When Your Young Adult Won’t Launch-A Parent Group that Helps
Your 24-year-old is sleeping until noon. College felt too overwhelming and they bounced back. They're gaming all night, avoiding your questions, and you're still paying their bills. You've tried encouraging them, threatening them, bribing them. Nothing changes.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone — and you're probably exhausted.
What is Failure to Launch?
Failure to launch describes young adults (typically ages 18-30) who are struggling to transition into independent adulthood. They may be:
- Not working or consistently unable to hold a job
- Not in school or repeatedly dropping out
- Living at home with no clear plan to move forward
- Socially isolated or withdrawing from friends and activities
- Struggling with anxiety, depression, or avoidance that keeps them stuck
While every young adult's timeline is different, failure to launch becomes a problem when avoidance, anxiety, and family accommodation create a pattern that's hard to break.
The Accommodation Trap
Here's what most parents don't realize: the things you're doing to help might actually be keeping them stuck.
When you pay their bills, make their appointments, do their laundry, wake them up, avoid tough conversations to keep the peace, or lower your expectations to prevent conflict — you're accommodating. And accommodation sends a powerful message: I don't think you can handle this. I'll do it for you.
Over time, your young adult starts to believe it too.
Why Failure to Launch Happens
There's rarely one cause. Failure to launch often stems from a combination of:
- Anxiety — Social anxiety, generalized anxiety, or fear of failure that makes stepping into adulthood feel overwhelming
- Depression — Low motivation, hopelessness, and difficulty imagining a future
- Avoidance patterns — A habit of withdrawing when things feel hard, reinforced by family accommodation
- Executive function challenges — Difficulty with planning, organization, time management (common with ADHD or learning differences)
- Family dynamics — Parents who unintentionally enable by doing too much, or who feel stuck between helping and letting go
Traditional therapy often focuses on getting the young adult into treatment. But what do you do when they refuse? Or when they've tried therapy before and nothing changed?
SPACE-FTL: A Different Approach
SPACE-FTL (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions — Failure to Launch) is an evidence-based treatment framework specifically designed for parents of young adults struggling to launch.
Unlike traditional therapy, SPACE-FTL works directly with you, the parent. No coaxing. No waiting for them to "be ready." You start making changes now, and those changes create the conditions your young adult needs to move forward.
What Makes SPACE-FTL Different?
It's not tough love.You're not kicking them out or cutting them off. You're staying connected, staying warm, and staying firm.
It's not enabling. You're not rescuing them from every consequence or making excuses for their lack of progress.
It's evidence-based. SPACE was developed by Dr. Eli Leibowitz at the Yale Child Study Center as both an alternative and an adjunct for treating childhood anxiety and OCD. SPACE-FTL adapts that framework for the unique challenges of young adult failure to launch.
It works. Parents consistently report that when they stop accommodating, their young adult starts moving — sometimes slowly, sometimes in fits and starts, but they start moving. Parents feel calmer, more confident, and have a plan for moving forward.
Who is LaunchPad For?
LaunchPad is designed for parents of young adults (ages 18-30) who are:
- Not working or not in school
- Living at home with little motivation to change
- Struggling with anxiety, depression, or avoidance
- Resistant to individual therapy or previous treatment hasn't worked
- Heavily accommodated by parents who are doing too much
This group works best when:
- The young adult is not in immediate crisis (active substance abuse, severe mental health emergency, safety concerns)
- Parents are willing to make changes even when it's uncomfortable
- There's at least one parent committed to participating consistently
Real Change Starts With You
If you're reading this and thinking ,”But what if I stop helping and they completely fall apart? — I get it. That fear is real, and it's what keeps so many parents stuck in the same exhausting pattern.
But here's the truth: Your young adult is already struggling. What you're doing isn't working. And the longer you accommodate, the harder it becomes for them to believe they're capable of anything different.
SPACE-FTL gives you a roadmap for stepping back with love, holding boundaries with warmth, and creating the space your young adult needs to grow up.
Join Our LaunchPad Parent Group
I run LaunchPad, a SPACE-FTL group for parents of young adults struggling to launch. It's a place to learn the framework, get support from other parents navigating the same challenges, and start making real changes in your family.
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