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Coaching Your Family Relationships: Help for Parents of Adult Children
Coaching Your Family Relationships: Help for Parents of Adult Children is a podcast for parents who want a healthier, more connected relationship with their adult children, especially when that relationship has become strained, distant, or difficult.
Hosted by Tina Gosney, Family Conflict Coach and Parent Educator, the podcast takes a whole-family approach to parent-adult child relationships. Rather than focusing only on what your adult child is doing, Tina helps you understand the larger relationship system: the patterns, emotional reactions, expectations, communication habits, nervous system responses, and family dynamics that influence how everyone shows up.
Each episode brings family science out of the textbook and into real life, helping parents understand not only what is happening in their relationships, but why it is happening and what they can do differently.
Whether your adult child has become distant, set boundaries you don’t understand, stopped communicating, or your relationship simply isn’t what you hoped it would be, this podcast will help you look at the entire relationship differently.
Because changing a family relationship doesn’t always require everyone to change. Sometimes, changing the way you participate in the relationship can change the entire system.
Coaching Your Family Relationships: Help for Parents of Adult Children
Failure to Launch: How to Help Your Young Adult Move Forward, with Colin and Hayley from Not Therapy
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Episode 234: Failure to Launch: How to Help Your Young Adult Move Forward, with Colin and Hayley from Not Therapy
If your adult child is living at home, struggling to find motivation, avoiding work or school, or seems stuck while everyone around them is moving forward, you may be wondering what to do next.
Do you push harder? Set firmer boundaries? Stop helping? Are you supporting your young adult, or are you accidentally enabling them?
In this episode, I talk with Colin MacDonald and Hayley Caddes from Not Therapy about what may be happening inside the mind of a young adult who is struggling with “failure to launch,” and what parents can do to help without taking over.
Colin and Hayley both bring lived experience to this conversation, and their work focuses on helping teens and young adults build confidence, motivation, structure, executive functioning skills, and independence. We also talk about the important role parents play in the family system and why changing the way you respond can sometimes create movement even before your adult child is ready to change.
You’ll learn:
- Why “failure to launch” may be better understood as delayed independence, and why your young adult may be making progress even if they are still living at home.
- What may be happening emotionally when an adult child appears lazy, unmotivated, withdrawn, defensive, or resistant to help.
- How to tell the difference between supporting your adult child and enabling them, especially when it comes to money, housing, transportation, chores, and daily responsibilities.
- Why small wins, structure, discipline, and follow-through can help a young adult build self-confidence and move toward independence.
- How ADHD, autism, executive functioning challenges, and other forms of neurodivergence can affect a young adult’s path to adulthood, and why that path may look different from the one you expected.
We also talk about why pressure can sometimes make a struggling young adult shut down, why parents may need to reduce the things they are doing for their adult child, and how to set boundaries you are actually prepared to follow through on.
Most importantly, this conversation offers parents a different way to think about a young adult who seems stuck. The goal is not to force your adult child into adulthood on your timeline. It is to help create the conditions where they can begin taking responsibility, building confidence, and moving toward a life that feels like their own.
Contact Hayley and Colin:
Website: nottherapy.me
Email: colin@nottherapycoaching.com ; hayley@nottherapycoaching.com
Instagram: @nottherapycoaching
Free Parent Facebook Group: Not Therapy for Parents
Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs.
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If you want support putting what you’re learning into practice, come join The Connection Community in Bridge to Connection. This is the perfect spot where you can learn, connect and get targeted help to start moving your relationship with your adult child in a different direction. Set up a Connection Clarity Call with Tina to see if this is a good fit for you: CLICK HERE TO SET UP A CALL
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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.
Hey, you're listening to Coaching Your Family Relationships podcast, and I'm Tina Gosni. I'm a family conflict coach and a parent educator. With this interview that you're going to hear today, I interview Colin and Haley from Knot Therapy. And what I really wanted you to get from this episode, what I really wanted to focus on, was getting inside the mind of a young adult who is in a failure-to-launch situation. And this is exactly what Colin and Haley do. They are mentors. They have a company called Knot Therapy where they mentor young adults who are really having trouble moving on and taking those next steps in life to become independent and their own person and to and to create their own life. And so this is your sneak peek, your glimpse behind the scenes from a different perspective than your own into what is happening with your young adult child when they are failing to meet those traditional milestones on time and even in a way that you might think is the right way to do it. So enjoy this interview that I had with Colin and Haley from Not Therapy. I'm here with Colin and Haley from Not Therapy. I'm really looking forward to this conversation that we're going to have today because when I heard from them and heard about the company that they've started, I was so impressed about who they're helping and how they're helping. And I just really wanted to have a conversation today that brings parents in on the inside view of their young adult child's mind, especially when they're like in a failure-to-launch situation. So this will be so helpful for parents to hear like what the perspective is of their child and how they can, how you as a parent can help your child actually move forward and not keep repeating these same patterns that keep us stuck. So Haley and Colin, do you want to go introduce yourselves first before we get started?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Well, Tina, thank you so much for having us on. So I'm Colin, the CEO and co-founder of Not Therapy with Haley. And just want to give a little bit of background on what not therapy is, because I think it gets gives us some credibility in talking on this subject. So we've been a business organization for almost three years. And something that makes us really unique is both Haley and I built this business based on our lived experience. And, you know, for me, when I was, you know, fourth grade, I got started going to therapy. Then once I got into high school, I started kind of being that outward acting kid. And that just kind of led down a path where my parents were getting really frustrated with me. I'm the oldest of three. I was sneaking out, taking my parents' car. And that just led to me having really bad anger management, depression. And when I was 15, I went through a stint of I went to eight different psych boards. I went to rehab. And then when I was 16, my parents decided to send me to wilderness therapy in Utah. And then from there, I went straight to therapeutic boarding school from so from 16 to 18. And especially even before that, I really tried the whole gamut of things of, you know, am I really that bad of a kid? Nothing seems to be working. And, you know, all those experiences had their plus and minuses. The biggest plus is it built a lot of resiliency. But I just remember talking to my parents always and saying, I wish I had a mentor. I wish I had someone that knew what I was going through, that was on the other side of it, that could speak to me and really help me just on a day-to-day basis get through things. And then I met Haley after I spent a stint at being a life coach at a Gap Year program where I lived with a bunch of five, a bunch of 18-year-olds. I live with five of them in an apartment. And I was just trying the things that I thought would work. And when I met Haley, you know, after our first conversation, we had almost identical stories, minus that she has her bachelor's and master's in chemical engineering for Columbia. I didn't quite get to that point. But you know, she went to psych wards and we both dealt with suicidal ideation and went, she went to wilderness and went to therapeutic boarding school. And so we really just wanted to create something that is what we needed. You know, this is really like somewhat of a child inner child healing company. And, you know, what we do is provide seven-day-a-week mentorship in the almost three years that we've been in business. We have 10 employees all across the country that are trained, certified coaches by the ICF, but most importantly, they all have that lived experience. They all have gone through, whether it be wilderness or rehab or you know, eating disorder treatment, whatever it might be. We then partner our clients to work with someone that has similar lived experience that they can pick up the phone and call any day of the week. And uh, you know, we've had a lot of success. We've learned a lot. And, you know, at this point, we've worked with close to a hundred clients all across the United States. And for Haley and I, it it's just like kind of a dream come true. I don't know if like when we were in it that we thought it was what our dream of our work would look like, but you know, it's just really been addressing a need and like a new paradigm of mental health, especially with things like failure to launch coming into the picture.
