Stop telling your kid to get a job (do these 5 things instead)

Okay, so you know how we spent all of last week’s issue roasting the term “failure to launch” and hunting for better language? Well, that hunt led me straight to a study that made me feel so…🎶 VINDICATED🎶.

And even though the study uses failure to launch right in the title…😑…it is one of the only hopeful studies I could find about stuck young adults,

So I’ll allow the use of that term this once, because what the study found is THAT good.

Here’s the tea ☕️

In 2022, Yale researchers ran a randomized controlled trial with parents of young adults, with the criteria that their young adult child isn’t working, isn’t in school, and is living at home (the young adults were ages 19 to 32, with most in their early twenties).

What made my jaw drop, though, was that the researchers spent about 15 weeks coaching ONLY the parents on five specific shifts in their attitudes, behaviors, and support systems. The young adults never attended a single session, and they probably didn’t even know their parents were participating 😱

The results??

With only changes in parent behavior, a whopping 60% of the young adults no longer met the criteria for “failure to launch” by the end.

45% got jobs (30% of them full-time), 25% enrolled in school, 10% moved out, and the parents themselves reported feeling significantly less burdened. Okay slayyyy. The control group of parents, who were waitlisted for the trainings and kept doing what they’d always done, had zero young adults launched in the same time period.

And I’m sorry, but the best part for me was that their methodology is exactly what we’ve been telling families to do for years now. Sure, was our direction and advice based primarily on our own intuition and lived experience? Absolutely. And we’ve always been very upfront about that. Literally just look at the name of our company. But as it turns out, a clinical trial existed this entire time that backs the exact approach we’ve taken with Not Therapy parents.

The proof is no longer just in the pudding!! I actually have no idea what that idiom means, but point being, the five things the researchers coached parents on that helped them “launch” their kids are already baked into Not Therapy’s philosophy. What a win for the people.

Before we get into the five things, though, we have to talk about the thoughts that are probably already forming in your head (and were probably in the heads of all the parents who participated in this study when they signed up).

A parent’s 11pm thought 💭

If you’re the parent of a stuck young adult, there’s a sentence you’ve thought lying awake that you’d never say out loud (besides maybe to your closest friends, in a Facebook group, or on a Not Therapy parent group call):

“I’ve lost all the authority I ever had. My kid doesn’t listen to me. There’s nothing more I can do.”

You feel just as stuck as your kid. And when we tell parents that THEY are the most powerful lever in this whole equation, the same three fears come up almost every time. So let’s talk about them.

Fear #1:

“My kid isn’t motivated. They’re incapable of being independent.”

Your kid is stuck because they’re in an anxiety and avoidance cycle: the thing they want or need to do feels hard, so someone else handles it for them, and therefore the next hard thing feels even bigger. The good news is that this is a structural problem, and structures can be taken down and rebuilt. The study included only young adults with no medical or major psychiatric condition that would explain the stuckness, meaning these were capable kids who stayed stuck until their parents changed the structure at home.

Fear #2:

“If I stop pushing, reminding, and holding them accountable, nothing will happen.”

This is the classic enabling trap, and it’ll sneak up on ya because it can also look like good parenting, at least when your kid is younger. But every time you step in, even when it’s out of love or in the name of accountability, your kid absorbs the same narrative: you don’t think they can handle it.

Which, once again, makes the next hard thing feel bigger, which invites more stepping in. In your kid’s defense, “get a job” is an unenforceable request anyway. The only levers you can actually pull in this case are what you do and what you pay for.

Fear #3:

“We tried therapy, we tried coaching, we tried a program, so why would this approach be any different?”

Because everything you’ve tried so far has put the onus of change solely on your kid’s shoulders, while our approach divides it between you. In the study, the young adults never directly engaged in the coaching, yet 60% launched anyway. This is exactly why, from the very inception of Not Therapy, our program wraps around the parents as much as the young adult.

Which brings us to the actual list.

The five things parents can do to launch their young adult 🚀 (as proven by the Yale study)

1️⃣ Educate yo-self.

The study calls this first step “psychoeducation,” which sounds very clinical. What it looks like in practice is listening, in a curiosity-forward way, to someone who deeply knows this territory and explains what’s going on in your kid’s brain.

For me, when I actually educate myself about what’s going on in my own brain, I start to drop the shame and set realistic expectations for myself. Same goes for you as a parent. In our world, that’s our queen Beth Hillman, parent coach extraordinaire, who has both the lived experience and years of coaching parents of stuck kids. Now, every family that works with us has to meet with Beth one-on-one at least four times in the first few months; I’ve seen how parents walk out of those first conversations visibly lighter. Their kid’s behavior finally has a more “logical” explanation.

2️⃣ Do the accommodation audit.

This is almost always the first piece of work we do with parents. List every single thing you’re doing for your kid OR paying for on a regular basis: gas, rent, car insurance, the phone bill, their laundry, cleaning their room, making their doctor’s appointments, signing them up for classes.

Then we ask parents the same question we ask their kid: what’s the smallest next step?

