Latest / LAUNCH: Parenting Tips for Raising Adult Children & Building Better Relationships / #88: Why Your Adult Child Isn't Launching: What Parents Need to Know with Psychologist Dr. Mark McConville, Author of Failure to Launch

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#88: Why Your Adult Child Isn't Launching: What Parents Need to Know with Psychologist Dr. Mark McConville, Author of Failure to Launch · LAUNCH: Parenting Tips for Raising Adult Children & Building Better Relationships

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Sherry Jonas and this is Launch, the podcast for parents with older kids in their twenties and thirties who are struggling to launch into adulthood.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that can look different for everyone.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: But for a capable young adult who is simply not moving forward, something must be done.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: When your son or daughter is choosing not to work, study, contribute, or participate in anything, it makes me think of the expression still waters run deep.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's really going on beneath the surface with all that idle time at home?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Why won't they take on responsibilities?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: What's stopping them from stepping out into the world, discovering themselves and figuring out what lights them up?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Each week on launch, my guests and I talk about the issues that your adult child might be struggling with and how you can help.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because as I often say, doing nothing is not an option anymore.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not for you or for them.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Today, my guest is an expert in this field, and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with him.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Mark McConville is a clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in adult, adolescent, and family psychology.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's also a senior faculty member at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, where he continues to teach in the areas of child development, parenting, and counseling.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: In 2020, Dr.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: McConville published the book Failure to Launch, Why Your 20-something hasn't grown up, and what to do about it.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is truly a groundbreaking guide for parents who are not just asking why their young adults are struggling to launch, but talks about the developmental skills they need to make that transition, such as developing responsibilities, finding purpose, and learning what Mark calls interdependence.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Mark's wealth of knowledge on this topic is, in my opinion, best in class.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And although this is just one hour, I feel like we could have talked forever.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Please be sure to share this episode with another parent who's struggling with the same issues because I know it will make a world of difference.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: So let's begin.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, Mark.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to launch.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Sherry.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful to be here.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I first of all just want to say that I'm so excited.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Not just because you're a clinical licensed psychologist with over 30 years of experience working with young adults and families, but your groundbreaking book, Failure to Launch, Why Your 20 Something Hasn't Grown Up and What to Do About It, is my absolute favorite on this topic.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: I am delighted and flattered to hear that.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I love how you place so much emphasis on the family dynamic and the parent-child relationship.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: That feels so aligned for me and what I believe in, which is not about blaming parents, even though many do feel guilty when I talk to them about their involvement.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just wondering, do you get a lot of that in your private practice as well?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's very interesting.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: I I learned my craft back in the age when the goal in working with any adolescent was to get them to age 18.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And really, if you could do that, they they pretty much the culture launched them.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that changed gradually over time.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so somewhere, you know, I can't quite put my finger on the calendar, but somewhere around the turn of the century, I began to get more and more kids in the 18 to 25-year-old range referrals.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I was targeted because I'm an adolescent specialist, and where their concerns were really not young adult concerns.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: They were much more adolescent, teenage concerns, quarreling with their parents, arguing about whether they get a job or go back to school.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: And uh what I learned over time was that the individual therapy model often was fruitless.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: That I might have this young person in my office and have a thoughtful and candid conversation about their status in life.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then they would go home as a 22 or 23-year-old and re-enter the dance of a 15-year-old with his his or her parents.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I realized I have to find a way of getting parents involved.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: When I say this to parents, my response to them when they sort of come up with this guilty reaction is it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I like I like that way of putting it.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because first of all, I find that very empowering.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because I personally I love knowing that if I can change something that I'm doing, that it has an impact.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: So parents say I have no more control, but it's not about control, it's about influence.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I just I read um a Pew research report that said most parents of young adults feel that their children's failures and successes are a reflection of their parenting.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And here's something that I loved reading in that same report.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: 69% of young adults say their parents are as involved in their day-to-day lives as they like.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, they're fine with it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And about one in five say their parents aren't involved enough.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I I read that same statistic and I was really quite surprised by it because those aren't the families that are reaching out to me.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: The one the ones who feel things are fine, where the the young person appreciates the parent's support, the parent appreciates having them living at home.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's a um, you know, it's a it's a substantial percentage, 50 maybe, maybe a little higher, that are between 18 and 26 who are living at home with their parents.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Don't quote me on that statistic, but but the the great majority of them feel pretty good about it.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: But as I said, those are not the families reaching out to me.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I think, I think the difference is this is for healthy adult relationships, parent-adult relationships.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's what and that's the goal.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is to help the parent and adult child improve their relationship so that the the adult welcomes their parents' involvement.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: They don't see it, they see it in a in a better light.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Right now.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: So much of what I do when I'm consulting with parents is trying to help them shift the the parenting model or paradigm from the from the parent-adolescent model.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if if you were, for example, my 17-year-old daughter, um, it would be my obligation to care for you.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you could be the 17-year-old from hell, but it is still, it falls on me to do what I can to continue your education, to keep you out of trouble, to give you guidance.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the contract, right?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's the paradigm of being the parent of a teenager.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: But what I'm running into is 20-somethings who are locked in the same paradigm with their parents.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And what I'm trying to coach the parents to do is uh the language I use is horizontalized.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: How do you make this relationship more a relationship between adults?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Granted, of different ages, different uh degrees of life experience, but where it is it is more of a collaborative relationship between people of equal status.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'll often say to parents, well, now that your 24-year-old has finished education and come home, he is now your housemate, right?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, don't think of him as your child, think of him as your housemate.