SPEAKER_01So awesome. I think it really says a lot about how fast your company has grown for the need for what you guys are doing. Three years and having 10 employees and serving over 100 people is a pretty amazing. So I think that really speaks to such a need in families' lives and in young adults and parents' lives that you guys have grown so quickly. So thank you for sharing that. Okay, Haley, give us a uh an update or uh give us an introduction to you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, similar to Colin, you know, I really was struggling with my mental health as really starting as a teenager for me, and to the point where, you know, and so many of our clients are like this, like it may start out as like ADHD, depression, anxiety, but you know, depending on the person for me, kind of spiraled quickly into more, you know, self-destructive behaviors, you know, drug and alcohol abuse, running away from home, that sort of thing. Of just really like, I remember thinking though, even at the time, this is when I was, you know, 14, 15, 16, I was like, oh, damn, I wish I had an older sister. I'm also the oldest of three. I wish I had an older sister who had just been through it and could give me the cheat codes for like what I need to do, what I need to worry about, and what I don't need to worry about. Like I was desperate for that because I was like, I don't like feeling this way. You know, I think that's something that I we remind parents of all the time is that, you know, as much as you hate to see your kid maybe in the position they're in right now, they also don't like being in that position, right? It is like painful, you know, mentally, emotionally, physically. So with that, after I went kind of through my wilderness therapy, therapeutic boarding school, that type of thing, I was sober for many years and an AA, which introduced me to the idea of sponsorship. But for me, it was really more like mentorship, because I just picked an older woman who I was like, damn, she's really cool. She runs multiple businesses. Like I essentially just wanted to be like her. And she was kind of the only person I listened to for my early 20s for a number of years. And it was because she had been in my shoes. And I really, I was like, okay, she has some credibility here. And so for me, when I was, you know, my career, I was, yeah, like Con said, I was in engineering and I worked in tech. I started another uh mental health tech company, had like venture capital backing, a few million dollars, like kind of did, you know, very nonlinear career path until getting to this point. And with not therapy, it was really like, yeah, what does what do the, you know, 16 to 24-year-old versions of ourselves need? And it really was, you know, there's therapy, there's medication, there's all these other things, but specifically mentorship is like the hardest thing to find. And so in creating not therapy, not only were we, you know, passionate and are we passionate about working with these mainly young adults, but also with their parents and families, because for both me and Colin, it was so key to have our parents kind of on the same page as us and having a mindset of, okay, maybe you're struggling right now, but like we believe you can do this, we'll support you, but we're not, but we're also gonna let you fail. So there's, you know, a lot of maybe nuance there and why I'm excited to talk to you and your audience because a lot of our work really does come with the parents. And, you know, we have a parent coach and stuff on our staff, but really it's about how do we get the whole family aligned so that someone, especially who's struggling with failure to launch, often they're still living at home. How do we get them to a point where they feel confident in themselves, can use, you know, whatever they've been through as a foundation to literally launch into a life they're excited about versus using what they've been through as something, you know, as to hold them back or as an excuse not to, you know, go out there into the world.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Yeah, that is awesome. Thank you. So there's a couple things that I want to just point out that I heard you say that I think the audience will appreciate. And that is that you use the same type of system in your business that I use in mine, which is a family systems. And so we can't just, well, it is faster and easier to work on multiple relationships or multiple people in the family than it is to just change one person. But when we do change one, it changes the system. So it forces change into the system, which is helpful to reorganize patterns and to move forward in a different way. But also, you were talking about I wanted a big sister, I wanted a mentor, and so I found this older woman. Did you say it was in AA? That's where you found it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, in that case, it was AA. And then it was kind of a theme throughout the rest of my adult years of like, that's the type of person I always would gravitate towards.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, it's so much easier for us when we have an example of somebody that's done something that we want to do. And when, because when we're going into the dark, it's kind of like I have no idea where to go. So I'm just gonna stay here. So it's so much better to have a mentor, an example. It kind of gives us a map of just like what's the next step? Just I just need to know the next step, right? And to have someone there that can show us how to do that and just shows us a few steps ahead or that is a few steps ahead themselves is so helpful for us as humans, no matter what age we are. But it's that especially in those really important years where you're moving from being a child into adulthood and you're supposed to meet certain adulthood markers and not knowing how to do that. So I love your business model. I love the way that you guys work with families. So thank you so much for offering this to the world. Appreciate you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, thanks. Thanks for letting us, you know, share about it. And yeah, we're we're excited to chat about whatever you think your audience will find most valuable.
SPEAKER_01I do have one question about your company. So I know you guys were both, you said, you know, you gave your histories about residential treatment and therapy. What if a young adult is not has not had the same type of history as you, but they are still in that failure to launch, kind of stuck and not knowing how to move forward. Is that the right person for your for your business model?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I would say we're seeing an increasing number of failure-to-launch people coming into the not therapy ecosystem. You know, for I think right now, like what we're experiencing with failure to launch is kind of something that's more generational. And it's something that maybe wasn't as much of a thing, even when Haley and I were, you know, in our early 20s. And I think the frameworks are somewhat similar in terms of, you know, just having someone that is helping you find the answers that you already have within yourself. And it's all about building self-confidence. And I think sometimes parents get really frustrated because they're like, why is my kid not living up to my standards? But the kid's not even living, or the young adults aren't even living up to their standards. And so for us, it's really just about having someone. So we don't work with anyone that doesn't want to work with us. So even if the loved experience isn't exactly aligned, it's still someone who's in their later 20s, early 30s that has gone through significant challenges to become a person that they're really excited about. And for a young adult, building self-confidence is just about them following through with the things they tell themselves they're gonna do. And so we work with our coaches to really pull those answers out of their clients. And it can be as easier as like as easy as I want to move out of my parents' house, I want to get a job, I want to have new friends. And so just thinking about not just going from point A to point B, but what are all the steps in between that breaks it down into a daily, weekly, and even a monthly, and then thinking six months down the road. But then showing them that by doing the little things, they're gonna build self-confidence and that you can't just go from I live at my parents to I don't live at my parents. There's so many steps in between. And so having someone that's just showing up for them, but then also on the parent side of things, having the parents have boundaries that are actually supporting and not enabling their kid to move in that direction as well, instead of just getting frustrated in the situation that you're in. So I would say, you know, everyone has different lived experience. Obviously, with someone who's going to treatment or wilderness therapy, it's a unique experience. But I think anyone in life, and I've had multiple mentors even throughout my life, where you know, I want to get into a certain industry or I wanted a certain type of job, or I wanted a promotion, or I wanted to learn a certain skill, where just having someone that is somewhere that you want to go, which with failure to launch, it could just be like an independent adult who has a career that is inspiring to you. So I think it it doesn't matter as much. I mean, obviously, when we started our our background is kind of what got us somewhere to where we are, but now you know we're helping so many families that are more in the failure to launch stage.
