For all parents, watching a child move toward adulthood brings new questions, concerns, and challenges. How much support should you still provide? When should you step in, and when should you step back? What is reasonable to expect at this age?
For parents whose children are struggling to move forward, however, these questions can feel much more urgent. While peers may be leaving home, attending college, finding work, building relationships, and taking on more responsibility, your own child may seem stuck. They may be avoiding school or work, withdrawing socially, struggling with everyday responsibilities, or continuing to rely heavily on you in ways you did not expect at this stage.
These concerns may begin during the later teen years and become more pronounced as expectations for independence increase. Parents often try encouraging, reminding, problem-solving, finding treatment, adjusting expectations, or stepping in when things fall apart, without feeling that their efforts have had much impact. The result can be a painful sense of being stuck alongside your child: concerned about where things are heading, but uncertain about what you can realistically do to help.
What Is Typical in the Transition to Adulthood?
There is no single “right” timeline for becoming an adult. Young people vary tremendously in when they leave home, become financially independent, settle into a career, develop long-term relationships, or feel confident managing adult responsibilities. Needing financial support from parents, living at home, changing educational or career paths, or needing help with unfamiliar tasks does not necessarily mean that something is wrong.
One useful distinction is not simply between dependence and independence, but between forms of dependence that support continued development and those that may contribute to a young person remaining stuck. Dulberger and Omer (2021), in Non-Emerging Adulthood, describe this in terms of functional and dysfunctional dependence. Their framework emphasizes that complete independence is not necessarily the goal; rather, families can consider whether the current pattern of support is helping a young person develop greater functioning and responsibility.
So, rather than asking whether your child “should” have achieved a particular milestone by a particular age, it can be more useful to ask: Is my child gradually developing greater capacity to participate in their own life?
A young adult may still need considerable support while also making progress; taking classes, trying a part-time job, learning to manage appointments, increasing social involvement, or gradually assuming more responsibility at home.
When Might There Be More Cause for Concern?
Parents may want to look more closely when the overall trajectory seems to be moving in the opposite direction. For example, your child may increasingly withdraw from school, employment, relationships, or activities; avoid responsibilities they previously managed; become more dependent on family members to complete everyday tasks; or seem unable to take even small steps toward goals they say they want.
Sometimes these patterns have been developing for years. School avoidance, significant social withdrawal, difficulty taking on increasing responsibility, or other longstanding challenges during adolescence may become more noticeable as the structure and supports of childhood begin to fall away.
Importantly, appearing “stuck” does not tell us why someone is stuck. Anxiety, OCD, depression, ADHD or executive functioning difficulties, autism, learning differences, substance use, trauma, or other mental health concerns can all interfere with functioning. Some young people become overwhelmed as expectations increase or as the structure provided by high school, college, or family life begins to change. Others may become increasingly avoidant following experiences of failure or distress. Understanding the barriers matters, because the solution is rarely as simple as telling someone to “try harder.”
What Help Is Available for the Young Adult?
When a young person is willing to participate, support should be matched to what is getting in the way. Depending on their needs, that might include individual psychotherapy, treatment specifically targeting anxiety or OCD, psychiatric care, executive-functioning support, substance-use treatment, autism-informed services, or educational or vocational support. A higher level of care may also be appropriate when mental health symptoms or safety concerns are particularly severe.
A comprehensive evaluation can be useful when it is unclear why a young person is struggling or when there are questions about attention, learning, developmental differences, or other underlying concerns.
But what if your child does not want help?
As children get older, we know that parents have less direct control over whether their child participates in treatment, attends school, seeks employment, or follows through with responsibilities. Repeatedly trying to persuade, remind, negotiate, or find the “right” therapist can also become another source of conflict. This is where shifting the focus toward what parents can influence becomes especially important.
Parents Can Get Help, Too
Parents do not necessarily have to wait for their child to be ready for change before seeking support themselves. Parent-based approaches such as SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions) and Non-Violent Resistance (NVR) can help parents examine and change their own responses to avoidance, distress, and longstanding patterns of dependence. SPACE was originally developed as a parent-based treatment for childhood anxiety and OCD, but has been adapted for parents of highly dependent adult children.
