatment center who fall into these categories and will happily speak to their positive experiences, but do programs?

🙋‍♀️ Questions I have if I’m on the National Academies Committee:

How do you collect data from the youth in your program before, during, and after their treatment?

What are you required vs. what do you elect to report to state and federal agencies?

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS WORKINGGGG???

If kids’ parents send them to your program to keep them alive and safe, how safe and alive are they after leaving your program?

2️⃣ The federal government will consult former troubled teen treatment “alumni.”

While they are mandated to consult with the owners and staff at youth residential programs, they also MUST consult with “individuals with lived experience as children and youth in youth residential programs, including individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities and individuals with emotional, mental health, or substance use disorders.”

That’s me!! And Colin. And many of our closest friends. And the people on Reddit and TikTok.

🙋‍♀️ Questions I have if I’m on the National Academies Committee:

What are programs doing to help their alums after they leave their program?

Are we at least, bare minimum, doing a six-month check-in? What about a year down the road? Five years? Ten years?

How reliable is your outcomes data? Do they only complete surveys on their last day of the program, or can you stay in touch and follow up months and years later?

3️⃣ The federal government is going to scrutinize programs’ business models.

As someone who has transparently run two non-clinical mental health companies as for-profit businesses, I get it! I also understand that so many programs are operating with very little profit these days, and anything extra is probably going toward paying off loans or dividends on PE investments, etc. The study must identify “existing barriers in policy for blending and braiding of funding sources to serve youth in community-based settings.” Read: yo business model

🙋‍♀️ Questions I have if I’m on the National Academies Committee:

Who are your funding sources?

Do you have a parent company, or are you owner-operated?

Can I see your quarterly investor report? Are long-term outcomes included in those reports?

What data do your investors prioritize?

4️⃣ The federal government must make recommendations on how to track and improve the outcomes of program alumni.

The “unique needs, experiences, and outcomes of youth with lived experience in youth residential programs.” The recommendations are going to sound much more severe and skewed towards “program

🙋‍♀️ Questions I have if I’m on the National Academies Committee:

Given that we’re dealing with an “at-risk” youth population, so the data skews a specific direction, how many of the people who went to your program have committed suicide or died of overdose since leaving your program?

WHERE ARE THEY NOW???

Treatment alumni. Are they just like us??

When you ______ , about that I feel______ , and my hope for the future is ______ .

I don't know if there are any correct answers to these questions 👆 for programs. It's up to y'all to determine what will best prepare your program for what's coming down the pipeline.

Would love everyone who read this far (congrats, first of all), to share your thoughts on the following:👇

Colin and I developed a repeatable, easy-to-implement system proven to help youth residential treatment program alumni build a track record of success straight out of treatment. While the definition of success is unique to each individual with whom we work, the success we've built isn't a fluke.

Our only qualifications when we started were that we had been in our clients' shoes, felt good about our progress through our 20s, and decided to get a life coaching certification. I'm sure every program reading this has at least two alumni who feel the same way we do and might even be willing to think about getting a coaching certification.

Programs that might be struggling financially are missing out on an opportunity with their alumni. Programs that don’t know how well their process works the over months, years, and decades after their students left are missing out on an opportunity with their alumni.

Programs unsure of what the future is to bring with my girl Paris’ SICAA Bill are missing out on an opportunity with their alumni.

Programs that don’t provide resources to teens and young adults who need something more than therapy, but less than residential treatment, are missing out on an opportunity with their alumni.

Programs that want to improve their process, as proven by the long-term outcomes, are missing out on an opportunity with their alumni.

If you work for or run a program, or if you’re a former treatment kid who is passionate about helping other young people have a better experience than you had, hit me and Colin up 😎 We’re starting Not Therapy’s next phase now.

🌈 Before we dive in…Our New Parent Guide

If you haven’t heard of Speaking of Teens, run (don’t walk) to join parent of former troubled teen Ann Coleman’s active online community of parents! Colin and I hosted two online parent support groups for their parent community over the last three weeks, including one where we gave our classic Four Pillars of Transition talk, and we received some glowing reviews from the parents who attended 😍

📎 Download Our Parent Guide

She also had me as a guest on her podcast last week! I share some new stories from more recent clients, so give it a listen 😊

🎙️ Listen Here

Client Success Stories 🌟 “Not Therapy” is Actually Changing Lives (For Real, At Home)

If you’ve read any of our infamous “former troubled teen” blog posts, you’ve heard countless stories of how we here at Not Therapy put our parents through the wringer with our various mental health diagnoses, social anxiety, substance abuse, and straight up refusal to let them parent us.

If you’re the parent of a teen or young adult, you know the rollercoaster ride of helping them find their footing. Maybe you’ve explored the “troubled teen industry” or looked into treatment programs that promise a fresh start. Maybe you’ve even sent your child to one of these programs.

🔥 Here’s our hot take: Residential treatment and wilderness therapy programs can be a good option in many cases. They can be the right fit when a teen or young adult needs a break from a toxic home environment, when the family needs time apart to heal, when everyone needs to learn coping skills quickly, etc. Young people can experience a relatively quick transformation when they buy into a treatment program.

🔥 In fact, some of our most successful clients went to treatment programs because we worked with them immediately afterward to ensure a smooth transition home or to college.

🔥 However, residential treatment programs can fall short when it comes to lasting, real-world results IF they don’t support their alumni properly afterward.

Colin and I experienced meaningful transformations ourselves in programs. BUT we never would have succeeded if it weren’t for us accidentally getting the type of support after leaving treatment that we needed all along. And despite having our own mental health diagnoses, what we needed all along wasn’t more therapy.