SPEAKER_01Great. And so you said it's not like I'm living in my parents' house one day and then the next day I'm moving out. Like there's so many steps in between that. But I think, you know, parents come from a very different generation than and very different world climate, financial relationship, everything climate than than the youth have today. And so I think it's really helpful for parents to hear that there's that the same milestones at certain ages might not be appropriate and we might need to reassess some of those milestones and how our child, how they achieve them or when they achieve them. But what are some of the signs of progress and of markers of progress if we're not saying, if we're saying like, you know, okay, they're gonna move out, that's definite progress in a parent's mind. But what are some of the things that they can look for before that to see that my child is moving in the right direction? And maybe that's gonna be our end goal as we move along these steps.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think I mean, I I was literally just writing an article about this last week, but I'm really starting to see failure to launch more as kind of what you alluded to, which is just this delayed independence. So, like some of these milestones have just been delayed. It's not that they'll never achieve them, it's that maybe, especially compared to maybe their parents' generation, you know, they're achieving them later. So stuff like moving out the financial independence, et cetera. So it all depends on when we're working with anyone, like where that person is like currently. So that's where we're gonna start. So sometimes we have, you know, are working with young people who are pretty like neurodivergent on the spectrum and they're even having trouble, like they're living at home, they're an adult, but they're having trouble even brushing their teeth and like showering every single day, right? And if what they need is someone to remind them to do that, to call them in the mornings, help them get up, like that type of thing, like that is step one. Like we can't go out and get a job and move out if we're not brushing our teeth every day. That might be an extreme example, but we have worked with that where like that is the starting point. So we can kind of go from like that scenario all the way up to, all right, now what is it that you actually, what do you want your life to actually look like? Is it a job? Is it learning a certain skill? Is it going to school? What is that? Everyone wants the independence, but like what are the specifics? You know, what are you passionate about? That type of thing. What skills do you have? What are you already good at? And from there we can kind of reverse engineer, you know, is it, do we need to enroll in some community college classes? Do we need to start with a part-time job that's, you know, at a restaurant or something? Do you already have a resume and are can we apply to, you know, maybe a more like white collar-esque job? Like, how are we essentially are like, can we just reverse engineer where you want to where you want to get from based on like their own personal interests and where they're starting, if that makes sense? But it's never, you know, moving out all of a sudden. Like, I mean, even at the soonest with some of our clients, you know, that's gonna take the better part of if they're starting, especially with no job, like that's gonna take the better part of maybe six months to a year, right? To get to that fully independence point. But if they've been living at home for multiple years in their 20s, that time period isn't actually that long to kind of get them activated and launch.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great. So if a parent is only seeing them moving out as progress, what kind of pressure does that put on the child then?
SPEAKER_00I think that, you know, most young adults they want to move out. And it's all it's like I said before, it's point A to point B, and you're only focused on point B, right? You're not seeing that your child finally did a resume or they applied to 10 jobs this week and they have two job interviews. That is where your child is feeling like they're making progress, but then you're so focused on this endpoint that there's no necessarily a timeline. Like we can't work with the family and promise, hey, we in three months, we promise that your kid's gonna move out. Because when you put that type of pressure on them, they might move out just because they feel like they need to and put themselves in a situation where they're not actually set up for success. Right. And so it's about as a parent, I feel like we're we're always trying to get them to zoom out and just reframe and just think like, is your child making progress? Like, are they in a better situation at the that they were at the beginning of month one to the end of month one? Right. Like, hey, your kid applied to 25 jobs, had three interviews, they might not have a job yet, but this is the most effort that they've put into getting a job in a long time, right? And so I think for a parent, you need to zoom out a little bit and not put so much pressure on it. And also, I think as a parent, you know, when by the time your kid, up until your kid turns 16, you're kind of the director of their life. And then once they go, maybe after 18, but I would say after 16, you want to start being the guide for their life. And so when you're putting all that pressure on them, you're still kind of being the director and you're almost uh not empowering them to move towards independence because they're like everything I do is just making it so it's like I'm not good enough to be able to live up to my parents' standards and you need to meet them where they're at and like find a middle ground where if your child comes to you and says, Hey, this is what I've been working on, that you're actually like really excited for them because you see that that's progress and not just putting pressure because the progress isn't living up to your standards.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, really good point. That and they will react to the pressure that you put on them, right? And I don't remember which one of you mentioned that like you don't want to see your child stuck, but they also don't want to be stuck, right? So, what goes on inside of their own mind when they see themselves as stuck and they see maybe, you know, like their friends or their siblings, maybe that even are younger than them, moving on and taking on those adult responsibilities and moving on with their making, you know, meeting those milestones and moving on with their life. Like what's happening inside the mind and body of that child that feels stuck?