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And housemates do you have responsibilities and they they contribute insofar as you know they're they're capable of it.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a very different um set of implicit ground rules for the relationship.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're gonna get into that horizontally because I love that concept and I want to elaborate more on it for parents.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: But before we get too far into the topic and talk about your book, um, I want to hear more about you.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I read your book again after so many years, and I feel like I know you because you do share quite a bit about yourself throughout the book, but I'm sure that our listeners would appreciate knowing what was your inspiration for working with young adults and parents, as you say, and is it tied to anything that you experienced as a young adult?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a that's a wonderful question.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Do we have a week or so that we could do a symposium?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um I uh the there was some accident involved and some deep meaning involved.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: My first job out of graduate school was at a large community mental health center, and um I was in the department, the outreach department, where uh a lot of community connection, public speaking was involved.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time, well, I've always been a good public speaker.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: At the time, I was still in my 20s, uh I was pretty much phobic about it.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I just I hated the fact that I had to go out and speak to police groups and PTAs and community organizations, and and a job opened up in the child guidance section for someone to work with adolescents.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I just I jumped at it.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: When I was in grad school, I had taught adolescent development at an undergrad level, and I jumped at it, and I felt so fortunate to get the job, and I was informed some months later that I was the only applicant, and that no therapist in their right mind at that in that era wanted to work with teenagers.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, therapy was for crazy people.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you never had a teenager come in and say, you know, I'm really glad to be here and to have someone to talk to.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, today that happens, right?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: But but it didn't happen back in that era.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: So so I was kind of thrown into it.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: I escaped public speaking, which I ended up, by the way, doing a ton of as I built my practice.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I I just found I wasn't, you know, I was in my late 20s, so I wasn't that much older than the kids I was seeing.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think I developed a knack for earning their trust and for for being genuine and and trying to be an adult that would make a difference.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And when I looked back, I've done a lot of teaching of therapists, learning to work with adolescents.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that's so I've gotten that question like, why did you choose to work with teenagers?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in really reflecting on it at a more deeper level, I thought, ah, you know what it was, I wanted to become the adult who was missing in my own growing up years.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I I was a mildly troubled adolescent, um, certainly anxious, did not get along with my dad, who was very strict and old school.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I I don't recall having any adult in my life that I felt I could really trust this person.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: I could, in fact, when my parents took me to see the pediatrician, that was the closest they would come to a therapist, the pediatrician very gently, so Mark, anything you'd like to talk about?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Nope.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, your parents tell me that you've been struggling a little bit.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we could talk about it.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Yeah, I don't think so.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: That was it.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: That was that was that was the extent of it.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I really do think that I it left me with an appreciation of what was missing and the kind of adult that was missing.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think that's uh that's the sort of thread of meaning that has run through my career.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for sharing that.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: We know that young adults today are taking longer to reach some of the milestones, and that more young adults are struggling to launch into adulthood than ever before.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some of the reasons are obvious: the job market, wages, living expenses, housing, cost of education, and so on.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: But since you've been doing this for many years, it's more than just a function of the current economic climate.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, what changes have you seen in young adults over the years that can help parents understand why this might be happening to them?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, the nature of parenting has changed, and it's changed dramatically.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: I recently went back and took a look at the sort of granddaddy of parent advice books, which was um by Rudolf Dreiker's Children the Challenge.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: He introduced the concept of consequences.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I was surprised as I leaped through the book to see how often he cautioned parents against spanking.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh my God, that's today if you spank your child, you're gonna have a social worker on your doorstep, right?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: But but there was no one thought anything of it back in the the 50s or the 60s.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: So, and then emerged books like um how to talk to your children, how to listen to your children so they will talk to you, or parent effectiveness training.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: And and what and which books that had were very much about how do you cultivate a relationship with your child such that that there is dialogue and there's openness and they're open to your guidance and instruction.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And and I could only think um I I recalled talking once to uh an elderly gentleman has since passed, who was a friend of my father.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: My father was born in 1902, and and he was a very, very good father.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: But this this friend, as I spoke to him, said, you know, your father wanted his boys to be responsible, um, to be educated, to be good citizens, but trust me, he did not really care whether or not he had a relationship with you.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and that really was a sign of the times.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I grew up in the 50s, right?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas today, parents are much more involved, and and there's a there's a huge plus and there's a downside.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the the plus is today, kids today are much more supported, much more supported than than they were when I grew up.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um last night, my wife and I drove 40 miles to see my granddaughter in a soccer game, right?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas when I played high school sports, my parents never they didn't it just parents didn't they did they that was your world, not their world.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Or I think of educationally, um if you are an ADHD kid today, you're gonna have a 504 plan and you're gonna have a reasonable shot at finding your way to college and through college.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, when I was in at that in high school, you you were you were not going to college, you simply weren't.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: You were gonna be sent to, you know, you're gonna go to trade school or vocational training.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: So there's just so much more support.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Parents really cultivate uh relationships with kids, and you we see kids really profiting from that support.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the flip side, the other side of that coin, is we sometimes find kids who are so accustomed to adult support that when they read this this transition that we're talking about from adolescence into emerging adulthood, where you really have to take on self-support, that that often they're at a loss.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it will be sometimes it's observable in the the simplest things, like, you know, make make a phone call, call your dentist, and reschedule the appointment.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not calling the dentist.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the truth is, I I don't know how to call a dentist.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm only 19.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: I've never those are things adults do.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, me, the 19-year-old, I've never done that sort of thing.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we we that that's a rather common profile of the kid who avoids taking on simple responsibilities because adults have been so so there and so attentive and so supportive.