When Colin and I met, we realized we had both stumbled upon a formula for success in our 20s where many of our friends - who later committed suicide, died of an overdose, or ended up in prison - hadn’t been so lucky.

Thus, Not Therapy was born 💫

And holy sh*t, it’s been a YEAR! Since January 2024, Colin and I had the privilege of working alongside over thirty families who were at their wit’s end—feeling “stuck” in the cycle of stress, disconnection, and uncertainty. 😱 Spoiler alert: they’re not stuck anymore!

We’ve collected their testimonials, and we’ve distilled what’s been working for us as your friendly neighborhood troubled teen (and young adult) coaches.

And since we’re famously humble, we’re sharing these wins with you!

In just our first year in business, we have genuinely seen that what we’re doing at Not Therapy is redefining what long-term success looks like for young people and their families, whether they’ve been to wilderness programs and residential treatment or not.

“But Hayley and Colin - how are you doing it??” — someone reading this, we hope 🤞

Connection Is Key 🔑 (Not a Clipboard and 45 Minutes)

Traditional therapy and treatment centers often miss the mark because they focus on teens or young adults in isolation without bridging the gap between parents and kids. With Not Therapy, Colin and I decided to flip the script. We don’t just “talk at” clients; we connect — building relationships that resonate because they’re real, relatable, and rooted in lived experience.

Take it from one parent:

For one teen struggling to find her voice in college, I — hi it’s me, Hayley 👋 — became not just a coach but a mentor who genuinely understood.

Growth at Home 🏡 (Not in a Controlled Bubble)

What happens after a wilderness program or treatment center? Often, we kids return home and slide back into old habits because the controlled environment doesn’t teach us how to navigate our environment. And no, home visits aren’t exactly the most realistic way to see what things will actually be like for us at home. Not Therapy focuses on equipping clients with the tools to grow where they’re planted — at home, in school, in relationships.

One family shared how working with us shifted their dynamic entirely:

Real Wins 🏆 Not Just “Resolutions”

When we say “success,” we mean goals achieved, confidence boosted, and relationships restored. Like Colin helping a young man build a portfolio for art school and giving him the courage to apply. Or me (Hayley) guiding a college student from “completely lost” to making supportive friends and becoming her “own biggest cheerleader” — my client Adara’s words, not mine.

And for one family, the transformation wasn’t just in their teen but in their entire outlook:

Why This Works. Hint: It’s Not Magic 🔮

Our secret?  🥁 Drumroll please 🥁 ……

We believe in meeting people where they are — literally (at home) and figuratively (where they’re at on their journey). We bring a mix of empathy, tough love, and action-oriented coaching that empowers teens and young adults to take ownership of their lives. And we don’t leave parents out in the cold; they’re part of the journey too.

As one mom puts it:

“Not Therapy was fantastic from the beginning. The home visit was very helpful to get to know not just our son but the whole family and our unique dynamic. Colin was patient and set realistic goals, which he helped our son break into manageable steps. We’re so grateful Colin helped our son become ready for college.” — Christine, mother of 19 yr old

The Bottom Line👇

We’re not here to throw shade at therapy or treatment programs —they have their place, of course! But if you’re looking for something that actually sticks when your teen comes home, we have seen — from our clients’ progress and their families’ satisfaction — then Not Therapy is it. Because the real world doesn’t come with a controlled environment or someone holding your hand 24/7. Our clients learn to thrive in their world, not escape from it.

If you’ve ever thought, “We’ve tried everything, and nothing works,” let these stories be your proof: there’s hope. Whether it’s building emotional resilience, reconnecting as a family, or helping a young adult step into their full potential, we’re here to make “life-changing” feel less dramatic and more doable.

And now……our vibes this week🔮

📚 What we’re reading

It wasn’t you. it was your parents, nyt

The best gossip spreads in invisible ink, bustle

AI friendships claim to cure loneliness. some are ending in suicide, washington post

🎶 What we’re listening to

Understanding and supporting your “troubled teen” to help them thrive, speaking of teens

💡 One last thought

taking advantage of the moment

THANKS FOR READING!

If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎

We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:

• If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!

• If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.

Get In Touch

Idk about you guys, but as a long-term patient of therapy, it’s very clear to me that there are HUGE gaps in the mental healthcare system based on the support I need that goes beyond the normal “prescription.”

The mental health landscape is changing. Traditionally, if you’re a teen or young adult struggling with your mental health and you ask your parents for help - and if they have decent insurance - the first step is to go to weekly therapy.

If that alone isn’t working, you add in a psychiatrist and maybe some medication. If that isn’t working, you probably still let things get really bad for a few months (or years), and then you’re next step might be a short-term stay in a psych ward or partial hospitalization program. Maybe you drop all your extracurriculars, try switching schools, or take a leave of absence. If none of the above works, it’s off to long-term, out-of-home treatment in the form of wilderness programs, residential treatment centers, therapeutic boarding schools, transitional living, etc.

Tbh, the gap between weekly therapy and being admitted to an outpatient or inpatient program is less of a gap, and more of a chasm. Are there other things people can try, such as peer support groups? Yes. But most young people don’t know that when you go to an hour of therapy per week, they have to use what they’re learning about themselves in sessions as a jumping-off point to change their behaviors for the other 167 hours that week. Even if they do get that, they have no idea how to apply what they learn to their already unbearable everyday life.

The reality is that most young people start therapy in hopes of solving their problems, not figuring out why their problems exist in the first place.

I get that those two things go hand-in-hand, and many people do eventually need some therapy. But I remember being 14 years old and SO FRUSTRATED with therapy because I was already ashamed I had to go, and yet I would still leave each session thinking, “Why aren’t they telling me what to do differently? I want an actual plan to feel better!!”