SPEAKER_03I mean, I think like in some ways it can be similar to the parents, just mentally, right? Where it's like, oh, I see all my friends doing this, or I want to get to this point. It seems so far from where they're currently at that what are the steps in between that I need to take? Like it just gets totally lost because it's so overwhelming. So, like mentally, I think it's overwhelm. Emotionally, you know, depending on their situation, kind of how their parents are responding to where they're at, a lot of our clients deal with that kind of guilt and shame that can keep them really, really stuck. I know for me, when I'm kind of in those emotions, it's so hard to figure out a pathway out because they feel kind of so big and you feel so incapable that you know almost everything seems impossible. And so that's where in my own life a mentor has been super helpful of like, like I remember even one time I talked to one of my mentors and it's like, I want to start a company, you know? And it's like, okay, first of all, in what? Like doing what? Second of all, like with what money? And also, like, why would like what's the why behind this? You know, there were so many other things that, and you need these skills and management experience and all this stuff that I just couldn't really see because it's such a big goal ahead of where I'm at, that having someone who had started their own company in that case break it down for me down to where I was at that day. And what do I need to do on a daily basis to kind of start working towards this bigger goal was so, so helpful. So I think that's why we focus on keeping it so simple to try to take some of that like guilt and shame out of just the day-to-day of, hey, you did get up, shower, brush your teeth, you know, apply for some jobs today and like, you know, mow the lawn or whatever it is. Those were the things you said you were gonna do. Awesome, great. And like it can we get the parents on board also with praising those things and celebrating those wins. Again, even though it's not the big win they want yet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I I like how you brought up the The guilt and shame that lives inside the young adult because I think that's a universal experience in different types of situations in all humans. So I think we can all kind of relate to what it feels like to be stuck encircling in those emotions and not be able to see a way out. I also like how you brought up that, hey, let's just look at the small little wins. Let's look at the progress that is being made instead of being focused on all these big giant things that haven't happened yet. But if we could start focusing on these small wins and just like repeat them every day, like that's a big win in itself. And that helps us to get out of that cycle of guilt and shame too. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Definitely.
SPEAKER_01What do you think? So how do you use like motivation? Is there any do you talk about that in your program? Like how to help motivate these kids?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think kind of like I said at the beginning, building self-confidence in a young adult is about them falling through with the things that they tell themselves that they're going to do. And so we're constantly asking, and when we were working with the family, the client or the young adult has a coach and the parents have a coach and they're separate, right? And so we're able to tell our clients and the young adults that we work with, like, hey, I'm just here to help you. Like, and we are working with your parents too, so that they can show up and support you better as well. So then there's a little bit of safety with the client knowing that, like, oh, I have my person that is gonna answer the phone, pick up the FaceTimes, answer my text every single day. But then when you're not able to follow through with the things that you tell yourself you're gonna do, it's not so much that we're holding them to a standard that's not theirs, we're holding them to their own standard. And so then the question, the question we're asking them is like, what's stopping you from doing the things that you want to do? And so I think for us, we're also not tied to a specific path, right? Like I feel like when we first meet them, they're gonna have these big goals, but we're gonna know very quickly in the first week or two if those aren't the goals. So also finding the bar that they're at and then building from there and not judging them for not following through, but also holding them accountable to what they say they're gonna do. But I always just kind of think about it it's like, how quickly can we just get you back on the saddle? Like a bad day doesn't mean it's a bad week, a bad week doesn't mean it's a bad month, but a bad week, a bad day can turn into a good day really quickly, right? And so, like, how can we just get them back on track as quick as possible with one win the next day or a couple of wins? And I think when one of the hardest things for a young adult with motivation is like structure feels a little overwhelming. But when you were talking earlier about, you know, that older sibling or a friend that is a lot further ahead in the young adult's mind, it's probably because that person just has a lot of structure that's allowing them to make pursuing their goals a little bit easier. And I think sometimes for people in a failure of talent situation, creating structure for themselves is really challenging. But if you can tie structure to what their self-defined goals are, that's inherently gonna help build their self-confidence and motivate them.
SPEAKER_03And I I think just to add on the motivation piece, like the motivation is gonna come in like it's in verse, right? Like when you do something and you get immediate validation from it, you feel good about it, whatever, like that will kind of keep the motivation going. On the days where you aren't seeing any results and you did apply to 10 jobs and you have been applying all week and all month and like haven't gotten anything yet. I mean, then that takes like the daily, what Colin's talking about, the discipline and the structure, where that's where the mentorship can be so helpful, at least for me or for any of our clients, if they're, you know, if they're neurotypical, neurodivergent, but especially the neurodivergent ones. It's like we can just sit there with you on the phone and help you apply to these, like while you apply to these jobs. We can do like basic kind of executive functioning, you know, body doubling skills, that type of thing to keep them kind of because sometimes you do need that external, you know, validation and push to stay disciplined day to day until you get those results. Because again, the bigger the goal, the longer it can take to get to that actual, you know, end outcome. So that's where I find it's helpful is just we're almost just helping them see like what discipline feels like, even when they aren't getting the wins. So then eventually, you know, they don't need us to be like calling them every single day to get them to do something that they've now practiced it.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. So we we have the child here trying to learn motivation and discipline, trying to create different patterns in their lives and move forward. And then there's the parent who's like, I got to keep pressure on them, I have to keep on them. If I how do I let go? Am I enabling them if I just let go? And so it can be really confusing for the parent to know, when do I step in? When do I let go? Right. And all of these things can be really confusing. And I don't think that there's one set answer for that. But how do you help parents see that difference between supporting them and enabling them?
SPEAKER_00I think one thing I always like to call out when I'm talking to a parent is reflecting on how they grew up and how different that was from the time that their kids growing up. I can't tell you how many parents I talked to where they're like, my kids so lazy, they're so ungrateful. And then I'll say, like, well, let me guess, you started working when you were 12 years old and like you, you know, worked super hard to provide this life for your family that has been a lot easier than the life that you grew up in, right? And they're like, oh yeah, I mean, my parents never checked my location and I didn't even have a curfew. And so I think helping them just realize like, what are maybe the two or three things that are actually getting you super upset instead of the whole entire situation? Like it's like, well, my kid doesn't pick up around the house at all, or you know, I pay for my kid's entire life. And then creating specific boundaries around those two or three things, and then kind of letting go of the rest of the expectations. And also, like I said before, it's viewing the progress because once your kid starts feeling like they're moving in the right direction, we also have seen so many times that the kid and the will be more likely to share their wins with you. But when the the child or the young adult is not in a place where they're feeling like happy or motivated about their life, that's when they're being secluded and they're not sharing things with you. So I think it's once again about zooming out, but also just what are the things that you're doing? For example, like your kid wants to get a car or something. And part of you is just like, well, if I buy them the car, it's gonna make it so much easier for them to drive to these jobs interviews, and then I don't really have to worry about it. But that's not teaching them any resiliency or hard work or discipline towards earning something that they want. And that's something that your kid has probably been lacking, is they haven't really earned a lot and you've earned a lot. So you're making that so they don't have to earn a lot. And so, how can we just kind of switch that on its head? A lot of parents that are kind of in this failure of the launch phase, they give their kid an allowance and there's nothing tied to the allowance. And then their kid comes back and asks them for