I'm so over the term "failure to launch."

This week, I decided I was over the term “failure to launch.” It’s shaming to parents, and it’s shaming for the young adult. And it doesn’t really tell us anything about what happened to get to that point. So I went down a whole rabbit hole figuring out what other terms people use for it, including a deep-dive into Japanese clinical studies (more on that later lol), and I ended up doing wayyyyy too much research on it so that you don’t have to.

Before I tell you what term I landed on to describe what so many parents come to Not Therapy seeking help for with their young adults, to the point where it has become our specialty, let me back up real quick and tell ya how I got here.

What put this on my radar this week was when I was sent the Child Mind Institute’s explainer on failure to launch, which their team gave a fresh review this July. Tbh, it’s not a bad piece. They confirm that there’s no official clinical definition (which, for the record, I don’t think there should be), that failure to launch has never been a diagnosis, and that the researchers who study it mostly describe it as “highly dependent adult children.”

Even though they try to call it a syndrome at certain points, the article describes a pattern rather than a diagnosis. Failure to launch is defined as an adult who falls into one or more of the following categories:

1. They are physically capable of working or being in school but aren’t doing either (and aren’t looking)

2. They depend on their parents financially

3. They lean on their parents emotionally for constant reassurance

If you’re reading this newsletter, I’m assuming there’s a chance you’re supporting a young adult who fits that description. You know our whole thing by now is that stuck isn’t sick, which is exactly why the term failure to launch bugs me. The current name for this pattern points the blame at the parents, young adult, or both, without pointing to any solution.

My rabbit hole this week 🐰 AKA finding the least “bad” name for this thing

Here’s what AI told me people call this situation many young adults find themselves in these days:

🔶 “Failure to launch (FTL).”

Failure is in the name, but whose failure is it, exactly? The young adult hears it as their failure. You hear it as yours. Everyone gets shamed, and no one gets information on how to move the needle.

🔶 “Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome.”

It’s been studied and reported in psychiatric journals, and we’ve worked with many young adults who received this exact diagnosis at some point. However, as you all know, “syndrome-speak” does something I openly dislike: it nudges families back into a diagnosis mentality. And anytime you’re in a diagnosis mentality, you’re in an office, you’re in a treatment center, you’re waiting on hold with your insurance company, but you’re rarely operating in the “real world.” Without even reading the studies, we all know what the prescription for this looks like: therapy, career counseling, treatment for depression, etc. NGL, all three of these things can be very important components to moving your young adult forward, but it’s the same menu we’ve already ordered off of multiple times, and families are still finding their young adults are still stuck after all these interventions.

🔶 “Boomerang kids.”

This is a cute phrase, but it explains nothing.

🔶 “NEET” (not in employment, education, or training).

That’s the term economists use, and these studies show that unsuccessful transitions into independent adult life can predict “long-term lack of functional independence.” Greeaaaat, but that still doesn’t tell us how to stop that prediction from coming to fruition.

🔶 “Hikikomori.”

Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a fun-to-say, one-word term to describe what they call a “hidden epidemic” of a “severe form of social withdrawal” among young people, which researchers have been observing there since the 1970s. Side note: this is actually a fascinating study you can read (for free), and it goes into all the “comorbidities” researchers observe with hikikomori. They even propose a way to diagnose hikikomori, but interestingly, the Japanese characterize it more as an inability or unwillingness to leave the home (straight up social isolation), whereas many parents come to Not Therapy not because their young adult is totally withdrawing from their peer group, but because they’re withdrawing from their expected societal responsibilities.

🔶 “Highly dependent adult children.”

Okay, maybe now we’re getting a little more of an accurate description here, which is probably why researchers use it so often. My main issue is that it only describes the end state, but it says nothing about how the young adult (and their parents) actually got there.

Why “delayed independence” actually fits best, imo 🚀

Even though this still sounds a little too clinical for me, I like this description because parents already understand what it means to delay a developmental moment. You can delay your kid’s kindergarten start, for example. Schools recommend it all the time when a kid needs another year, or when they’re a little young for their grade. That’s a totally normal, common parenting decision.

Since I’m not a parent myself, I’m curious if parents ever talk about how the emotional and mental growth moments can get delayed the same way, much later than early childhood? I did find a lot of research on what they call “family accommodation,” which is when children and adolescents with anxiety or OCD “display a pattern of excessive dependency on their parents for help in avoiding anxiety-provoking situations.” Researchers studying FTL hypothesize that these small decisions to accommodate your kid while they’re younger (regardless of whether they have OCD or not) add up to a young adult relying on their parents for family accommodation to avoid “daunting functional challenges.”

This research supports why I’m coming to prefer the term delayed independence over failure to launch. It describes what’s actually happening here: your young adult just hasn’t had enough practice relying on themselves for emotional and functional support, rather than them (or you as parents) being an all-out irreversible failure. Delayed independence puts everybody a little bit on notice (parents, schools, and yes, the kid too) without shaming anyone. Someone did the delaying, and then it becomes a cycle of external reliance instead of being given the opportunities to build internal resilience.

Which is the best news in this whole issue!! What was previously delayed can be un-delayed.

The moments where your kid actually got delayed (as a teen or young adult)

Here are two things we see over and over with our Not Therapy families:

🟡 Earning things.

