Tag: Fear and threat response

When Zeke was in high school, he struggled with anxiety and substance use problems, and he left college after the first semester. Now 25, he is living at home, and his mom Carol is frustrated. While she’s pushed him to go back to school or work, he has only held one part-time job at a local smoothie shop and quit after a few months, embarrassed that high school classmates would see him working there. Another attempt at trade school to become an electrician also didn’t take — it didn’t feel like the right fit. Now he rarely leaves the house, stays up all night playing video games or scrolling online, and sleeps most of the day.

Failure to launch syndrome, highly dependent adult children, boomerang kids — there’s no standard term or definition, but if you’re a parent in this situation you recognize it. You are worried and frustrated about your adult child’s difficulty in leaving the nest, and you don’t know what to do because everything you’ve tried so far hasn’t worked. 

“These aren’t kids who come back home because they finished school, and the first job they get doesn’t pay enough for them to afford rent on an apartment,” says Theresa Welles, the Shapiro Family Director of the Bubrick Center for Pediatric OCD at the Child Mind Institute. “We’re talking about young adults who functionally have hit a wall, so to speak. They’re caught in a loop of dependency.”

It’s not uncommon for adult children to live with their parents: According to Pew Research Center, 18 percent of adults ages 25 to 34 lived in their parents’ home in 2023, with young men more likely than young women to do so (20 percent vs. 15 percent). Young adults might leave home for a period of time and then move back in with their parents because they can’t find a job. Or for religious or cultural reasons, some adult children expect to live in the family home until they get married. Living at home is not the main criterion for determining a “failure to launch.”

While there is no official clinical definition, researchers who study this group of young adults generally categorize someone as a highly dependent adult child if they are:

• Not in school, working, or actively looking for work (though physically capable of doing so)
• Financially dependent on their parents for housing and other necessities
• Emotionally reliant on parents (i.e., needing constant reassurance that they are okay)  

They usually have very limited social interactions other than online. Often, they have mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression, or OCD, which is a contributing factor, Dr. Welles says.

“They’re at the developmental stage of early adulthood, they’re figuring out who they are,” Dr. Welles says. “The fancy term in psychology is ‘individuation,’ but it’s essentially who you are, both as part of your family and separate from your family.” Highly dependent adult children haven’t made much progress in this stage for several years. Many of them want to change their life path and become more independent, but they struggle with anxiety or fear of failure and don’t follow through on the necessary steps. “Reliance on parents reduces opportunities to build autonomy, which in turn maintains that reliance,” she says. So, they remain stuck.  

Young adults who are highly dependent often fall into certain patterns of behavior. They don’t do their own laundry, cook, clean, or help out around the house. They rarely leave the home and often shut themselves in their bedroom or live in the basement, avoiding talking to others in person. As a result, they rely on their parents to act as an intermediary with the outside world, such as making doctor’s appointments. They might blame their parents for their difficulties in life.

While parents may not like the situation, they struggle to get their adult child to change. So instead, they accommodate them — especially when they are concerned about their child’s mental health challenges.

“In the world of neurodiversity, accommodations are a good thing — we want accommodations for testing and sensory environments,” says Natalia Aíza, LPC, the author of the forthcoming Anxious to Launch: Parenting Strategies to Help Your Adult Child Move On. “But in the anxious-to-launch world, accommodations are actually interfering with your child becoming independent.”

Aíza gives some examples of unhelpful family accommodations: You make sure there’s food in the fridge, don’t ask them to contribute to paying bills, and may give them spending money. When they get angry or upset, you accept the behavior and feel guilty, thinking you are to blame for the situation. If they are anxious when you aren’t nearby, you don’t travel because it causes them stress. Instead of expecting them to take steps to find a therapist, you do the legwork.

“The number one behavior of the highly dependent adult child is avoidance. I cannot emphasize this enough,” Aíza says. “If your child has a full-on virtual life, that’s their social outlet. They are avoiding real-life challenges. They are avoiding working at jobs that are unpleasant. They are probably avoiding adulting tasks that should fall on them at this point. So, we swoop in and take care of those tasks for them.”

While adult children have lived with their parents in past generations, researchers argue that phenomenon of highly dependent adult children is on the rise, and young people today seem particularly susceptible. Adolescence is more prolonged now in many cultures, and there’s an emphasis on finding a fulfilling career, not just a job that pays the bills.

Technology contributes to the problem. Playing video games, watching videos, scrolling through social media — “these activities don’t help matters because they can do things that feel like they’re accomplishing something,” Dr. Welles says.  