more money, and they're like, What are you doing with the $75 a week I'm giving you? So, what are the things that that's what's bothering you? How do you make it so you actually make them do a checklist of things before you give them their allowance, or they have to show you their grades before they get their allowance? Like there, it's I feel like it's not rocket science, but it's just taking some time to reflect on the difference between your childhood and what your child's current childhood looks like or you know, young adulthood, and then figuring out, oh, okay, things worked out with my parents when they were less, let's call it like authoritative or enabling. And then how can I one implement some of that in my own child, but then also rec recognize the things that are really getting me upset so that I can hold boundaries with that, where it's very simple for my child to understand what are the things that trigger me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I I think too, just to dive in on that is just systematically like reducing the things that you're doing for your kid and like communicating to your kid that that is what you're doing. So if you're doing literally everything for your kid and they're living out, maybe it starts with, I'm no longer doing your laundry. You can walk downstairs, you can do it yourself. Like, I'm excited because you're an adult and you can do this, like I support you. So we are almost never like, okay, just stop everything. Cause I think that's like where some as your kid can get overwhelmed with like, I have to do so much in order to get to this outcome. Parents can too of like, but I'm supporting everything or I'm doing all these things. And I want to get to the outcome of not doing any of that. So we have to also do kind of the systematic reduction in all those accommodations they're making for their kid.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so good. I I want to go back to a little bit to what Colin said about like you're you grew up in a very different time than your child did, different circumstances, different type of family. Because a lot of the parents that I talk to say the very thing that you just said, Colin, which was like, I got a job when I was so young and I was independent and I supported myself and I did all these things, and my kid is not doing any of those, and I've given them all these things, right? So, you know, decades ago, we started anxiously focusing on our children and giving awards for everybody got a trophy, you know, that generation. It's that you didn't really have to earn anything, you were just forgiven it. And there was just like parents focusing on their children to a point where they weren't letting them fail as children and developing resilience and because we develop confidence through failing, picking ourselves back up again and figuring it out. And when we didn't allow our children to do that, we really did a disservice in a lot of ways, even though it felt very loving and culturally appropriate at the time. But I think we're seeing some of the effects of that now and what you're talking about, in that a lot of young adults don't have confidence in themselves. They haven't ever developed like a strong sense of who they are. They haven't been allowed to fail and they've been given a lot and hadn't didn't have to really work hard for stuff. So again, that goes back to like what family system did you grow up in? What were you promoting and what were the parents overdoing and over functioning for their child because they loved them, right? Because this is, I usually talk to a lot of parents that really loved their children. But we do need to kind of look at that bigger picture. What was the ecosystem that your child grew up in? And then how is that affecting them now? And can we get them back developmentally where they are meant to be at this time in their life? And how do we do that? But we have to step out and have to give up some of that control that we've had before. We have to deal with our as parents, we have to deal with our own anxieties about letting go and be willing to let them fail at some things in order for them to learn how to succeed.
SPEAKER_00And I agree with that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's it's interesting that you say, like, you know, how do we kind of step out of that like ecosystem? Because I think, like, as parents, you know, there's so so many come to us. And this makes sense. Like, I think if I were a parent, this is how I would be initially approach it, is like, my kid isn't doing this, this, this, and this. Like it's very focused on the kid. Whereas, like, I was reading last week, they've literally done like clinical trials on around just parent like intervention on just parent behavior and what the impact has on not only like young kids who have like anxious attachment stuff, but also on adults who how that manifests is in kind of these failure-to-launch scenarios, once you know, your kid maybe anxiously attached or super dependent in emotional ways, comes into adulthood. And like they found that just by parents doing really what we've been talking about this whole podcast, which is like educating yourself on where your kid is at, just to get some kind of like objective information in there, actually, then you know, reducing your accommodations, like look at what you're accommodating, reduce, start reducing them for your kid. Um, and then just mainly focusing on your own attitude towards your kids. So turning it into an attitude of like support and positive belief rather than like they aren't doing this or they can't do this because they're gonna pick up on that. And then just kind of recruiting your own supporters as a parent. So that could be a parent, like a parent coach or something, but it could also just be friends, right? Like I'm sure like you can find one other person in your immediate or kind of external circle where maybe their kid is struggling with something like this too, and having someone kind of, you know, in your lane who's going through something similar, I see as being super important to parents, but they found that like they can change these kids' behavior without at all intervening, like with the actual kid and just focusing on parent behavior.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love how you brought up that you read a research study because I've read so many of those research studies that you're talking about. Yeah. So I I really hear you. And I've I've read that same same research. Colin, did you have something you wanted to say?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's just interesting with parents. I do feel like it's really confusing. And the question I always am thinking about is how do you create the discipline that their parents grew up with? But then what those parents didn't grow up with was the emotional support. But then I feel like we've switched so far into too much emotional support and not enough discipline. Like, you know, how many parents can say, like, oh man, my dad was so strict, and if I had ever talked that way to my parents, I would have, you know, gotten in a lot of trouble or grounded for a month or, you know, would have gone to military school or something like that. And so I think it's somewhat we want to keep the emotional support. But then when you give too much emotional support, the amount of parents that come to me and say, I would have never talked to my parents like that. But you're also not able to create the discipline where they're somewhat like not wanting to share everything. But at the same time, I think in this generation, you want to help them create the discipline to move towards independence. And that's what we're missing. But at the same time, I always think that communication between young adult and a parent is so important, especially when they move to independence, because you would rather your kid reach out to you when they're really struggling because you, you know, harbored the sense of communication and safety with your kid. Because at home, you want to start building that before they actually launch into independence. Because, you know, when I went to college, right after I went to a boarding school, my parents didn't really have any roles, minus, you know, you have to go to college. But we're not going to judge you. We want to be the first people that you call when something happens. And so whenever I was really struggling, honestly, when I hit my lowest moments, that's when I would call my parents and they were always super supportive and wanting to talk through things with me. Because otherwise, if you're kind of putting all this pressure on your kid, by the time they finally launch, they're going to be afraid to express failure to you. And then I feel like parents are so overly emotionally attached and helping their kid because they're so afraid of their failure, but they need to fail. So you need to have the communication so that when they do fail, that's when you can step in as a guide and as a parent and help them make better decisions.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And what you're describing takes so much work on the parent's part, right? To be able to like keep those lines of communication open without judging, be there as a support and let go, but also let their child fail, because we've also culturally defined good parenting as a child that is successful. And so allowing your child to fail feels like a bad reflection on a parent. And so, in my experience, often we are trying to manage our children's lives so that we can manage our own feeling of identity and self and success too. Why, you know, sometimes when parents approach their child that's failure to lunch and they're like, hey, we want you to do this and this and this, and they're like, you know, giving them maybe some some, I don't want to say ultimatums, but sometimes they sound like ultimatums, right? Or they're just saying, hey, you need to be doing this. Why can you give us a glimpse inside what's happening for that young adult when they become defensive and angry, or maybe just stop even talking to their parent?