These approaches involve looking closely at how parents have gradually become involved in managing their child’s life: providing repeated reminders, making appointments, communicating on their behalf, repeatedly stepping in financially, reorganizing family life around avoidance, or taking responsibility for their tasks.
Many of these forms of help start for understandable reasons. They may have been helpful or even necessary at another point. The question is whether they are continuing to help now.
A useful question for parents is:
Is the support I am providing helping my child function, or is it increasingly replacing their functioning?
The goal is not to abruptly withdraw support or create a “sink or swim” situation. Instead, parents can identify patterns that may no longer be helpful and make thoughtful, gradual changes while remaining supportive and connected.
DBT-informed parent or family work, general family therapy or parent consultation can offer helpful strategies for parents to address expectations, boundaries, communication, financial support, living arrangements, and household responsibilities.
What Can Parents Actually Change?
One of the most important shifts can be moving away from:
“How do I get my child to change?” and toward: “What can I do differently in response to what is happening?”
Dulberger and Omer’s (2021) approach similarly emphasizes changes parents can make in their own responses Rather than placing parents in the position of trying to control an adult child’s behavior, their model emphasizes changes parents can make in their own responses, including reducing unhelpful accommodation and finding ways to remain present and supportive without assuming total responsibility for their adult child’s functioning.
In everyday life, this might mean:
- stopping repeated reminders about an appointment while remaining available to help your child figure out how to schedule it.
- acknowledging the anxiety that comes with making a phone call, attending class, or applying for a job, while also communicating confidence that your child can begin taking small steps.
- setting a limit around what you are willing to do while learning to tolerate the discomfort that can come when your child is unhappy with that limit.
For parents who have spent years encouraging, worrying, reminding, problem-solving, and stepping in when things fall apart, these changes can be difficult. Parent-focused treatment can provide a place to think through which changes make sense, how quickly to make them, and how to respond when changing a longstanding family pattern leads to distress or conflict.
Support Does Not Mean Doing Everything for Them
Changing how you help does not mean becoming less compassionate. Your child may be genuinely struggling with anxiety, depression, executive functioning, neurodevelopmental differences, or other significant challenges. Recognizing those difficulties does not require assuming responsibility for solving every problem they create.
Parents can communicate two things at once:
“I understand that this is really hard for you.” - and -
“I believe you are capable of taking steps toward handling it.”
Helping your child move forward does not always mean removing what is difficult. Sometimes it means staying connected while allowing them more opportunities to experience their own ability to cope, problem-solve, and take responsibility.
Finding a Place to Start
When your child is struggling, it can be hard to know which problem to tackle first, especially when difficulties with school, work, mental health, relationships, and daily responsibilities overlap. But you do not have to change everything at once. A useful starting point may be identifying one area in which the current pattern is not working well and asking what a small, realistic shift might look like.
Parents can also consider whether their own lives have become increasingly organized around monitoring, managing, or responding to their child’s difficulties. Supporting a child does not have to mean putting your own relationships, activities, or well-being indefinitely on hold.
The goal is not to force a young person into a particular timeline for adulthood. It is to help create conditions that support greater participation, responsibility, and functioning over time, while remaining caring and involved without feeling responsible for carrying your child forward.
For families who have spent a long time wondering what else they can possibly do, that can offer a different place to begin:
It is not longer “How do I make my child move forward?”, but “How can I support movement without trying to do it for them?”
Support for Your Family
You do not have to navigate these challenges on your own. The Ross Center offers a range of services to support young adults and their families, including individual therapy, parent consultations, SPACE parent training, psychiatry, and psychological testing. Our clinicians can help you better understand how to support your struggling child, identify where change is possible, and develop a plan that supports both you and your young adult.
CONTACT US to arrange support for your family.
References
Dulberger, D., & Omer, H. (2021). Non-emerging adulthood: Helping parents of adult-children with entrenched dependence. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108891240
SPACE Treatment. (n.d.). SPACE FTL: Parent-based treatment for highly dependent adult children. https://courses.spacetreatment.net/l/pdp/space-ftl