Hey Not Therapy community!
If you’re the parent of a young adult who’s having a hard time, you’ve probably heard “they need more structure” from a therapist, a teacher, your sister, or a stranger in a Facebook group.
And you probably nodded, because it sounds right. Right?
But then you went home and wondered what you’re actually supposed to do with that. Make a chore chart? Set an alarm for them? Print out a color-coded schedule and tape it to their door? (Please don’t 😅.)
So I want to break down what structure actually looks like, starting with why it mattered so much for me.
Why it matters
The world is an overwhelming place, especially when you’re someone who struggles to regulate your emotions.
For a young adult like that, one small thing can feel like the whole day is thrown off balance.
A rude text, a missed bus, a bad night of sleep, an awkward conversation at dinner. One bad moment can turn into a bad afternoon, and a bad afternoon can turn into a bad day, and a bad day can turn into a bad week. Emphasis on “it can”.
It doesn’t have to.
What usually breaks the chain is something pretty boring: a place you have to be at a time that doesn’t change. When the day has a few of those fixed points, there’s somewhere to land after something goes sideways, and a bad moment has a much harder time taking over the whole week.
At least that was my experience as a teen and young adult.
I didn’t always like school, but having to show up, sit in class, and have lunch at the same time every day meant I was following a schedule and interacting with people whether I felt like it or not.
Sports helped even more. Practice was at the same time, the team expected me there, and by the end of it I was too tired to spiral about much of anything.
When I went to treatment, everything was structured down to the minute, almost militaristically. Wake up at this time, eat at this time, group at this time, free time from here to here. In the moment I despised it. Looking back, it gave me a stable external container while I worked through my messy inner world.
Then I came out, and suddenly I had all the freedom in the world. Which was amazing, obviously! I’d been waiting for it.
But it was also really, really hard to adjust to. Like a lot harder than everyone told me it was going to be. I wish I’d been given more of a heads up.
When nobody tells you when to wake up, what to do, or where to be, every hour becomes a decision. Should I apply to jobs, go to the gym, text a friend, figure out my whole life in an hour, or just use that hour to nap?
With that many options and nothing pushing you toward any of them, it’s easy to end up doing none. People call this decision paralysis, but for me it felt more like life paralysis. I wasn’t stuck on one choice. I was frozen on all of them.
And if you spend all day in bed or in your room, anyone would start to feel depressed, unmotivated, and pretty bad about themselves. I would. You would. Your young adult will too. The low mood makes it harder to get up, the not getting up makes the mood lower, and around it goes.
What breaks that loop for most young adults is a few small, predictable points in the day that get them up and out of their room whether they feel like it or not. Motivation tends to show up after that, almost never before.
So here’s what those points can look like at home.
What structure actually looks like
Structure at home doesn’t have to look like treatment. A minute-by-minute schedule is hard to recreate in a house, and come on, it’s completely unrealistic.
What helps is a handful of anchors, a few fixed points in the day and week that happen no matter how anyone feels.
💙 A wake-up time that holds on weekends too
This is the anchor everything else hangs on. It doesn’t need to be early. 9am is fine. It just needs to be the same, because a body that wakes up at 9 one day and 2pm the next never gets its footing. (Daylight saving ends Nov 1, which is a pretty good excuse to reset it.)
💙 One reason to leave the house every day
A coffee run, a walk with the dog, the gym, a shift at work, picking up a sibling from school. It can be small. Getting outside and seeing other humans, even ones you don’t talk to, changes how a day feels.
💙 Meals at regular times, with people when possible
Dinner at 6:30 as a family gives the day a shape and a built-in moment of contact, without anyone having to schedule a “conversation.”
💙 Something every week where other people expect them
A part-time job, a class, a rec league, volunteering, a standing plan with a friend. This was sports for me. When someone else is counting on you to show up, showing up stops being a daily debate with yourself.
💙 Movement
Any kind. A run, a pickup game, a climbing gym, a long walk. It burns off the restless, anxious energy that otherwise turns into scrolling at 3am, and it helps with sleep, which helps with the wake-up time, which helps with everything else.
If the spiral has already started
If your young adult is already spending most of the day in their room, a full routine will probably feel impossible to them right now. Starting small is the only way that works.
Pick one anchor ⚓️.
Usually the wake-up time or the daily reason to leave the house is the easiest place to begin. Get that one steady for a couple of weeks before adding anything else. Ten new rules at once tends to collapse in about three days, and then everyone feels defeated.
Make anchors something the household does together when you can. “We eat at 6:30” or “Saturday mornings we go to the farmers market” lands very differently from “you need to be up by 9.” Shared routines feel like family life. Routines aimed at one person feel like being managed.
Bring in someone from outside the family. A coach, a job, a gym buddy, a class with an instructor who notices when they’re missing. Accountability from someone other than a parent is much easier to accept, and it takes some of the enforcing off your plate.
Expect bad days. A missed morning doesn’t mean the routine failed. The point of an anchor is that you come back to it tomorrow.
And go easy on yourself. Building structure for someone else while keeping your own life running is a lot. You don’t have to get it perfect. You just need a couple of things that happen the same way most days, and a willingness to keep coming back to them.
Remember that chain from the beginning, where one bad moment turns into a bad week?
Momentum works the same way in the other direction.
One steady morning makes the afternoon a little easier. An okay afternoon turns into a decent day, and a few decent days in a row start to look a lot like a good week. It starts small and it builds, and most of the time it starts with something as unexciting as getting up at the same time tomorrow.
Peace,
Not Therapy
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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.
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