SPEAKER_00I think a big part of it is that oftentimes your child's expectations are just a lot different than your expectations. I would say where I see it the most is when their child starts doing better in their own mind, but it's still not living up to the parents' expectations. And so there's no middle ground. And so then all of a sudden, when you're giving your child these ultimatums, the amount of times where the child's gonna say, Well, I'm doing great, like I'm actually happy, things are going well, but it's still not living up to your parents' expectations, then there's this like battle that happens just because you're not on the same page. And so I think that's where we see a lot of that happening, is just the parents' expectations are here, the child's expectations are here, and we need to meet in the middle somewhere. And it also needs to be like an open conversation, especially if you think, I mean, I would say a big thing with failure to launch kids or young adults, sorry, is you know, they're over 18 usually. And so they want to be treated like adults. And when you're giving them all these ultimatums and you're saying, Well, this is my house, then they're always gonna uh fire back and say, Well, I'm your child, like you don't want me to live here, you don't care about me. Instead of how can we create ultimatums that also have some incentives behind them? Where, you know, where I've seen it work the best is especially most people in a failure-to-launch situation, they're not gonna get a salary job in the next year that's gonna allow them to be fully independent. And so it's kind of this negotiation that you have to have with your child of what I've seen work really well is hey, if you're doing this, this, and this based on something that we agree on, I'm totally down to put down a first month's deposit and pay half your rent for the first three months you live there while you're kind of building up your savings or something like, hey, you know, let me take 20% of your paycheck. The rest of the money is yours. I would love to learn you how to budget, but I'm saving this money so you can move out because you're telling me that that's what you want and I want to support you in the things that you want. So I think it's just like almost a negotiation and also parents not being on the same page as their kid. And that goes back to the communication. Like, how can you how can you get to a place of communication with your kid where they know they feel that you know or that they know that you want what's best for them? And like you said, it takes a long time. But I think that's where just hearing your child out and not coming from a place of resentment because they're not meeting your expectations. And I think where we see the most success with families is where we're able to rewire and reframe just kind of how they're approaching talking to their child and also approaching conflict as well. Like if they're like the things that haven't worked are the things that are usually going to trigger you when you're trying to make it work. So, how can you reframe that where you know your child missed an interview that and you're wanting them to get a job? How can you have a conversation with them about why they missed the interview? Was it about that they actually didn't really want the job and they just took the interview because you know how much they wanted a job, and then refocus that energy into, well, why don't we help you find a job that you actually really want so that you're actually excited about this next phase? And I think sometimes your child's gonna try and live up to your expectations, but they'll never meet them to what your expectations are. And so it's always just about meeting where they're at, having effective communication and so that you're guiding them and supporting them in the next phase. And you're not just saying, like we have some parents that will not want their kid to have a certain job, but the kid's really excited about the job, right? And so it's just kind of a trial and error thing until you figure out how to, you know, hit that mark of effective communication with your child.
SPEAKER_03I think if we think about too, like something we always say to parents is right now you're you're practicing and setting up for a lifelong relationship with your adult child. Like if everything goes well, the majority of your relationship with your child and your lifetime will be with them as an adult. So really, if we're thinking about, okay, yes, like how can you support them and get on the same page? The point of that is so you can have this long-term relationship with them. So if you're thinking from about it from that perspective, and we'll even talk to like the young adults about this too, of like, let's say your parents don't change really. Do you want like a relationship with a mom, a dad, who uh, you know, a caregiver, whoever? If yes, which almost always it's yes, okay, this is the one you have, or these are the ones you have. So how do you kind of come to terms internally, either set boundaries with them or just like have, you know, your own internal agreement with how you're going to communicate with them, really. How can you kind of set that up so you can have this relationship with your mom and dad for the rest of you know your their life? So thinking about it from that lens, which is really what Colin is saying, uh is usually part of that kind of helpful reframe.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's and I can see like the parent approaches their parents trying to do something different, right? They're trying to show up differently, trying to uh use different words and uh and be Curious and come to their child and ask them something, and then that's new for the child. And so they're reacting with old the old anger and dismissiveness and defensiveness, and then that triggers the parent back into the old pattern, too. I think that's a super easy scenario to see. And the one that is gonna be the that's the that's the pattern that we're trying to change, right? So and and Haley, what you were talking about before is like if the parent, that research study, you know, the parent shows up differently, and if they can hold on to that that new way that they are showing up in the relationship, then it shifts the child. But I think that sometimes we give up too early and we get reactive in in their reactivity, like their defensiveness, and we get then we get defensive or we get more angry, so we get dragged back into those old patterns. I think it's a a matter of trying over and over again. I don't think it's this is one something you try once and you're like mastering it. I don't know anybody that can do that. I think it's a matter of showing up again and again and trying again and again and looking at your own reactions. And I like what you were describing about okay, these are the parents that you have, even if if they don't change, how do you have a relationship with them? Which could be possible because parents get really stuck in the way that they think and the way that they interact. And it's for some parents, I know it's really difficult to think, even think about changing that. And so this is when we have, you know, like a boundaries conversation, which is what you were talking about. I don't think that you said the word boundaries, but that was what I was in my mind as you were talking about that. Like, how do I maintain a relationship with them, but still maintain my sense of identity and my individuality and the things that I want for myself.
SPEAKER_00One thing I would add about the boundaries conversation is I think where it also isn't, I think that that's one of the most effective things you can do. But then in order to show up differently as a parent, you have to be willing to fall through with the boundaries. Cause every time you don't fall through with the boundaries, then your child is going to say, Well, my mom always says that type of stuff, but she actually never does it. And I think sometimes the hardest one with a failure to launch situation is saying, like, if you don't figure this out or I'm not seeing progress in a month or so, like you can't live here anymore. And I know as a parent that seems so hard to, you know, kick your kid on the streets or something, but I've actually seen it with multiple families and some of our most successful clients is when a parent actually holds that boundary, what ends up happening is your child is gonna like be like, fine, I'm leaving, right? And then they're gonna go couch surf at their friends for at most a week, I would say one to two days, and instantly be like, wow, my life was way better when I was living at my parents. And so then when they come back home, they're more like, okay, I'm willing to do the things that you want right now, right? And I think with parents, there's just a lot of fear of, oh, like around it's almost like homelessness, like that you feel like if you hold this boundary that your kid can't live at your house anymore, that all of a sudden they're gonna be homeless and a drug addict and you're never gonna see them again. But if you've been supportive in providing your child a life that is honestly somewhat privileged or super privileged, they're gonna be in an uncomfortable situation, maybe for the first time in their life. And then they're gonna realize somewhat how good they had it to some extent, and then come back and kind of work with you to get the end goal that you're working towards. Or it could work the other way where their back is super against the wall and they start doing it on their own without you. And then they come back to you and they're like, hey, I got this job. Can I move back in? You know, I'm working now. And so I've seen it work really effectively. I'm not saying it's for every situation, but sometimes you need to put your child's back against a wall a little bit. It doesn't mean if you're gonna do something like that, it doesn't mean that you're saying, I don't love you anymore. It's just, hey, this is not working. And as your parent, I'm doing you a disservice by enabling you to not do anything. And so I think sometimes with boundaries, you have to be able to follow through with the boundary because otherwise when your kid realizes that the boundaries aren't gonna stick, you're essentially walking on eggshells around your child. And I also think that you're kind of a prisoner in your own house to some extent because you've lost control as a parent, and now you have a 23-year-old who's just getting mad at you, you know, doing all these things that are really upsetting you, and you've kind of lost some control as not just a parent, but as a guide because they're not feeling that you have their best intent.