I see parents run incentive structures with little kids all the time. “If you eat your vegetables, lil Timmy, you get the ice cream!” Then, somewhere in the teenage years, it will just stop as soon as they start resisting. However, teens and young adults can re-engage in this behavior if the incentive structure changes to where they have to earn something they actively want over a longer period of time than just a meal.

“Hey Timmy, we’ll get you the new PlayStation if you do x, y, and z” can work at 15, even 20. As we all know, when we earn something for ourselves, we appreciate it more, sure, but the bigger deal is we prove to ourselves that we can do the work. Your teen or young adult could also just decide they don’t want the PlayStation that badly. That’s a choice too, and making real choices is exactly the rep they’ve been missing.

🟡 The incompetence loop.

This is what the researchers are talking about with family accommodation. Weaponized incompetence is still having a moment, and okay, maybe your 24-year-old is weaponizing it now. Tbh, I fall into weaponizing it on occasion (every weekend) too when I’m “too tired and depressed” to do the chores and errands I put off all week and that I know will make me feel better as soon as I do them.

My suspicion, however, is that the weaponized incompetence subtly started way earlier, back when it was simply faster for parents to do the thing themselves. Your kid learns “okay, I’m just not doing it right,” you keep doing it for them, and by adulthood the act has hardened into a real belief that they can’t.

With a lot of the young men we work with, especially, that belief comes out as anger and frustration. And in our experience, most of those feelings are aimed at himself. He is a harsher critic of himself than you have ever been. Then everyone keeps babying him, and the loop feeds itself.

What my dad got right 👏

Growing up, when we didn’t know how to do something, my dad would sit us down. He’d say, “Okay, this is how you do it.” He’d show us and do it himself. Then he’d undo it. Then he’d have us do it. We eye-rolled at him a lot (he still does this to us to this day), but it ingrained something legit: I saw it, I’m gonna mimic it, oh wait, it’s not as hard as I thought it’d be.

I use his exact method with clients now. When someone tells me they can’t figure out how to find a therapist, I make them get on a FaceTime with me, share their screen, and I walk them through how to find one by having them do it. I show them where to search, how to filter, and what to actually look for.

And I watch parents lose patience for this with their adult kids because “you should already know how to do this.” Should they though?? You may have never even shown them how to do it or given them the opportunity to do it for themselves, so why would they know how to do it now? Just because they’re an adult doesn’t mean they learned how to do it. I didn’t even feel like an adult until I was probably 28. At least.

Related: the number of parents who tell me their kid has executive functioning issues and then get mad at that same kid for fumbling basic life admin. You know what’s great for executive functioning? Someone literally showing you how to do the thing while you do it, as my dad did. It’s called “body-doubling.”

How to un-delay each delayed moment ➡️

Take the three markers from that Child Mind piece, and you can reverse-engineer every single one.

1. Capable of school or work, doing neither

   ➡️ The delayed moment: earning. Somewhere along the way, effort and reward got disconnected.

   ✅ The un-delay: reconnect them now. If they’re living at home, the roof is the incentive. Rent, real contribution, real work for the family if there’s no job yet (we went deep on this last week: Am I a bad parent for charging my kid rent?) There are a million ways to incentivize an adult kid. Start with the biggest one.

2. Financially dependent.

   ➡️ The delayed moment: they have never regularly paid a bill, because you always paid it first or bailed them out.

   ✅ The un-delay: slowly start “handing back” what you’ve been accommodating, gradually and with support. This is the main place where I’m in full agreement with what the research suggests. The example used by the Child Mind Institute is taking your young adult off the family phone plan with advance notice, so the hundred bucks a month becomes theirs to earn. The same research also suggests that parents who combine this approach with adopting and communicating an attitude of acceptance and support, like “I know this is tough” and “I know you can handle it,” have a higher likelihood of moving their adult child out of the “FTL” category. I love when something we’ve seen work with our families is actually supported by clinical research 😅

3. Emotionally dependent.

   ➡️ The delayed moment: they never got any practice being uncomfortable, because someone always resolved it (or protected them from it) as soon as the parent saw it become an issue.

   ✅ The un-delay: whenever they complain to you about something (”no one likes me,” “my back hurts”), just be like, “Okay, well this is what I do when I’m dealing with that. When my back hurts, I look up a doctor, check if they’re in my insurance network, call, and make the appointment.” Then ask them how they think they’d do it? If they want to try it your way, do the body-doubling exercise I gave earlier (show them how you do it while simultaneously letting them do it). If they don’t want to do it your way, totally fine. Let them find their way, and now they know they can come to you for help if they get stuck.

What they really need are reps in tolerating the discomfort of being a beginner. This tolerance, and proving to themselves they can figure sh*t out, is where confidence actually comes from.

So what do we call it?

Damn, that was a really long-winded way of me deciding while writing this that I can’t think of anything clever enough to trademark.

However, I do think “delayed independence” at least tells the truth about what’s going on here. Your young adult’s growth moments were delayed, and you can typically trace it back to small behaviors, on both the parent(s)’ side and the young adult’s, that might have started a pattern of accommodation.

The good news is that anything that got delayed can be un-delayed, and you can start with a “show-then-repeat” skill this week.

Hit reply and tell us the delayed moment you can see most clearly in your own house. I read every single one, and I’d love to hear if this resonated for parents.

💚 - Hayley