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: So the support converts on its own from support to enabling.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not the parent who's doing the same thing.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: The same parent who supports is the parent who enables.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that the kid, in one case, uses that support as a springboard, and on the other case, the kid uses the support to avoid developing and taking on responsibility.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Which is my next question.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: The the question that plagues parents.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I have to ask this.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: When they come to you with their young adult who's struggling to launch, while the other children are hitting their milestones, how do you explain that?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you just did.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: But in other words, why why does one young adult in the same family launch while another doesn't?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, uh, I mean, this is a bit of a cliche, but children in the same family don't actually grow up in the same family, right?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: They grow up in a different family.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if if if I'm uh the high IQ kid in my family, and my brother or sister isn't quite as good a student as I am, they're going to get a different um kind of parenting directed at them.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, they're just those those differences are are quite significant.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: The the profiles, I there's a handful of profiles that I run into with kids who aren't growing up.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's it's fairly evident there's significant mental health problems.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is a kid who is depressed or who's had acute social anxiety and and maybe um uh never got into therapy or uh got caught up in the pandemic where a lot of kids were deprived of socialization that tended to mitigate social anxiety.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes there's a mental health issue.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes, you know, the parent describes a kid who's spending he's up in his bedroom smoking weed, even though there's a house rule against marijuana.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um every night, you know, somewhere where he's playing video games between midnight and 4 a.m., uh they get up to to use the bathroom, they can smell the marijuana.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: What are they gonna do?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Throw them out?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I suppose they could.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: My father would have, for sure.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: But but today's parents don't typically don't want to do that.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um in in other cases, it's just the kids who are facing the same um, you might say, uncertainty about growing up that probably you and I both faced.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh new circumstances, being called on to do things that we hadn't done before, uh, having to interact with the adult world.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we did it and we gradually, you know, discovered we can do this.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of these kids that I run into are just they're not taking that step.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're just not putting themselves, they're not getting an after-school job, for example.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're they're not um sticking it out in college.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they're not having the experiences that build confidence over time.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about three developmental challenges that young people need to master in order to, and I'm using your words, chart your own path in life, which are becoming responsible, becoming relational, and becoming relevant.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to talk a little bit about them?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think my favorite of them is the becoming responsible.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because we everyone thinks they know what that means.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm really talking about a very uh nitty-gritty kind of responsibility.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's a sort of thing, um, you know, making a phone call, paying a parking ticket, um, getting your license renewed, that that sort of thing.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Just the little nuts and bolts of adult life, not very dramatic, but you and I do it, and it kind of keeps our life on track.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and I encounter kids all the time.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: I have a favorite story about um I'd seen this boy in therapy when he was maybe 14, 15, 16, hadn't seen him in several years, and I got an email from him.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: He's now a college student, uh, 19 years old, and he says, Can I come in and see you?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Sure.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: So he comes in with his mom, right?
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: And the two of them take take a place on the couch and immediately start.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: They clearly had been quarreling in the waiting room.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: They picked up on the quarrel, and the quarrel was the mom is saying, the boy is is a summer job, and she's saying, You need to call the dentist's office to reschedule your appointment.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: And he's saying, I didn't make that appointment, you made that appointment, you call and reschedule.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm just sitting back thinking, this is really kind of interesting.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: So after about five minutes of them going round and round and round, I just I intervened.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'll call him Josh.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Josh, what do you think happens when somebody calls a dentist's office to reschedule an appointment?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Oh, they probably get pissed.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh, okay.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, anyone who knows anything about medical care knows that dentist offices have the highest rate of no-shows, right?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: So if you if you call to reschedule, they they want to kiss your forehead and send you flowers, right?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: They are so they're so delighted.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I I turned to the mom and I said, Would you call the dentist office on speaker phone and reschedule the so she did, right here on the couch.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: She calls, and of course, oh, you know, Mrs.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Jones, thank you so much.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: No problem.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: How about this date?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: How about that date?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: And she gets off the phone, and I I did this thing to Josh that my mother Used to do to me over the top of my glasses.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he just goes, Oh.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that in a snapshot is he's 19.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't know how the adult world works.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: He thinks he should.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's really embarrassed that he doesn't.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the things he doesn't know are remarkably simple.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: I had a 26-year-old who came in for a session and his dad had given him a check.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the check had the dad's signature.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's all it had on it.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the kid takes the pen and he he balks and he hovers over the check for 30 seconds and then says, How do you fill out a check?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think, well, none of us knew how to fill out a check until someone showed us how to fill out a check.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: But those are these little responsibilities.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: And what makes them, I think, so intimidating is they feel to the kid like these things are are these are what adults do.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so doing them and taking them on is like stepping into the adult world.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you know what?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a frightened, anxious 19-year-old.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not quite ready to do that.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: Not to say there aren't some kids that just boldly go forth, but um there's so many little skills that kids avoid because they just you know, they don't uh college kids who won't call to order pizza, right?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they they they find someone on the floor, will you call, you know?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's those kinds of little responsibilities that are really just managing your life.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: The relational thing is the relationships that that get us into adulthood from from adolescence into adulthood are more functional than the sort of friendships we had in high school.