SPEAKER_01So you as a parent, you better be really intentional about the kind of boundaries that you put into place. Do you have any advice for parents about the kind of boundaries that they do put in put into their relationship?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think like again, depends on where they're starting, right? And so if they're covering everything, if they're doing everything for their kid, we're gonna start small with like, we're not doing their laundry anymore, not picking up the towels off the floor, cleaning their room, that type of thing. Like, as Fallen said, you have to be willing to follow through on those boundaries. So we're saying like pick the easiest one, where if they don't do the thing you want them to do that you've been doing for them, like you can kind of live with it, you know, close their door. You don't have to see the mess. Like, like, you know, if their clothes smell, a friend will eventually tell them or their siblings or you, but like just let it happen, you know? So pick the kind of easiest one where you can kind of live with the result either way. And then you can kind of work to it. And I do think, you know, I mean, my dad even has this rule of like, if you live with us more than two weeks as an adult, you're paying rent. So like it can go up to that point, but just start as small as possible, I would say. And my other suggestion, which this is why we have at Not Therapy, a parent coach that works with all the parents. And, you know, they have a family manager, is what we call them, who is, you know, their day-to-day point of contact if they're freaking out about holding boundaries or it isn't going as planned. And we have weekly parent support groups of all of the parents we work with. So, like this idea that, you know, we're kind of taking the shame away from going through this as a parent because we're doing it as a group. You have support, you need to get that support. So I would encourage parents to even be open about what you're going through with friends or other family members so that you can have someone to call or text, you know, as you would hope your kid would when you're struggling holding those boundaries or with whatever you're doing, you know, for your kid or stop doing for them, so that you can just call them and kind of vent it out or get support rather than reversing, you know, the work that you're trying to do at home.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Or venting on your child too. Yeah. Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00I have uh two thoughts. One with what Haley was just saying, but then also with a boundary. I think for us, the reason our service is seven days a week is because we would rather when they have that first conversation of them showing up differently and it doesn't go well, they can process it right then after the conversation, instead of like, you know, we help tons of our clients find therapy, therapists. Tons of our clients already have therapists. So we're not saying that you shouldn't go to therapy, but there's a big difference between, let's say that's something you're working on with your therapist, and then you try it and then it doesn't work, and then you have to try it four times before you can next time you talk to your therapist. And so I think that's a big difference in you being able to, like Haley's saying, process it in the moment. I also feel like with boundaries, one of the easiest ones, if you feel like things aren't really good at going well, is just like looking at what you are providing, not even the laundry piece, but it's usually from a financial aspect. You're paying for their car, you're paying for all their gas, you're paying for their phone. And so essentially, like if you stop paying for some of those things, of course, your child is going to be upset, but that's like the quickest way to get them to make take action because all of a sudden they don't have a phone, or all of a sudden they can't drive their car unless they're putting gas in it. And I think also when we talk about those types of things, if we're when I talk about looking at progress, it doesn't have to be like all of a sudden your kid has a full-time job. Uh, I worked with a client and you know, he was kind of in a more intense situation of failure to launch. And we just got him doing things on next door. But his parents were seeing him earning, you know, $250 a week. And then that led to him getting a part-time job. Now he has a full-time job, actually was independent for a while, but then he started earning money and got to this point of saying, I want to be truly independent and I need to save money. And now he works for an assisted care living place, makes $25 an hour. And because he proved to his parents that things were moving in the right direction, they were like, we want you to move back in so you can save money to actually be fully independent. So I think just little steps like that, but they also held a financial boundary where if you were going to provide you these types of financial luxuries, let's call them, you have to show us that you somewhat deserve them. And that's what he did is like, you know, if he the first couple of months where he's paying rent, they put the deposit down, but he had to pay for half the rent and it was a month-to-month place. And then once he paid half, the parents would pay half. And so you're meeting them in the middle around finances as well. But if it's not working, I feel like that's one of the easiest boundaries where there's not a big discussion around it. You're saying, no, this is I I pay for your phone. I pay for your car. It's not yours. And that's just a life lesson that they need to learn, also.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I can hear parents as they're listening to you, Colin, saying, Well, if I stop paying for their phone, how am I going to get a hold of them? Or if I stop paying for their car, then they're going to have, I'm going to have to drive them all around, right? So these are the types of things that as a parent, you have to be ready to deal with holding onto that boundary and ready to be dealing with, okay, what does it mean if I take away the phone or stop paying for the phone? What does it mean if I stop paying for the car and they don't have a car or I stop paying their insurance or whatever it is? Like that's, you know, that's like you decide what you can live with and what you can't. And also if you're going to do one of those things, then are you ready to follow through with it? And what will that create for you in your life? How do you handle then your discomfort or your inconvenience for the things that you're taking away from them? And that's the parent's job to figure out, not to like back track on that boundary or to or to put the or to blame their child for the the decision that the parent made. Yeah. I want to pivot. I know we have our time is a few more minutes. So I want to go to one thing that you guys have mentioned a couple of times is that you work with neuro neurodivergence and you have some of those kids that are coming in. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that might look like and what the difference is between someone that is not neurodivergent and someone that is, and what the parents need to know about that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think I mean we didn't really set it up this way, but it's like over 80% of our clients have a diagnosis of either ADHD or autism or both. And, you know, all of I think probably all of our coaches, us included, like have been diagnosed with at least ADHD, among many other things. So, you know, I guess it makes sense based on our lived experience that these are the types of clients and families, you know, we we attracted. But I think for me, even just understanding like my and let's say neurodivergence, one thing that helped me just kind of get a hold of like what I need to do to function in life was just thinking about it as, you know, I'm connecting the dots of life or like information in a way that is maybe just different than a lot of my peers. And instead of being like, I'm dumb or I can't do it, or I'm so bad at executive functioning, executive functioning is just like at its core. How do you get stuff done that you say you're gonna do really? And there's all these different techniques you can do for it. However, so that's why I mentioned earlier body doubling. If someone's really struggling to get that resume, or I've sat with girls like online while they're finishing their last month of online high school, and like I'll just answer my emails and do my work while they're like doing their schoolwork and stuff. So it can be, we'll use actual skills like that. But you know, what it looks like is typically their path to independence or success is probably just gonna look different or have different steps than maybe the par their parents would take. Like if you gave the parents the same situation, same goal. It just they might have a more linear path and they just have more lived experience of reaching their own goals. So I always just more think of it less of like this is a diagnosis that changes everything, and more. We just have to find how are you connecting the dots in your life and what is the path that's gonna work for you specifically. And it will look different depending on the neurodivergent, you know, young adult themselves, too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love how you put that because I have a lot of neurodivergent people in my family. And so looking at it as like this is how we connect the dots differently has been really helpful for us as we've learned to to manage things a little differently and how things look differently in our family. Colin, do you have anything to add for that one?