💚 For a growing margin of our clients, currently at about 30% of them, that’s where we’ve been able to step in 💚

Parents are finding us much earlier in their child’s journey before they’re at the point of considering treatment. They’re giving their child the option of working with us to get unstuck, reach their goals, and improve the family relationship at home when traditional therapy and the resources at their school just haven’t been the right fit.

Both Colin and I believe what we’ve built with Not Therapy would have worked for us had we gotten this support a year or two before we were at the point of needing treatment.

Now, we’ve seen some amazing results with Not Therapy coaching for teens and young adults who just need a few months of relatable, high-touch support to get on a path they feel empowered to follow and can avoid residential treatment.

Obviously, there are many cases when being sent to treatment is necessary. That was the case for us. Having to go to treatment isn’t something to be ashamed of, and maybe there was absolutely nothing parents could have done earlier that would have led to a different outcome. To be clear, we don’t fault anyone or their families for needing residential treatment.

For the teens and young adults we’ve worked with early enough on their journeys, they haven’t had to go to treatment! Trust us; we share our experience with them as examples of what point not to reach. The best part is that their families have been able to avoid some of the things that Colin and I held against our parents for years, such as:

• Taking our choice away and sending us to a program against our will

• The trauma and fear of being gooned (transported)

• Spending our entire college fund and money they might not have had on programs

• The unavoidable feelings of betrayal and abandonment when you’re “sent away”

• Learning the skills we needed and doing therapy in our treatment bubble and having a hard time applying that to our real-world environments

• Missing out on formative experiences that all our friends had, like prom. Tbh, that is such a big deal to all of us who go to treatment as teens, because it takes us a few years to understand that it honestly didn’t really matter.

• Rebuilding relationships with childhood friends who were mad at us for leaving without a word

• Having to relearn social skills with non-treatment friends

• Missing months or years of cultural moments and feeling left behind

Interestingly, Colin and I have figured out that we can work with clients who haven’t been to treatment (yet) in the exact same way we work with clients who have left treatment. Slay.

Our coaching approach for all of the teens and young adults with whom we work is to help them identify their goals and explore/practice the habits they need to develop in the different areas of their lives.

{The Mental Health Equation}🟰

I wrote about this years ago when I was running a STEM program for teens, but I started to identify patterns in how my brain works and develop a process for figuring out what I need to do regularly for my own mental health foundation when I was in engineering school. I called this “Hayley’s Mental Health Equation” (in my head, to no one else).

I realized that the quality of my mental health solely depends on my {🚀goals + 💅habits + 💪follow through} in five different areas of my life:

Solve for: the quality/state of my mental health

Variables: the sub-categories of what I need to do & focus on to change or maintain the state of my mental health

Coefficients: how much energy I put into my specific {🚀goals + 💅habits + 💪follow through} for a given variable. These change based on the current phase of my life and the states of other variables

If I want to live a life I love (at least 75% of the time), then I need to figure out the variables (what I can do) in each of these areas that are most impactful for me personally.

Note: this isn’t mathematically correct 😭 We’d have to break this down into a system of partial differential equations to reflect how the variables change with respect to each other (humble brag) because how else would I get to use my engineering training?? Just go with me on this.

••••••••

ANYWAYS, I was so proud of myself when I broke down this system because NO ONE TELLS YOU ANY OF THIS when you’re a teen or young adult. Maybe you see some of this stuff on social media, but it’s often fed to you by influencers instead of people who can relate to you and understand you as a person.

This “mental health equation” is different for each person, and countless people, both intentionally and unintentionally, helped me figure mine out over the years. It was through trial and error, making mistakes, and leaning on people other than my parents. In hindsight, I probably would have gotten here quicker had I been more open to their suggestions. lol.

So, Colin and I figured out and documented the cheat codes to give our clients to help them solve their own mental health equations.

A personal example:

Disclaimer: at this point in writing the newsletter, I’m in too deep to stop now. Sorry bout it.

Solving my mental health equation breakdown has taken years of intentional exploration and refinement. It’s still ongoing.

I spent my twenties (and now thirties) exploring where I fit in the world, who I like to help, what problems I like to solve, what supportive friendships look like to me, what value I bring to my relationships, what deal-breakers and boundaries I set with work and relationships, and what I need to prioritize for my mental health to be at a good baseline.

Colin and I help our clients whose families are trying to avoid getting to the point of needing residential treatment by guiding them through the process of solving their mental health equation. We help them identify their goals in these areas of their lives, and we break it down to reverse engineer the “variables” they need to focus on to reach these goals.

And that’s how I’ve chosen to use my chemical engineering master’s degree lol.

Alright, well that digressed into niche advice that no one asked for. But for young people willing to put in the work necessary to solve this equation before getting to the point of treatment, we gotchu.

And now……our vibes this week🔮

📚 What we’re reading

Is ADHD really a superpower?, the cut

Where some see taboos, they see opportunity, nyt (profile on my fave gen z consumer brand founders)

🎶 What we’re listening to

ICYMI: Not Therapy Playlist

💡 One last thought

My toxic trait

I’ll never forget the morning of our product launch for my first company Chill Pill - an online peer support mental health platform for Gen Z women - when I woke up to a notification on my phone that Paris Hilton had commented on one of my viral TikToks and started following me.

Only a year before that, in May 2021, I had set up a few meetings with venture capital investors and convinced some of them to invest over $1,000,000 in my idea for a company. At the time, I had no product, team, or co-founder. I had a Discord server with about forty young women on it who were talking to each other about their mental health and daily struggles during Covid in a way I had never seen them do anywhere else online. I leaned heavily on my story of being sent to wilderness and therapeutic boarding school for my fundraising pitch.