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um I remember being in a fraternity in college and turning to older, you know, I'm I'm all of 18, and the 21-year-old seems so grown up to me.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I would turn to them and say, How do I do X?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Or, you know, I want to change a course.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: So how do I go about doing that?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and they would say, Oh, well, you they give you a simple bit of instruction, so that you get this sort of fragments of mentoring, sometimes from peers.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: You find someone that's your peer that they know how to do something you haven't done yet.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so you're learning from others.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: It may evolve into a mentorship with a professor or an employer, but these these are relationships that become um really integral to our growing up process.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And what it my my uh colleague Gordon Wheeler says, the opposite of dependence, and you know, all these kids don't want to be dependent anymore.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: They might be, but they don't want to be.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: He says the opposite of dependence is not independence, it's interdependence.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I absolutely buy that.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: But so many young people, particularly males, think that to be a grown-up, I've got to do it all on my own.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: And yet here I am, 19, and I don't even know how to call a dentist's office.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm in this kind of catch-22.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I have to do it without consulting anyone, and yet there's so much I don't know how to do that I become frozen in place.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the profile that I run into.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: And trying to teach teach those kids to use relationships.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's all a lot of what therapy is with kids this age, is I become a coach, a mentor.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I know how to do that.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: Let's make that call together.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Then the third one of relevance is a little hard, harder to sort of put your finger on, but it's do I imagine that there's a place for me in the adult world?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have to know what that place is, but do I see it as probably ultimately friendly territory?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the way I sign up for that is I get a job that's that's that could lead somewhere.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh maybe I join the armed forces.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's a way of saying these are all things that I would consider apprenticeships for adulthood, going to college and taking on the role of being a college student.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I may not know what I'm going to be doing at age 30, but if I'm taking college classes at age 20, I'm I'm kind of pretty sure I'm going to be doing something in the adult world at 30.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: I may not know what it is, but I'm signing up for it and I'm and I'm um I'm a I'm becoming an apprentice.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that sense of relevance versus kids who I see who are in avoidance of the adult world.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Their world is um a video game or a video game community or YouTube or you know, something that they're doing in their bedroom between 11 p.m.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: and 4 a.m.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: that doesn't lead anywhere.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're in something like I I sometimes call it a bubble world.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: You're in a world that really doesn't have any sort of uh there's no conveyor belt into the future.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so this is, I believe, and when my favorite, I think, is becoming relational, because this is where we talk about horizontaling, correct?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think of the horizontaling as if I'm that kid, how do I, how does my relationship with my parents evolve?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas when I think of the uh in changing my interpersonal world, it's really reaching beyond my parents and finding other other people in the world, whether it's a peer, an older sibling, an uncle, a professor, a coach, but but someone that knows more about living than I do.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I may, I may turn to them.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: I do this with I do this now with my own friends all the time.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: Most of my friends are businessmen.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really my my practical business IQ is not impressive, trust me.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I will turn to them and say, How do I do this?
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do I go about this?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Say, oh, well, here that you know, they've been through it, they've done it.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's that that's what I mean by widening your interpersonal world.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: But horizontaling is on the kid's end, it's very interesting.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's two sides to it.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: On I'll say the parent, the on the parent side, it's beginning to treat your transitioner as an adult.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: And and I'll tell you where I learned this most acutely was the year after my daughter went to college.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was a consultant, I am still, at a private girls' school that's in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a student who had left the school because she and her mother moved to Washington, D.C.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: for 11th grade, and she desperately wanted to come back and finish her 12th grade year uh in Shaker Heights.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: The school needed to find a place for her to live, so they approached me and said, Would you would you house her?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Would you take her in?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the interesting thing is I had seen this kid at the school when she was a ninth grader, and and she was a bit of a rabble rouser.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not sure what bad judgment possessed me, but maybe maybe because my wife and I were so brokenhearted that our daughter had gone, that we took we took her in.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Her name was Ashley.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it was honestly the smoothest year of parenting, and my parenting was smooth.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: My kids they were not failure-launched, they were great kids, easy to parent.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: But Ashley, it was just our relationship was adult to adult.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and and the the sort of example was she was a cigarette smoker, um, as were many people back then.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and I just said, you know, I figured whether she smokes or not is not my business, right?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: The the future of her lungs, uh, her health, not my business.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: We might have a conversation about it, but not my responsibility.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: But smoking in my house, uh-uh, not gonna happen.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: So simply not going to happen.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and if you need to find a place, and and back in those days, um you probably could find a rental where you were allowed to smoke.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Smoking was much more common.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I had that conversation with her, and she said, no, no, no.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um I live five minutes from the school, it was very convenient.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a day in February where my wife went up to the second floor, and from the third floor suite, she smelled a whiff of cigarette smoke.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that evening we sat down with Ashley and said, you know, I had been a smoker when I was a teenager, so I kind of understood.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a very civil conversation about would you like us to help you find a different place to live?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, she said, I'm so sorry.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: My bad.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: And um, it just it the rest of the year unfolded very gracefully.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and it's sort of reflecting on that over you know subsequent years, what made it so different and so easy?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I realized it's because I didn't have responsibility for her and I could set the expectations as I would for an adult.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: An example uh that I use in the book, a kind of thought experiment, is I say, imagine, just imagine that your son or your daughter were not actually your son or daughter, but was a distant nephew or a distant niece, someone you haven't seen since you know childhood, but now they've maybe moved to your city uh to attend school and they're going to live with you.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: How would you organize the relationship differently than you do with your own child?