Pick the thing you’re most okay with them dropping the ball on, stop doing it, and…wait for it, because this is the hard part…let go of the outcome. 😮‍💨 If you stop cleaning their room, the room will be messy, and you’re going to have to close the door and live with that. If you stop doing their laundry, it will pile up until it becomes their problem. If you stop paying their phone bill and they don’t have a job or savings, it’ll usually get them moving on that real quick.

Here’s what we say to parents constantly: the thing you’re most okay with them failing on is where you should start. Baby steps, people. As it gets easier, you can keep adding to the list.

3️⃣ Flip your attitude to acceptance plus confidence.

Let’s say it again for the people in the back. Acceptance. Plus. Confidence.

This one my own parents nailed, and I only understood how much it impacted me years later.

Right before I came home from residential treatment as a teenager, I remember my parents floated enrolling me in community college as a backup plan, in case regular college didn’t work out. Tbh I’m pretty sure the treatment center told them to. My response was something like, “Hell no, how rude, I am SO ready for college how dare you.” And that was the last time they ever brought up a plan B for me. Kudos to them for listening 👏

Fast forward to years later, my mom told me how she actually got through that era: “I just had a core belief that this wasn’t going to be ‘your forever.’ This is not how you were always going to feel or be. I knew you were going to come out on top.”

I don’t remember if she said that to me at the time, but she didn’t have to. When the people you live with believe you’re capable, you receive that attitude every single day, in a million small ways 👑

Living with people who have the opposite mentality is brutal, though. Imagine living with someone who is quietly bracing for you to fail or expects you to disappoint them. That’s the energy your kid absorbs. Every accommodation you make for them says “we don’t think you can do it.”

So here’s the flip side. Acceptance: where your kid is at feels genuinely hard for them, and they want out of it as much as you do (probably more). Confidence: “I know you can figure this out. I’ll show you how to do the laundry (or rewrite the resume, or sign up to drive for DoorDash), and I know you can do it. It’s f**king hard, but I know you can do it.”

My parents gave me room to fail. The deal was: we expect you to deal with the consequences of your actions, good or bad. We’re always here to help, but we’re not going to save you. That deal is the reason I trusted myself.

One more thing here, because parents always ask: yes, this works even if you’re faking it at first!! All of us treatment kids learn this on day one: change the behavior, and the belief will follow. Or in DBT, they love to tell you to “act opposite.” All your kid can actually read is your actions.

4️⃣ Change yourself instead of trying to control your kid.

The study draws from the principles of “non-violent resistance,” which we love and are absolutely keeping. This focuses parents on the only person in the house you can actually change. What can YOU change, behavior-wise? Because if you change your behavior, your attitude tends to follow it, and your feelings eventually follow that.

This is why we made parent coaching non-optional for new Not Therapy families, regardless of how much therapy, coaching, or treatment you have been through. This is why we ask parents, more than once, “Are you willing to do the work you’re asking your kid to do right now?” The success of your kid hinges on this.

To be fair, here’s the worst-case scenario if you change your behavior: you become a happier, less anxious person who takes care of yourself and lives your life again. Best case, your kid watches you change and follows your example.

5️⃣ Build your support bench.

If you do the first four things, you are breaking 20 or 30 years of your own behavior. It’s going to be uncomfortable, and there will be a week where your kid pushes back hard, and you will want to fold. You need people to lean on so you stay strong.

In the study, the researchers had parents recruit relatives, friends, and professionals to reinforce what they were doing at home. We build this into everything we do with parents: weekly parent support group calls (where you hear another parent say the exact thing you’re thinking), one-on-one coaching with Beth, and your own dedicated point person we call the Family Manager, whose main job is to be there for the parents. You text them any time, any day, jump on an ad hoc call, and they’ll check in on you regularly.

Parents who try to white-knuckle this change in attitude and behavior tend to slide back into old patterns pretty much immediately. The parents who build, and then lean on, their support system can hold the line much more effectively.

Your action item (if you’re open to suggestions, that is)

Start the “accommodation audit” today. Just do a stream of consciousness (I use Wispr app to voice-memo the hell out of everything, and it translates it to clear thoughts). Talk about every accommodation you’re making for your young adult.

Then circle the smallest, easiest-thing-for-you-to-let-go-of, and stop doing that one this week. Let the outcome be what it is.

Your kid doesn’t have to be in the room for this to start working.

Shameless plug (this is our newsletter after all)…the study cited 20 parents who actually went through the training, so the 60% who stopped qualifying as “failure-to-launch” = 12 young adults.

In our case, we have 59 families who have been through Not Therapy, and 86.4% were employed, in school, or both by the end of the coaching engagement. So that’s 51 teens and young adults we’ve helped move out of, or helped avoid entirely, the failure-to-launch label. Check our outcomes.

While parents are clearly a huge part of the equation, the success rate is even higher when you pair the young adult with a mentor who can help them name, work toward, and achieve their goals 😎

So, just to remind you, the parent who thinks they’ve lost all their power is holding more of it than anyone else in the house.

And as always, reach out to us anytime for help. We will help any parent create a game plan absolutely for free.

💚 - Hayley