Only six months before that, deep into Covid, Paris Hilton had released her documentary “This is Paris” on YouTube. At the time, I didn’t have any opinion on Paris other than loving her show The Simple Life and remembering she had a sex tape leaked of her when I was too young to understand what that meant.

I found out about the documentary from my students in the emerging tech/entrepreneurship program I was running at the time. Earlier in the school year, I had shared my experience going from troubled teen sent to treatment programs to graduating from Columbia with a master’s degree in chemical engineering and working as a data scientist by the age of twenty-five. One day, a few of them messaged me asking if the places I was sent to as a teen were like those Paris Hilton had been to.

I had no clue what they were talking about, so I searched it on Youtube and watched it myself.

When the director got Paris to open up about her nightmares of being taken from her home in the middle of the night, I was completely shocked. I had no idea she had been through something so similar to me.

Did I find the animations a little campy and dramatic? Sure. The emotion behind her voiceover detailing what had happened the night her parents had two people take her from her bedroom and fly her out to a wilderness program struck a chord with me like no other documentary had before. It was both emotional and inspirational. Two words I never thought I would associate with Paris Hilton.

Up until that point, the only people I spoke to about my experience in wilderness and treatment were the other young women with whom I attended those programs. I shared some of it with the high school students I worked with at the time, but my story was always something that I thought would hold me back professionally.

Hearing from Paris about how she used that experience, for better or for worse, to fuel her drive to build an empire and create a life where she didn’t have to rely on anyone else, specifically her family, for money or security resonated deeply with me. When I left treatment, I resolved never to let that experience hold me back from building a life where I was financially independent and building a career based on my passions.

It wasn’t until I fundraised that I realized I could directly use my treatment experience to propel myself forward. I was inspired to use my story to build a business helping young women improve their mental health before they got to the point where they needed treatment. This ultimately led me to what Colin and I are doing with Not Therapy.

So thank you, Paris Hilton, for sharing your story and for inspiring a young woman who has struggled with mental health most of her life to use her experience to help other young people who’ve been in our shoes.

This ^ is the exact opposite view that many people in the residential and wilderness treatment industry have of Paris Hilton.

Colin and I get why many people who run residential treatment programs, specifically for teens, are defensive when they talk about the Paris Hilton of it all. They view her work as a direct attack on their programs. And while I can see how that viewpoint is justified, it’s ultimately unhelpful for these programs and the teens they treat.

The advocacy movement that Paris became the face of has led to bills being passed that protect children and, from my non-legal viewpoint, are regulations that make complete sense if you want to improve residential treatment programs.

For instance, the bill passed in Utah a few years ago calls for programs to report any time they use physical restraints or seclusion to the state’s licensing authority. They prohibit programs from using mechanical restraints and sedation without prior authorization, and they require the Utah Office of Licensing to conduct four inspections every year of each program. The records of these inspections and any violations are now in a public database.

I looked back through many of Paris’s #tti TikToks and her testimonies before state legislatures and Congress, and I couldn’t find a single time that advocates for “all programs to be shut down” - a common talking point we hear people in the industry repeat. Instead, she advocates for a federal “bill of rights” for children in residential treatment facilities.

She advocates for data collection and transparency within residential treatment centers - an initiative I know many programs themselves are pushing for to track and improve outcomes.

She talks about going to programs to help children who have been abused, such as what happened at Atlantis Leadership Academy. Everyone reading this would absolutely agree that the program needed to be shut down, and the legislation she’s supporting is intended to prevent abusive programs from hiding under the radar.

The industry’s reaction to Paris is just like when people in the industry were looking through my old TikToks and claiming that I’m also calling for programs to be shut down, which I’ve never once said in any video or podcast interview even before starting Not Therapy. We’ve seen programs and people working in the industry get so defensive - an understandable initial reaction - around what Paris Hilton has been doing that they fail to see how they can partner with alumni that identify as survivors.

As the senator championing residential treatment reform in Oregon and on the federal level puts it, “The survivors have been telling us what’s wrong this whole time. As legislators, we just hold up the megaphone.”

This is called survivor-led legislation reform. This is becoming the standard in many states for legislation around domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking, just to name a few. I’ll go more into that another week because that approach to not just legislation reform, but program improvement and reform, merits an entire newsletter.

The other gripe we hear from people working in the industry is that Paris Hilton’s advocacy - and the online discourse that stems from people who were also in these programs - makes parents too scared to send their children to these programs based on what the industry claims is “false information.”

We’ve heard many people claim that she has completely lied about her experience at Provo Canyon. We’ve also heard that there was a lot of malpractice when Paris Hilton was in treatment, and that it doesn’t exist anymore.

Okay, that’s great, but it’s clearly been a waste of energy trying to prove that Paris Hilton is lying or not.

A better use of energy is working with these organizations and alumni who are speaking out, rather than discounting everything we’re saying. Sure, do some people exaggerate? Of course. But behind the exaggerations are real experiences that were painful for us.

Imagine if there were more people who went through this experience who had the power of Paris Hilton and unlimited resources to spend on PR. She’s not the only person that is going to become rich and powerful after going to treatment.

So shouldn’t the industry focus on helping people heal the trauma they went through by being sent to programs? The reality is, even if you have a transformative experience in treatment, trauma is inherently woven into it. Everyone we know who’s been to treatment feels, to a certain extent, abandoned by their families or betrayed by their parents. We all struggle to trust and open up to mental health professionals afterwards.

Imagine if programs worked with alumni who had the resources and leaned on their experience to improve how programs are positioning themselves to parents, families, and teens in an authentic way? I know at least two people personally who went to treatment and who have since built careers in brand positioning and PR. Just saying.

