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.