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: And for most people, it's a very simple thought experiment.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, I would, you know, I would do this, this, and this.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I wouldn't feel it was my job to teach them to be responsible, but I would tell them, uh, I don't want food dishes left in your bedroom because because it's my house.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I just and that attracts insects, and I don't want it.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not, I'm not trying to parent you.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking out for my own self-interest, right?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: The way I would if I was a landlord.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it's a much, it's now it's of course they're not your distant nephew or nice niece.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're your but it gives you an idea of what to aspire to.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: To make this relationship so it is more horizontal.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's a quote that you have from your book, and I want to read it.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is this will explain why I like this so much.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: This developmental achievement has significant positive consequences for the transitioner.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: For one thing, it affirms and enhances their new sense of feeling, like I'm an adult.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: For another, now beginning to see his or her parents as ordinary people, the young adult begins to develop a tolerance of parental disappointment and disapproval.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, both real and imagined.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is not to say that parental disappointment becomes irrelevant, rather, it becomes bearable.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is an incredibly important dimension of beginning to think, feel, and behave like an independent adult.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so glad you read that quote.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I was so proud for writing it.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: I really was.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um people know, but it so every age in developmental psychology, every stage has what I referred to as developmental tasks.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a task you have to take out.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're a preschooler, you have to, if you're a toddler, you have to learn to manage, you need bowel control.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: You have to, you need toilet training.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't master that, you're not gonna go to preschool.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: When you go to preschool, you have to learn how to manage conflict.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: You can't bite the children next to you.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: So these are tasks that once you master them more or less, you move on.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one of the developmental tasks in this transition between 18 and 25 is I have to learn to make my own decisions.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And if I'm gonna do that, there will be things that would not have been my parents' first choice.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: Some parents are very active in insisting that I recently spoke with a family where the parents are saying, you must go to college in state.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: Even the family could afford to send the kid anywhere, but you must go in state, and which I think is incredibly heavy-handed, right?
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Good kid, good student.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: In in other cases, the the disapproval is more implicit.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: When I said to my father, I'm going to major in psychology, I'm from an Irish Catholic background.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Irish Catholics are not known for their psychological sophistication.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, right?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: Just not.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that because I trained, I did a lot of training of therapists in Ireland.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I love them, wonderful people.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I could see these are like my comrades from the 1960s, just starting to kind of get into understanding ourselves.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: And and so when I said that to my father, he he didn't say a word.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: He cocked his head.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, a gesture that said, huh?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: And and I needed to be able to say, that's okay.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's the price of me doing, you know, my agenda can't be to just please my dad.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: If if that's my agenda, I will never grow up.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'm I'm so glad you read that.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's it's important.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very hard.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you have parents that are opinionated or controlling, it's a real task.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's a real task.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Then when you choose a partner in life, you know, that often that's an issue.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I happen to be a golfer, and there's a there's a kind of golf shot that is referred to as the son-in-law shot.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that was a son-in-law.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what do you mean, a son-in-law?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's not exactly what I had in mind, but it'll do.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's you know, if you're going to make your own choice of career, of where to live, of partner, um then chances are, I mean, maybe not, you may have parents that are just, you know, they I want you to be who you are, and and I will support that um no matter what your choices are.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: There those parents exist, but they're probably not the norm.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: The young adult that I'm getting is very affected and influenced by their parents.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the disappointment is it fills them with so much shame.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I I'll often say, who whose voice is that in your head?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't, is that you speaking or is that your parents speaking?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's a wonderful question.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: A wonderful question.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: But there's an interesting, I mean, that's a very complicated issue.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Most kids who are not growing up, I would say, in my sample of, I don't know, somewhere between 500 and 1,000, shame is a part of the picture, probably 90% of the time.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I here I am, I'm 22 years old, and I'm I'm not finishing school, and I'm not doing anything particularly productive, and I'm seeing my old classmates moving on.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty reasonable that I'm in some way feeling bad about my what I've accomplished in life.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and sometimes the parent really is disapproving in a way that that makes things worse.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: But there are other times that the parent really just, what can I do to help?
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: And what the kid does is project their own shame, their own, I'm a disappointment to myself.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm but I'm not yet, you might say, emotionally mature enough to own that, to say, the problem here is my self-assessment.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: So instead, what they do is they project it.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: And they say, my parents are are are not accepting, they're disapproving of me, which may be true, but I'm just saying there are times that it's not true.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: I love your question.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Whose voice is that?
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: You write about three specific skills that people that young people need.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think you might have touched on one of them, but just so we're clear, purpose, responsibility, and interdependence, which you talked about, which I love, interdependence.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a word we hear a lot about.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd like to sort of elaborate a little bit, but those three specific skills, when you see a young adult who is lacking purpose, what do you suggest to them?
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, do you have any suggestions for their parents?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but the first thing I do is I go looking for where is there a hidden sense of purpose?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: The example I use in in the book is a kid who was incredibly involved in a game that I don't know if it's still popular, but it was very popular called World of Warcraft.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's a role-playing game.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's it's not the kind of thing that he's going to turn to his parents or the adult world and say, yeah, but you know, I'm really good at the world of work.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: But that was his inner sense of, I'm really good at this.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: And and it's very meaningful to me that I'm good at this.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I first try to find, I try to understand that that sense of purpose and meaning in their own language, which often will be something that doesn't really is not relevant to the adult world, right?
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: But but when you are a therapist, you have to go to the client.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: When I taught adolescent therapists, the image I would use was the therapist as a kind of anthropologist.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking of Ruth Benedict and um people like that, where they would they would be in a third world culture, and their job was to get invited into the village, and to go into the village and to be respectful and to learn the ways of the villagers, to learn their customs, their rituals, and their traditions.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I would say that's how you, when you're working with a young person, you have to go into their village.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: You have to find out who are you on your own terms, right?