This is a call to people working in the industry to reevaluate their views on what Paris Hilton and other survivors are talking about for the past four years. Most of us, Paris Hilton included, don’t want to “shut down the industry.” We’re the experts on how programs affect their alumni long-term, and we have thoughts on how programs can support us better during and after our time spent in treatment.

Colin and I believe these programs can be life-changing for the right people if they have the support they need afterwards. That’s why we built Not Therapy. Instead of calling for the programs to shut down, we came up with a peer mentorship-led way to support young people going through any tough transition in life, including those who are coming out of residential treatment centers and wilderness.

As always, this is just our opinion, and it’s based on our personal experience. We would love to hear from anyone else who has thoughts on this, whether you agree with our opinions or not! In fact, we especially love to hear from people who have a different point of view, whether you’re a program alumni, a parent, or someone who works at a program.

And now……our vibes this week🔮

📚 What we’re reading

Change your thoughts, change your life, Dr. Wayne Dyer

More teen girls smoke marijuana than boys now, qz

This new drink testing kit could save your life, Nylon

🎶 What we’re listening to

Ourselves, Not Therapy

💡 One last thought

Early 2000s kids will understand

THANKS FOR READING!

If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎

We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:

• If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!

• If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.

Get In Touch

I had the best time recording this episode of Stories from the Field with Will White a few weeks ago! We mostly talk about what I went through after treatment, which is part of what inspired last week’s newsletter of what qualifies us to be coaches. Give it a listen for a different side of my story. Thanks for having me, Will!

🎙️ Listen Here

Our top parenting Red Flags 🚩

Colin and I have often talked about how much we don’t like (most) home contracts. Creating a home contract typically marks the beginning of the end of being at a treatment center. My therapist and I agreed upon goals, rules, and red flags that my parents signed then off on.

One of the things we feel is usually missing from a home contract is the part where the parents agree to do (or not do) certain things to support themselves in their child’s transition home. If we’re bringing eighteen months worth of therapy and treatment to the table, we feel the parents should also take time to reflect on what they need to do to make sure they continue to grow and take care of themselves.

Over the last eight months, we’ve worked with 25 young people and their families, and we have been on 15 home visits.

Here are the top three things that we see parents tend to do that block their kids from having success when they return home from treatment, especially when everyone is living under the same roof.

🚩 When parents do not have the outside support they need personally

We’re talking therapist, parent coach and/or parent support group (we love OPLM, Hopestream, and Speaking of Teens!). This genuinely is the number one block we see with parents who are struggling to build the relationship they want with their children when they’re living at home.

If parents aren’t taking care of themselves or if they’re unwilling to grow and try something new, then we’ve seen it be extremely difficult for them to be genuinely supportive of their children in the way they need.

For Colin and I, it was incredibly encouraging to see our parents putting in their own work, separate from us, to understand themselves better and work towards living their best lives.

There’s solidarity in that. It also showed us that their happiness and their relationship with each other didn’t rely on their children doing well 24/7. Seeing them take care of themselves showed us that we could go to them when we’re struggling and not have to worry that we were going to deeply upset them.

I’m sure they were and still are upset behind the scenes when we come to them when we’re struggling. However, because they’re keeping their side of the street clean and talking to a third party about how they’re doing, we were much more likely to come to them when we needed help and take care of ourselves in the same way.

🚩 When parents don’t recognize the difference between their expectations vs. house rules

A parent’s expectations are the manifestation of what they want for their child. i.e. their hopes and wishes for them. It’s totally normal and okay expectations for one’s child, but we see often parents mistake their own expectations for the rules they want their child to follow.

A rule is something their child has to follow or else face specific consequences. When we start working with a family, we encourage parents to choose 2-3 rules that their child absolutely must follow in order to live under their roof (or have college paid for, cell phone plan, etc.). Each rule must have a very specific consequence so that their child knows what’s at stake if they break them. Rules are usually the things parents need their child to do (or not do) to keep them safe and themselves sane.

If their child breaks a rule, it’s on the parents to enforce the consequence. If their child doesn’t meet their expectations, however, it’s on parents to cope with their emotions around it.

We encourage parents to remember that it’s healthy and normal for a young person to have different goals for themselves than what their parents expect of them. We love when parents talk to their children about their expectations in an honest and transparent way, and we encourage them to share their feelings when their kids aren’t meeting those expectations. At the same time, parents have to work towards letting go of their judgment of themselves and their children in these moments.

We see that having another parent (or therapist or coach) to talk to when they feel like their child is disappointing or when they need to enforce a consequence makes parents lives a lot easier in this respect.

🚩 When parents take their children’s behavior personally

Trust me, I know I’m going to struggle with this when I have children. Parents make many of their decisions based on what they think is best for their children. Even the decisions that seem like they have nothing to do with their kids.

This is why Colin and I constantly remind parents that their kids don’t operate in the same way. Most of their decision-making has nothing to do with how they think their parents are going to feel about things.

It’s hard not to take their behavior personally, especially when it feels personal and they might even try to make it about their parents. Their choices right now are about figuring out who they are and where they fit in the world outside of their family.

Taking their behavior personally leads to resentment and often contributes to a lack of communication. I know this one is easier said than done, hence the need for parent support outside of the family.

•••••

Just to be clear, we understand why parents tend to do all of the above, and we don’t think parents who do these things are bad parents at all! Quite the opposite. It usually shows how much they love and care for their child.

We’re just sharing our perspective of what we’ve seen that hasn’t been helpful, having been in their kid’s shoes. We know that changing these things is easier said than done, and we have the utmost respect for all the parents we work with. They’ve all put in a ton of work on themselves. We’ve seen that as they come out of these patterns of behavior, it makes a huge positive difference in their relationship with their child.