SPEAKER_00I just think, you know, we do have a lot of neurodivergent clients, but what we're doing is customized to each client. Like we really are just focusing on four areas. One is that lived experience mentor, that mentor in your life that you can literally talk to as much as you want. There's no set amount of calls we have. And so it's just someone that's not a parent, that's not a therapist, that they choose to be a guide in their life. And if they can build that connection with their coach or mentor and they can become a good influence in their life, that's obviously one of the biggest markers for success. The second one, and that goes along with them connecting their own dots, is helping them find a community of like-minded individuals. So that could be through a job or college, but that could also be through asking them what their interests are and just encouraging them to look into their interests a little bit more. The and because every young adult these days, I would say one of their biggest things that they're challenged with is making friends. The third one is just that executive functioning organization piece. And that looks different for everyone, right? Like I'm a big use my Google Calendar checklist guy. But for a lot of our clients, it's gonna look different for them. And we're gonna just figure out what works for them and help them connect the dots. And then the fourth one, and that's where the parent part comes in, is just like, how do you maintain a baseline of trust and allow your kid to feel like your parents are in your corner? Because you ultimately want the same thing as your kid. It might just look a little different, but I guarantee every single young adult in a failure-to-launch situation wants independence. And if they say they don't, that will only last so long. And then all of a sudden they're gonna feel like they're behind and they do want that independence, but their life is just pretty easy where it just seems really challenging for them to do that. So it doesn't really like look a whole lot different, you know, and we're not trying to specialize in really intense diagnosis. Like we, like I said, help our clients find therapists. We just think it's really important to approach each person that they all have their differences. And how do we figure out how their differences can be their superpower? Because then when they really own who they are, that's when life starts to move up into the right form.
SPEAKER_01Excellent. I love how you meet people where they are. Is it usually the parent or the young adult that contacts you first? Do you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they're the parents are usually the ones that find us first. Obviously, you know, unfortunately, we're not private pay. So there's like a somewhat of a financial obligation that we need to talk to the parents through. So we kind of explain what the program looks like. And then when we're talking to the teen or young adult, it's a much simpler conversation where it's just about their goals and do they like their coach. So the process is, you know, the parents reach out. I usually talk to the parents, then after that, the teen or young adult talks to their coach, and then actually they are the ones that say they want to move forward. And then we have kind of an onboarding process. But I did just want to say before we wrap up, you know, anyone who's listening to this podcast, I've literally both Haley and I have spoken to hundreds of parents. We've spoken on panels, we've been keynote speakers, and we're happy to talk to any parent for free. So don't think that by having a conversation with us, it means you have to become a client or anything. We got into this because this is what we needed and this is what our parents needed. And so we'd rather have one good conversation that maybe shifts some perspective. We also have been on a ton of these podcasts. This podcast is now an amazing resource. Haley has an amazing blog that she writes on a weekly basis. So we also have a ton of free resources that we're happy to share with parents because we would rather have a conversation than not have a conversation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great. Thank you. Okay, last question for you, maybe. I'm gonna say it's the last one on no promises, though. Okay, so what would you tell the parent that's listening today? They have a 22-year-old that isn't like they say they're not doing anything, they refuse to get any help. This parent says, I have tried everything and I don't know what to do. What would you tell them right now?
SPEAKER_03Well, I it it can depend on the situation, but I usually, you know, how we approach it with our clients, especially if they seem like they don't have really goals or anything, right? Or like they're not motivated to do anything is really truly having a curious conversation with them, which as a parent maybe is hard to like not expect an outcome. But okay, what do you genuinely enjoy doing, like on a day-to-day basis? What have you done in the past that like makes you feel proud of yourself? And asking, like, truly maybe those two simple questions. Um and really having like that needs to be the first conversation. And it doesn't need to be immediately, okay, well, because of that, you love rock climbing, let's sign you up for a rock climbing gym. Like, let's do this, let's do the resume. Just like let's help them start thinking about what actually brings them joy, like maybe as cliche as that sounds, but like what does bring them joy and pride in themselves in their life? Because they might not have just like thought about that, you know, or had someone ask them that in a while. So that's always a good place, I think, to start. Because I'm much more motivated to do things that I enjoy doing than like things I'm not. So we need to figure out what it is that's going to eventually motivate them.
SPEAKER_00I think that's the best starting point. I think also just remembering that the path that you're on is already somewhat of in your mind the path path less taken, and accepting that the path is not linear and the path is not exactly how you thought it was going to look compared to your childhood or even some of your other kids. And so then, based on that conversation, then that is the first step in starting to create that path. I think, you know, through from that conversation, you can learn some things about your child. And then that's when you can maybe make suggestions based on their interests, not just suggestions based on them moving out of their house, uh out of your house. And then also that's a great place to start with finding a mentor, finding a third party that can come in and it's built on their interests. And I think it's one of those questions where then you're like, hey, would you be open to like finding someone that could talk to you about this stuff? And and I feel like a lot of parents, when they come to us, also the child is really burnt out of therapy. So it's kind of an outside the box approach of using their interests to motivate them to move in the right direction. And that's really the first step.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for this great conversation. I know that it's gonna help a lot of parents to just see this from a different perspective. And I really appreciate you guys sharing your time with us today.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, thanks for having us, Tina. And uh yeah, any parent can find us at not therapy.me, M E or email us, you know, Haley or Colin at not therapycoaching.com, and we're happy to set up a call with any parent.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for sharing that. And those links will then will be in the show notes also as we put this episode together. So thanks so much again, Haley and Colin. I appreciate your time.
SPEAKER_03Thanks, Tina.