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Before I'm gonna start, you know, if if you're a 16-year-old who's got a you know, D's and F's on your report card, I'm gonna start by trying to understand how it is you're such a good skateboarder and what that means, and how does one get to be that good?
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was younger, I took several lessons in skateboarding in the parking lot of my office building, right?
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I have to go there before I can say, so, you know, what are your thoughts about schoolwork and what are you going to do after high school?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: And how how do you feel about the fact that, you know, you you kind of you stand out in your family as not being interested in school?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: Where I want to know, uh, let's let's have that conversation.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: But if I start with that conversation, I'll get fired.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I have to I have to meet them on their terms.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: When I'm meeting that person, the first thing I try to do is find out if there is some sense, and often it might be in the arts.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm actually jumping ahead, but you don't you're not concerned about their final destination.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: You want to figure out two things, what they like and what they're good at.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what you're trying to say.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's what, like, who who are you?
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, little little side story.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: When I was really young, I had to write this essay, Who Am I?
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: I will never forget this essay.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure I still have it.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's in cursive writing.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: And every sent it was almost poetry.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I am, I just kept writing, I am, I am, I am.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it was so it allowed me to really kind of figure out myself, this level of self-awareness that I I've had since I was very young.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Zig Ziggler, um, I used to listen to his tapes because my dad wanted me to, and there was a book that he handed that he gave you when you bought all his cassettes, and it said it was just a blank journal, and it said, write down everything you want to be, do, and have.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the being was so powerful.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because we we we focus so much on we say to kids, who what do you want to do?
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: What do you want to do?
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I say to young adults, who do you want to be?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's a much more answerable question.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: The kid who's completely lost as far as what career path or what to major in college can often still answer this is the kind of person I want to be.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I I again I love that you're a step ahead.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: When I ask that question to these young adults, they their their face, their facial expressions light up.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody's finally asking me something that I can answer.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that's purpose.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: The next one was responsibility, and I think you touched on that, managing life, holding jobs, all that.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's talk about interdependence.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then that's the idea.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: Again, you touched on that, learning how to depend on others and having others depend on you.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because relationships require a healthy relationship, I should preface, requires reciprocity and mutual responsibility.
• 43:01
  unknown: Right.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: There's a book written by a colleague and dear friend of mine named Gordon Wheeler, and the book is titled Beyond Individualism.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: And what he does is looks at how in Western culture, particularly in the United States, uh, and particularly in male culture, there is this image of the solo person, the Rambo, you know, who's in the jungle doing it all on his own, and that that uh that individualism is the sort of peak attainment.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: And what Gordon points out is that that is completely mythic.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: It does not line up with reality.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he has this exercise that he, I've I've done the exercise with him in workshops, but he presents it in the book.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: The exercise is just pure genius.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: He says to the reader or or the workshop participant recall a time in your history when you felt completely inadequate.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: You felt deeply flawed.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not what I'm supposed to be.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm there's something really wrong with me.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm insufficient to whatever is being asked of me.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's no one that I've seen could not come up with that, right?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone can remember the time when, right?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it might have been a particular incident in seventh grade, or it might have been their entire high school career, or you know.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and then he he asked them to name and describe what it was about them that was flawed.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I wasn't enough of this and I didn't know how to do that, and I made this decision rather that decision.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then he asked that the the tr the real question, which he says, okay, going back to that scene, what is it that had what addition had it been present, whether it's a person, a resource, a circumstance, if that had been present, it would have solved the situation for you.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and it might be like, well, gosh, if I'd had a Latin tutor, I would not have, you know, failed Latin in 12th grade and had to take summer school.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: But what he was what he was the his bottom line point is those failures and flaws are situational, but people tend to internalize them.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the problem or I was the problem, right?
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he's saying we are not uh an entity unto ourselves.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: We need resources and people and support in the world around us.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's all relational.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and even people that think they've made it entirely on their own, that's a myth that they've constructed for themselves.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody does it without help.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about anxiety because so many young adults are struggling with it.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: We all know that anxiety is a natural consequence of uncertainty, but when it comes to these kids, it's a whole other level.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in your book, you call it developmental anxiety, I believe.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna quote you again.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: The promotion to adulthood opens up a new horizon of expectations and benchmarks.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: It alters their experience of self and identity and requires letting go of the safe and predictable habit patterns of childhood and adolescence.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I really want parents to see why their adult kids are so afraid to step into the world, why there is so much avoidance and resistance.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: The easiest way I have found to get parents to grasp that is to ask them if they have ever been promoted or taken on a new job with new responsibilities.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because virtually everyone, most sane and healthy people who are promoted have something called promotion anxiety.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, my boss thinks I can take on these new responsibilities, but they're actually new for me.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm untested.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a little bit, you know, I'm a little uncertain because I haven't proven myself yet.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: And most adults can identify with that.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: I say, well, your kid is going through that, but on a much grander scale, right?
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's really stepping out of one whole level of identity.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the um I knew, you know, I often reference 12th grade.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: Most everybody by 12th grade knows who they are.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: They know, they know what lunch table to sit at, they know who their friends are, they know what their rule is in the school community, right?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: So identity is pretty solid.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: When you step out of high school, either into the work world or the educational world, you are you're shedding that identity the way a snake sheds its skin.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: You step into a new world where you don't know who you are.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Am I still funny?
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was a terrific athlete in high school.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: Will I just be average now that I'm in college?
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, there's this whole level of uncertainty.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: And if COVID taught us one thing, to quote you earlier, uncertainty is the mother of anxiety, right?
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: We as human beings, we do not like uncertainty.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: We don't like it, right?