We love working with families who look at the transition home from treatment, or even just the transition into adulthood in general, as a team effort. We’ve partnered with some fantastic parent coaches, individual therapists, and family therapists over the last few months who have made a world of difference in the progress of the entire family. As we continue to build out our network of support, please feel free to reach out if you’re looking for more professionals to get the support you, or the families you work with, need.

And now……our vibes this week🔮

📚 What we’re reading

Meet the people using ChatGPT as their therapist, dazed

How it feels to be a college student whose parents can’t let go, slate

🎶 What we’re listening to

From wilderness therapy to empowerment, stories from the field

💡 One last thought

In honor of lamorne morris winning an emmy

THANKS FOR READING!

If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎

We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:

• If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!

• If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.

Get In Touch

We’re back!!

September, specifically in NYC, is my favorite time of year. After Labor Day, the city starts cooling down, the leaves start changing colors, and everyone coming back from ✨The Hamptons✨ adopts a borderline manic energy that makes me want to hustle.

So please excuse the last three weeks of no newsletters - we were recharging our creative energy and planning out the rest of the year. Exciting stuff.

I want to start by giving a shout-out to all the amazing young people and families we started working with over the summer. We’ve honed in on a three-month cadence of working with many of our clients right after they leave treatment that really hits.

Within three months, the young people we work with teach us so much that we then share with our new clients. So we started building this peer-to-peer mentorship into our new online community structure, and we couldn’t be more excited. All of our clients have been working so hard, and while life isn’t ever going to be perfect, we’re grateful we get to weather the ups and downs of big life transitions with them.

Recently, I’ve been sharing a lot with the young women and men we work with about all the things I’ve been through as a young adult post-treatment. One thing I’ve noticed is that because I’ve recently struggled with a lot of the same things my clients are currently going through, regardless of whether they’ve been to treatment or not, I’m a lot less reactive and concerned about some of the things my clients are doing than their parents are. Makes sense; I’ve been through it.

Obviously, I’m not a parent, and I completely understand where parents are coming from with their fears!

First of all, the parents we work with grew up in a different generation and a different time - one that didn’t include smartphones, dating apps, influencer culture, having to share their location with their parents 24/7… just to name a few.

Second, since I was 16, I’ve surrounded myself with people I could relate to. This means that many of my friends from college, AA, jobs, and adult life in general have shared similar “resilience-building” experiences with me. So, I’m used to talking to young people about these challenges, and they don’t phase me as much as they might for another person.

And finally, I’m not a parent yet. Trust and believe that karma will come through, and I will get my chance to deal with my own troubled teen. I’m already planning on it and preparing for it emotionally. Currently networking to find mentors for my future daughter when she inevitably stops listening to me and potentially starts going down the nefarious trail I blazed.

Both my and Colin’s experiences help us discern which behaviors are concerning and how they will negatively impact our clients’ short and long-term futures, compared to the behaviors that, while maybe not the best, they’ll eventually work through when they experience enough of the real-life consequences that stem from them. All we can do is help them practice the tools and self-awareness that they’ll need to change these patterns when they decide it’s necessary.

And that right there is why families hire us ^

However, I do think parents forget that both of us were actually deeply troubled teens, and we’ve both had to tackle countless obstacles post-treatment as young adults to get to where we are today. Some of these challenges were out of our control, some of them were part of becoming an adult, and a lot of them, at least for me, were self-created problems. Shout out to learning things the hard way.

I get that Colin and I are doing better than we ever have in our lives right now, but we both fought tooth and nail to get here.

So I want to take a quick opportunity to normalize for parents what their kids are going through as they transition into young adulthood. I want to remind them that none of these challenges have to define them. All they need is a bigger vision for their life and the conviction that they can get there if they refuse to give up on themselves. No one can do those things without support, but that’s why we exist 😊 (by we, I mean the Not Therapy community)

In the spirit of being fully transparent, here’s a recap of my 20’s - Instagram vs. Reality version. Please feel free to share this with anyone who might need to read this today.

📸 INSTAGRAM 📸

all my residential treatment girlies flew in for my 25th bday >>

• 2 bachelor degrees - one in chemistry from University of Puget Sound, one in chemical engineering from Columbia

• 1 master degree - in chemical engineering from Columbia

• Research and engineering internships throughout college

• Moved across the country to NYC mid-college, completely on my own

• First post-college job - lead data scientist at a NYC brand strategy agency

• Second job - director of a tech and entrepreneurship program for high school students, where my co-director and I built the NYC program from scratch. Literally got Evan Speigel (founder of Snap) to come in-person to speak to our cohort of students just 6 months into the job.

• While still at that job, I started a mental health tech company by myself and fundraised $2 million dollars based on pretty much just my life story. From legit venture capital funds, one of which was the co-founder of Uber’s fund, another was a personal check written by the founder of Giphy. Had no clinical experience, no experience building a company, no team, and no product yet.

• Built that company and online platform from the ground up. Hired 7 employees, one of which was my dad. It didn’t work out as I would have liked, but was able to wrap that up last year.

• Met Colin and we built Not Therapy together, where we’ve exponentially grown our revenue in the first eight months. And we feel pretty good while doing it! Yay!

🌎 REALITY 🌎

<< me in 2022 at 27 - a year into building my first company (a mental health company no less) and in one of my most unhealthy relationships to date

Some of the things I’ve struggled with or gone through at some point during the last 12 years post-treatment. In no particular order…

• Self-harm. As recently as that picture ^

• A deeply emotionally abusive romantic relationship that I struggled to get out of (different relationship than pictured above)

• Me royally f*cking up healthy romantic relationships due to unresolved trauma and lack of personal accountability → i’m that ex they hate

• Cyber sexual abuse

• Sexual assault

• Addiction, sobriety, and relapse. Sober 6 years after treatment, and when I decided not to be sober, I’ve gone through phases where I’m over-indulging and dealing with those consequences

• Figuring out my relationship to drugs and alcohol - which drugs I cannot do, and how to have a healthy relationship with the things that I can

• Relying on weed as an emotional crutch and coping mechanism

• Friendship breakups. Much more disruptive and sad than one would think. Harder than most of my romantic breakups

• An inability to manage my mental health causing me to quit jobs and do poorly in school

• School refusal. In college, I physically couldn’t get out of bed most of one semester.

