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.