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um if we you you're a fan of haunted houses at Halloween, which are bundles of uncertainty, you know that someone is certainly managing that haunted house, right?
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not genuine uncertainty.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that's yeah, I try to, I mean, getting parents to to the point of being able to say, oh, yeah, okay, because it's so diffuse.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas when you have a job promotion, it's pretty obvious.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, all of a sudden you're going from managing three people to managing 12 people.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I haven't I've never managed 12 people before.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: But when you're stepping from the world of structured education, as in high school, to where education is kind of an open field, you can go to class or not go to class.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: You don't do an assignment, nobody's gonna call you into the principal's office and uh or call your parents.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very, very different world with loaded with uncertainty.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that I have shared with my kids because I I do, as an as an older person, I do try new things in my life.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I share this with my children because I want them to continue to try new things and not be afraid and to step out of their comfort zone.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: So when I wanted to start a podcast, I had the same fears that a young adult would have.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you say this in your book.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Am I capable?
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: Which is the competence question.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: And will I be taken seriously?
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: Will I be accepted in this world of podcasting?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's your the validation/slash shame question.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want my children to know that the same concerns you have, I have.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's wonderful.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, you're I I love that you can be articulate about that.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: There is a a philosopher at the University of Chicago named Agnes Collard, and she wrote a book called Aspiration.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I I read most of the book, but she had she had one idea that just I fell off my chair.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: She said, Aspiration is I want to become something that I am not yet.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: So by definition, I'm aspiring to a state that is beyond my current development.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: And what she said is the imposter syndrome is intrinsic to aspiration.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd always thought of it like, oh, I thought it was my own personal neurosis.
• 50:49
  unknown: Right.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like, like, who am I to do a podcast or who am I to write a book?
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: Who am I kidding?
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, no, no, no, it's not you.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's not you.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's the nature of aspiration that you are arcing towards something that that is not yet supported by uh track record.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and so um it it's it just comes with the territory.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: I love that insight.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so we've been really exploring what the young adult is struggling with because it helps parents to get that insight.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to move on to helping parents take some action.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you find is one of the biggest mistakes that parents make when they have a young adult who is struggling to launch?
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I could put it another way.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: I can say, what are parents doing, often out of love and with the best intentions, that can unintentionally keep their young adult dependent?
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me say first, I uh an image I often use with parents is imagine your child were a line on a graph, like you know, like the stock market or something.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I what direction is that line going?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: If that line is trending upward, then you don't need me.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need my help.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: Anything you're doing for them qualifies as support.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're paying their cell phone, that's support.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're supplying them with uh Wi-Fi and uh they can tap into the Family Netflix account, that's support.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: If the line is trending upward.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: If the line isn't, if it's flatlining or it's going down, those same behaviors now qualify as enabling.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I think that's where parents they bail, they bail their kids out from things that really could be useful learning experiences.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a kid who's tried a couple of years at college, kind of lost interest, has had a couple of summer jobs, but really doesn't want to get a job because after all, all the jobs that are out there are what his generation calls shit jobs, right?
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: Which is, you know, you don't have a college degree.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: You're not gonna be hired as an executive vice president, right?
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna work at a coffee shop or in a warehouse or something.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: And this kid is saying, I don't want that kind of a job.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so the parent, now the parents faced with the dilemma.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: I have a kid that needs to be doing something constructive, either needs to be in school or needs to be working, but laying around doing nothing at age whatever, 20, 21, 22, that that doesn't work.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the parent sort of implicitly takes it on like it's my job to get you to work.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: And uh granted, in a lot of families that's enough.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: You annoy your kid enough by nagging them that they actually go and get that job.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: But again, those aren't the parents that reach out to me or to you.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's the parent that the kid doesn't get annoyed enough and get the job.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the parent continues to harp and harp and harp.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: And and I'm my message to them is it's time for you to stop harping and decide how you're going to change your own behavior.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: What are you going to do differently?
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and I have an example that I often use with parents, and it's a rather trivial example because there wasn't much at stake, but I'll I'll describe it.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: When my daughter came home from college, second year, terrific student, very committed.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, she wasn't a problem, she's a great kid.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: But our house rule was you work during the summer to earn your spending money for the school year.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: And she she gets home at the beginning of May, and she's not apparently doing anything to get a job.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so we start to nag her.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: And she doesn't like being nagged, so she gets annoyed, and it just got unpleasant.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this is it with a kid who is nothing but pleasant.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so after a right right around Memorial Day, I conferred with my wife, and I went to my daughter.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the first thing I did is I apologized.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Mom and I really are sorry that we've been nagging you.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the second thing I said was, we decided it's up to you whether or not you get a job.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's your call.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: You can get a job, not get a job.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: We love your company, we love having you around.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: But however, when the tuition bill arrives, as it does in mid-August, I'm gonna take a look at your savings account.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: And if you've got X number of dollars in there, I will write the check for school.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't, not a problem, don't worry.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: You can work during the fall, stay at home, work during the fall, save up money, and go back to school in January.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we will be fine with any and all of that.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: Two days later, she comes home and tells us that she has a waitressing job out in the Grand Falls.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now that was a trivial example.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: There wasn't much to say this kid wasn't going to drop out of college, right?
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: But but what it when I look back on it, I think it's the parent deciding, what will I change?
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: Simplest example is well, now that you're you're turning 21 next month, so as of your 21st birthday, um, you need to have your own phone plan.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll be happy to go up to the ATT store with you because I've done that before.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: And um, but but you and your, by the way, your brothers and sisters, when you turn 21, will all be off the family phone plan.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: Or um, this is a little trickier, but um, at that point we expect you to contribute to Wi-Fi because after all, you you you're probably the major user.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and things like you know, gassing for the gas for the car.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: Or one of my favorites is when you moved back home, our monthly grocery bill went up by X, right?