• New mood disorder diagnosis and learning disorder diagnosis

• Medication management (ages 18-23)

• Insomnia. Low-key one of the worst things to deal with on this list.

• Redefining my relationship with my parents when we didn’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on my vision for my life. Not easy, but one of the most rewarding outcomes of things I had to struggle with.

• Unplanned pregnancy while on the most effective form of birth control available

• Disordered eating. Picked that up from my residential treatment center.

• Deep, deep, DEEP depressive episodes. At least 6 of them. Worse than I ever felt pre-treatment. I had to figure out how to go through that without 24/7 support while having adult responsibilities.

• The list could go on…

The point of one of my biggest overshares to date??

“If you want advice about something, don’t ask someone who has always been good at it. Ask someone who is decent at it now, but wasn’t always.” - quote from one of my friends from treatment

The things we’ve been through on our “reality” lists are why we’re qualified to do what we do. I share these things not to upset people but because I’m genuinely proud of myself for making it through all that.

I want to make it clear that I didn’t struggle right after treatment, get my act together, and then start achieving the goals I always wanted for myself. I did all those things on the "Instagram" list WHILE dealing with all the things on the “reality” list. Tbh, I still struggle with some of those things. And I know more sh*t will come up.

This is not the resume you’d find on my LinkedIn. My real coaching resume is the challenges I had to overcome while achieving the same goals I share with many ambitious young women who didn’t have to go to treatment, struggle with mental illness, or go to years of trauma therapy. It’s not the degrees that make me feel good about myself; it’s the fact that I earned those degrees while going through some of the hardest sh*t I’ve ever had to confront in my life.

But I could not have done it alone.

Colin and I built Not Therapy so that young people can get the tools, structure, and support from people who genuinely care about them and who want what's best for them while they go through the normal, or even extreme, ups and downs of young adulthood. We give our clients the “cheat codes” to get to where they want to go while avoiding some of the pitfalls we experienced.

As evidenced by our resumes, we have cheat codes that you won’t find in any parenting or self-help book written by academic experts.

Our hope is that parents (and people who work in therapeutic programs) see that given our unconventional path as teens and young adults, we’re most likely going to continue on an unconventional path. And we’re going to struggle. A LOT. And that’s okay.

Mine and Colin’s message to our clients is this:

💚💜 Our diagnoses, life’s challenges, and even our self-created problems do not have to define us 💚💜

And while you’re on this journey, we’ve got your back because we’ve been there.

To the parents - your kids can go through all of this too, and they’ll survive as long as they have support from people who’ve been there before!! Just because they’re struggling today doesn’t mean they’ve fallen off the path to building the life of their dreams. Figuring out how to work with the cards they’ve been dealt is a necessary part of that journey.

And now……our vibes this week🔮

📚 What we’re reading

iPad kids speak up - inside gen alpha’s relationship with tech, vox

TikTokers are compiling ‘dopamine menus’ as a way to bring joy into their daily routines, glamour

Revisiting Winona Ryder’s 1999 Girl, Interrupted Cover Story, vogue

🎶 What we’re listening to

How to help your teen succeed after wilderness & residential (Colin’s interview), speaking of teens

Developing your mission statement as a parent, on purpose with jay shetty

💡 One last thought

They’re eating the pets!

THANKS FOR READING!

If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎

We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:

• If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!

• If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.

Get In Touch

Two months ago, Colin and I had the pleasure of talking with Tony Mosier and Craig LaMont on their podcast Ultimate Potential! We cover some of the cheat codes we give our clients for success after treatment, and we think this is one of our best duo podcasts yet. Thanks again for having us!

*Gets in one healthy relationship* … “Let me give you some advice on relationships.”

I spent this past week in India visiting my boyfriend and meeting all his friends and family. Very eat pray love of me, I know. Fair warning: this week’s newsletter is a little more in my feelings than usual, but I know some of what I’ve learned will resonate with parents with teen or young adult children struggling right now.

I went into this trip feeling very excited but fully expecting it to be overwhelming. And it’s been the most life-changing trip I’ve ever been on.

Not gonna lie though - I cried pretty much every night. Not a few tears here and there. Full-on sobbing. Very drama.

I experienced deep feelings of gratitude and joy, alongside feelings of insecurity and anxiety. My boyfriend got the “full Hayley experience,” which people in the past have described as bat sh*t crazy. So, I have never shown a partner all sides of myself.

But the most beautiful thing happened on this trip.

For the first time in a romantic relationship, I was able to experience and be present in all my feelings with my boyfriend, EVEN the ones I judge myself for, like insecurity or anxiety. AND how he supported me through each nightly breakdown helped me reframe many of my fears, judgments, and past experiences in ways that never even occurred to me. He helps me think differently about the world, and it’s the most refreshing feeling a (very stubborn) girl can feel.

It felt as if many of the tough lessons I learned in my 20s prepared me to be the partner I’ve always wanted to be, with a partner I’ve always wanted to be with. Who would have thought that hard work could actually pay off??

In that spirit, I reflected on what I needed to learn and do in my 20s before I could be in this relationship that just hits different. This is after MANY years of making every dating mistake in the book with a range of people who had their own problems to work through.