In Dr. Welles’s practice, she has worked with families where she initially treated the teen for anxiety or OCD, then involved the parents more deeply when the young adult had trouble launching. In one case, the son was in the habit of playing video games late at night and would sleep through class the next day. He had anxiety and depression, and his parents didn’t want to take away video games because it was the one thing he enjoyed doing. But they started turning off the Wi-Fi in the house at a certain time at night.

“It sounds so extreme, like he’s being punished,” Dr. Welles says. “But it’s about saying to him, ‘We’re going to pull back on ways we’ve accommodated that may have unintentionally made your anxiety worse.’” It was important that the parents validated his feelings, saying things like, “You feel like you’re in danger, as if you’re standing in front of a bear, and that’s really hard. But that’s the anxiety lying to you, and it won’t go away if we keep accommodating things that allow you to avoid what you need to do in order to overcome this anxiety.”

And tactics like these made a difference over time. The son is now attending college part-time and working as a server at restaurant. He has a girlfriend and has plans to save enough to move into an apartment with a friend.

If the adult child doesn’t seem motivated to find a job, Aíza has recommended that parents take them off the family cellphone plan, giving them warning that this will happen by the next month’s bill. “This is not necessarily the most strategic financial choice” because it’s often much cheaper per person on a family plan, she acknowledges. “But it is a perfect first accommodation to remove because it is telling your adult child, ‘This is something you can handle. You can be responsible for it financially and logistically. It is something that I control, and I want to stop controlling parts of your life.’” And it’s often the motivation they need to find a job — something that can earn them $100 for the monthly cell phone bill is small enough that it feels doable.

When families take steps like these, the adult child will likely get angry or upset. “That’s hard. But think about when your kids were toddlers, and they wanted to touch a hot stove,” Dr. Welles says. “They were mad when you said, ‘No, you can’t touch that stove,’ but that didn’t mean you let them do it.”

“The good news is, generally speaking, even if there’s unhappiness in the beginning,” she continues, “pretty quickly, once they start to feel better and are doing the things that they actually care about, it can really help.”

Highly dependent adult children might accuse parents of not being supportive when they pull back on accommodations. Dr. Welles suggests communicating that you hear them and validate their feelings: “You can say things like, ‘Hey, I know this is tough or ‘I know that this makes you really nervous.’ But you combine it with the confidence that they can do it, like ‘I also know you can do it, as hard as it is.’”

Sometimes, you might think you are being supportive when you are actually enabling — like filling out a job application on behalf of the child. “Even if it works and they get an interview, you’re accommodating their anxiety,” Dr. Welles says. “But also, there’s going to be a point when you can’t do something for the child — the interview or the job itself — so the earlier that you can pull back the better.”

If your adult child has both ADHD and anxiety, you can support their executive functioning skills without accommodating the anxiety. “Maybe you sit down with them on Mondays and look at their schedule to help them determine if there’s a way you can help them organize, as opposed to you stepping in and letting them avoid things they need to do because they’re anxious about it,” Dr. Welles says.

Aíza encourages giving the adult child the minimum amount of help needed, to avoid creating another form of dependency. “It’s about noticing, ‘Am I working harder at this than they are?’” she says. “A lot of times the answer is ‘yes,’ and that’s a signal to back off and put more expectations on the child.”

While there is no standard treatment for highly dependent adult children, early evidence has shown a form of therapy called SPACE-FTL (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions – Failure to Launch) to be promising. A variation on an effective treatment for anxiety and OCD, SPACE-FTL involves only the parents, since the adult child is often resistant to seeking help. The program helps parents reduce accommodations step by step and engage extended family and friends to help de-escalate conflict. 

One tactic is to make a plan to deliver a change in accommodation in writing — for instance, explaining that you will stop paying the cellphone bill at the end of the month and why. Doing it in writing (on paper or in a text) makes the message clear and helps you remain calm and non-reactive. If you are expecting an angry or violent response, they can ask a grandparent, uncle, or family friend be in the house when you deliver the letter, since that might make the response less extreme. The relative or friend may even spend the night if the adult child is more likely to cool off when others are present.

Asking for others’ help also helps you stop blaming yourself for the situation. “A lot of parents of highly dependent adults feel shame, but this is not something happening to only one family,” Aíza says. “We need to build on our social supports and get other people on our team so that we don’t feel so isolated in this process. Your adult child may be resisting change, but you don’t have to. It might sound cruel, but our central mandate as parents is making sure our child is okay after we’re gone. We brought them on earth to survive us — that is the design.”

The post “Failure to Launch” Syndrome: How to Stop Enabling Your Grown Child appeared first on Child Mind Institute.