What Jonathan Haidt isn't telling you about your stuck 21-year-old
Great to know about how we got here, but what are parents supposed to do now?
If you have a young adult who is currently stuck, at home, in their childhood bedroom, on their phone for most of the day, not in school, not in a job, not in a relationship…then you almost certainly have read or been recommended Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation in the last two years.
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!
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!
Talk next week.
💚 - Hayley
Hayley, I appreciate you identifying the age group gap, the phone's impact on the developing brain, the need for kids to experience and solve little "failures" so they develop skills to succeed with the larger challenges, and so much more. . . specifically discerning the pros and cons of therapy. I so agree that therapy is not a magic bullet, specifically for building and practicing life skills (I've had a couple of decades of being a therapist:)
Your mention of the RELATIONSHIP is specifically where Moms and Dads can make the biggest impact and have the greatest influence on there teen or young adult. As Johann Hari suggests in his TED talk, "the opposite of addiction is not just sobriety; it's connection" and that's good needs for families!
I completely agree with Hayley.
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.