For all the parents who hope their child will one day find a healthy partnership, I highly encourage you to let them experience the struggle and challenge of these lessons.

🚨DISCLAIMER: your children may learn some of these lessons by being in relationships with people you don’t think are right for them. Just expect that.

🚨ANOTHER DISCLAIMER: just like every other newsletter, this is what I personally needed to learn and go through. This isn’t meant to be an end-all-be-all guide; it’s just my experience.

Patience is key here; it took me over 10 years, a lot of hard work, and A LOT of mistakes to understand these concepts.

On that note, these are the top four things I’m grateful I learned in my 20s that I needed to find a healthy relationship:

Separate the person you want to be, from the person you want to be with 🐝

It took me YEARS to grasp this concept. Early on, I understood that no person could ever fill the holes I had in my self-esteem. But I only recently saw how this manifested in my relationships.

I would think I wanted to be with someone because they had the traits I actually wanted for myself - some of which were healthy traits, some unhealthy.

As I got closer and closer to people with the qualities I coveted, I became increasingly insecure about not embodying them. It made me feel like I needed to be with them to take on those traits when in reality, I needed to fill those gaps myself. I would seek out people who weren’t right for me because I thought they would give me a shortcut around doing the hard work I needed to do for myself.

Once I accepted that I needed to “become” the type of person I wanted to be with, it opened up an entirely new door for a relationship with someone I never expected. In a hilarious twist, what I needed from a partner was pretty much the exact opposite of what I had been seeking all along. Very on-brand for me. Parents, friends, and therapists have been telling me for nearly a decade that the type of person I need to be with is someone like my boyfriend, buuuut here we are. She finally made it to the party.

Don’t be afraid to breakup 💔

This is often learned by going through at least one really bad breakup. Not wanting to go through something awful again is an excellent motivator for being more discerning about who you date in the future.

But not feeling scared of a breakup is another level of freedom. After going through a few bad ones over the years, I became very confident in my ability to grieve, learn from it, and move on.

Tbh, I learned that breakups have many positives. Breakups can strengthen friendships when you lean on them for support. Breakups shine a light on where your self-worth and self-esteem are at and force you to face that reality. Breakups teach you how to live with grief. Breakups teach you how to compartmentalize and show up for your commitments while going through something very difficult. They teach you what you are and aren’t willing to work through to stay with another person.

Which leads me to my next point.

Be deeply okay with being single 😱

This doesn’t mean you have to love being alone or want to be single. At the beginning of my 20s, much of my growth around relationships was done while I was in relationships. Towards the end of my 20s, most of that growth had to happen while I wasn’t in a committed relationship.

The pre-requisite is that you have to want to learn to be okay with being single. That’s where most people get stuck. My mentality was that I wanted to be able to take care of myself, by myself, no matter what life throws at me. To be fair, that mindset can be a double-edged sword.

However, it empowered me to prioritize building a deep level of self-trust in my ability to work through anything without relying on a partner, if necessary. I now realize that only then did I feel safe enough internally to be ready to find a healthy relationship.

I still always wanted a partner with whom I could weather the ups and downs of life and build on our emotional and professional foundations together. Still, I worked to reach a point where I knew to my core that my career, friends, family, and other pursuits could be enough for me to feel fulfilled in life.

Having fun with your partner should be a non-negotiable ✅

My grandma told me this shortly before I started dating my boyfriend when I asked her for advice on finding a good life partner. She said, “The most important thing is to find someone you have a lot of fun with.” And she’s not exactly the type of person I would have expected to say that 😅

I told her, “But the ones I have fun with are never the ones who can support me emotionally.”

She replied, “Then you’re not really having fun with them, are you?”

I cried and told her she didn’t know what she was talking about because she hadn’t dated in 70-ish years. Literally a month later, I realized she was 100% correct.

In my relationship, and specifically while on this trip in India, I realized that having fun goes much deeper than sharing the same sense of humor or even the same sense of adventure. You only truly have fun when you feel safe. For me, safety comes from being listened to, feeling heard, and knowing that I can consistently rely on my boyfriend to celebrate my emotions and provide a safe space to express them.

There’s no way to find out if the person you’re with is someone you can consistently lean on unless you consistently show them all sides of yourself, which is very scary and very vulnerable. You must have a solid foundation of self-worth to take that leap of faith.

• • • •

I get that none of this is rocket science, and there are a hundred other things I had to work through before I could be in what feels like a completely different (i.e. healthy and interdependent) relationship than I’ve ever been in. And we haven’t even touched on the timing piece of it, which is largely out of our control.

But when I take a step back and think about 15-year-old Hayley, she would have NEVER believed she could do any of this. I couldn’t even be okay with myself in my home environment, let alone in another country halfway across the world, with someone with whom I share all sides of myself.

Honestly, even 25-year-old Hayley would have struggled to believe she could 1) find a partner who celebrates her emotions and creates a safe space to express them, let alone 2) immerse herself in a different culture, have fun, and feel like she belongs.

Relationships have always been my Achilles’ heel. But it feels like the hard work of learning from my mistakes is finally paying off.

My message to parents is this: the more you let your children experience the shitty things that life is going to throw at them, even relationships, and celebrate it as an opportunity for them to grow and challenge themselves rather than a problem you need to solve, the more confidence and self-worth they’re going to gain.

That’s the foundation no one else can build for them but themselves, and it will propel them towards a life they love living with healthy relationships, whatever that may look like for them.

And now……our vibes this week🔮

📚 What we’re reading

When teenage angst went mainstream, vogue

Influencers pitch Harris at DNC, bloomberg

🎶 What we’re listening to

Big Ideas

💡 One last thought

highschool but awful and less crushes

THANKS FOR READING!

If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎

We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:

• If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!

• If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.

Get In Touch