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: $140.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we would like you to contribute$140.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: So beginning to, you know, that distant nephew kind of thing, where we're asking you to carry your own weight.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: And and the the thing about the phone, the phone is a trivial example, but it just it represents the paradigm change.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not telling you you have to get a new phone, I'm just telling you you will be off the family phone plan.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason isn't because you're a bad kid or I want to discipline you or you're being punished for not working.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's no, no, no, no.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: The reason is you're turning this certain age at a certain time.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: 21.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've had parents have this conversation with 30-year-olds.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, now that you're 30, it may be time for you to pay, have your own you know, phone plan.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um again, if you've got a kid that's that's that's growing, that's um, that's on the up, up, then you don't worry about that sort of thing.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: I I joke, and this is just a slight exaggeration, that my daughter, the same daughter, was on my Netflix account right up to about the time that her annual income exceeded mine.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: Which it does.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm delighted.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: But so when when someone is making that progress, you don't worry about it.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: You want to help them out, you want to take them on vacation, want to treat them to dinner, go for it.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's you know, wonderful.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: But when you see that they really are they're just kind of living the endless summer, living at uh mom and dad's country club, that's when it's time to begin thinking about what services could we pull back that would be appropriate given this age.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: And and timing is always if it's tied to a birthday, to a sick, to a date that's not it's not just me changing my mind, it's the fact that you're turning this age, or it's that we're we're reaching January 1st of a new year.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: Or if you've you've just left school, we're reaching what would have been the next new semester, right?
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: So there's something outside of my parental intuition, but there's some objective uh benchmark that tells us it's time for a change.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: What do you say to parents when they cannot get their young adult to find a job?
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's it's like how do you turn over issues or responsibilities?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, the first order of business is a kind of diagnostic.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what is this about?
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is this kid fundamentally capable, or or are they at least functionally disabled?
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're functionally disabled, that's a whole different project.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you say you are my clinically depressed daughter, and you are, in fact, significantly depressed and you are refusing treatment.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: The problem of how do I manage that's a whole other interview for us because that's a tricky and delicate problem.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I'm not gonna, if the issue is you really can't work because you're so profoundly depressed, you can't get out of bed.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: Then for me, pursuing the you have to get a job is just a waste of time.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: It needs to be what has to happen so that you are um seeking treatment.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that's again, I I have a bag of tricks for that as well.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: I have one more question.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: Parents cannot motivate their adult children as hard as they try.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the biggest issues that I come across.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: What do you suggest that they do?
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: I have a chapter to this question in the book, and we think of I have to get you to do something.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm trying to motivate you.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to stir or trigger some intrinsic motivation on your part.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: And parents, by the time they reach out to me and probably to you, they've already played that card every way they can, and by definition or self-selection, it hasn't worked.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's a different kind of motivation that has to do with necessity.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's why I get my income taxes in on time, it's why I have the oil changed in my car.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to do either of those things.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I know if I don't do them that I'm gonna pay some kind of price, and that's necessity.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so the thing of, you know, you're it's time for you to be on your own cell phone plan, that's I'm not trying to motivate you.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just creating a circumstance where you are likely to respond to it with some motivation of your own.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've had the occasional kid in a spirit of defiance say, Well, then I won't use a phone.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: Where they they sort of construe it as a power struggle move from the parents.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: But if the parents really aren't, I'm just saying at this age, this is appropriate for you to carry this bit of financial responsibility, um, then it leaves the kid with a dilemma.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the dilemma is, how do I pay for a phone?
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: So what you're saying is to create the circumstances or the conditions.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: I have to ask you this because I always do leave on a positive note.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: After so many years of working with young adults and their parents, what hope can you offer them?
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: What hope?
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: Most people eventually grow up.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: Growing up in today's generation is a much different and longer process than many of the for the than the parents went through.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Jeffrey Arnett's research shows that that most young people today don't report I feel like an adult most of the time until their late 20s.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas you know, I'm probably a generation older than most of the parents consulting you, but in my era, nobody cared if you felt like an adult or not.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was come it never occurred to me to ask that question.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's the hope that most kids do grow up.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: And things happen.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: I have run into families that were so profoundly stuck.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then what happened is dad retired or mom retired, and they had to downsize.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so now they're moving into a two-bedroom condo, and they turn to their their two, you know, their 26 and their 28-year-old, and say, Hey fellas, really sorry about this, but but as of November 1st, you're gonna have to find your own place, and I'll do everything I can to help you.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll have my friend Joe, the realtor, he'd be happy to help you out, but we will not have a place for you.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: So eventually, circumstance often conspires to create necessity, even when parents themselves have not been able to orchestrate it.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: Mark, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: You've you've given us such incredible information, and we've only I feel like touched on some topics, so I really hope the parents go out and buy your book because you've explained so much of this in greater detail so beautifully.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: But honestly, truly an honor and a privilege to have you here.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope that you can come back again.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think the honor and privilege is mine, to be truthful.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Mar.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: All right, you take care.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: You too.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: Just a quick reminder that if you enjoy listening to launch, hit the follow button so you never miss an episode.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you know another parent who would benefit from it, please share this with them.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I very rarely ask, but apparently leaving a rating and review is one of the best ways for launch to reach more families who are looking for answers.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: As always, thank you for listening.