You’ve been watching your son or daughter struggle for months — maybe years — and you’re running out of ideas. You’ve tried being patient. You’ve tried setting limits. You’ve had the hard conversations, maybe more times than you can count. And still, nothing seems to shift. They’re withdrawing, avoiding, refusing help. Or they’re blowing up, and you’re both saying things neither of you means. You came here because you love them and you’re exhausted, and those two things are sitting on top of each other in a way that’s almost unbearable.
I want to start by saying something that doesn’t get said enough: the fact that you’re still looking for answers — still reading, still reaching, still trying — says something real about who you are as a parent. It doesn’t mean you haven’t made mistakes. We all have. But you haven’t given up. That matters more than you know.
What I’ve seen, working with families for over a decade, is that the question most parents are asking — how do I get my young adult to change? — is almost never the right question. Not because your young adult doesn’t need to change, but because the change you’re hoping for almost always requires something to shift in the relationship first. And that shift usually has to start with you. That’s not a judgment. It’s actually the most hopeful thing I know how to say.
Why What You’ve Been Doing Isn’t Working (And Why That Makes Sense)
When someone we love is struggling, we move toward them with everything we have. We problem-solve. We offer solutions. We worry out loud. We research, we call, we push, we plead. We do all of this because we’re good parents — because we’re wired to protect and provide, and because standing by while your kid suffers feels unbearable.
But here’s what happens on the other side of that effort: young adults — especially those already dealing with shame, anxiety, or failure to launch — often experience all of that love as pressure. And when they feel pressure, they do what humans do: they contract. They avoid. They push back, or they go silent. The more you reach, the further they retreat. Not because they don’t love you. Because they’re overwhelmed, and your proximity to the problem makes it worse, not better.
This isn’t your fault. You’re doing what any caring parent would do. But the strategy that made sense when your child was young — move in, fix it, make it better — is the exact strategy that tends to backfire with struggling young adults. The tools that worked then don’t translate here, and nobody tells you that.
The strategy that worked when your child was young — move in, fix it, make it better — is often the exact strategy that backfires with a struggling young adult.
There’s also something worth naming about the emotional weight you’re carrying. Worry, grief, resentment, guilt — these tend to show up in our bodies and our tone before we’re even aware of it. Your young adult can feel all of it. They know when a conversation has an agenda underneath it, even when the words sound calm. That’s not a criticism — it’s just how close relationships work. Which is why the work of supporting a struggling young adult almost always has to involve you doing some of your own work too.
The 5 Mistakes Well-Meaning Parents Make
These aren’t indictments. Every parent I’ve worked with — including parents who did extraordinary things for their kids — has found themselves doing at least a few of these. They make sense in the moment. That doesn’t mean they help.
1Making Every Conversation About the Problem
When a parent is worried, it’s hard to talk about anything else. But if every interaction orbits around “what are you going to do about your situation,” your young adult stops looking forward to seeing you. The relationship becomes synonymous with pressure. Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is just show up and not bring it up — and mean it.
2Rescuing to Relieve Your Own Anxiety
Paying a bill they should handle, making a call they need to make, smoothing over a consequence — these things feel like love, but they often send a quiet message: I don’t think you can do this. That message lands harder than we realize. Supporting a struggling son or daughter means learning the difference between help that builds capacity and help that quietly erodes it.
3Pushing Therapy or Help They Haven’t Asked For
You’ve probably already discovered that telling a young adult they need help — and presenting the solution — tends to generate resistance, not relief. We’ve written about this in detail in our guide when your young adult won’t get help. The short version: readiness can’t be forced. But it can be cultivated — by how you show up, what you say, and what you don’t.
4Confusing Boundaries With Ultimatums
A limit is something you hold for yourself: I won’t continue to pay for this if nothing is changing. An ultimatum is a threat designed to force someone else’s behavior: If you don’t get a job by March, I’m done. Limits rooted in your own values tend to be sustainable. Ultimatums born from desperation rarely produce the outcome you’re hoping for — and they damage trust in ways that take a long time to repair.
5Neglecting Your Own Life While Waiting for Them to Change
Some parents put everything on hold — friendships, hobbies, their own wellbeing — because it feels wrong to enjoy life while their kid is suffering. But this creates an invisible weight in the relationship. Your young adult can feel that they’re the reason you’re not living. That’s a burden they may not be able to name, but they carry it. Your own health and aliveness is not a luxury. It’s part of the equation.
What Your Young Adult Actually Needs From You Right Now
They need to know you haven’t given up on them — but they also need to feel like you’re not managing them. There’s a particular kind of presence that communicates: I see you. I’m not going anywhere. And I’m also not going to chase you or fix you. That presence is harder to hold than it sounds, especially when you’re scared.
Most struggling young adults are carrying enormous amounts of shame. The gap between where they are and where they think they should be is painful. When they feel your disappointment — even when you’re trying to hide it — it confirms the story they’re already telling themselves: I’m failing, and the people who love me most can see it.
What your young adult needs most isn’t a solution. It’s a relationship where they feel seen without feeling managed — and believed in without feeling pressured.
What shifts this is genuine, non-anxious connection. Not forced positivity. Not pretending things are fine. But a quality of being with them that isn’t saturated with worry. This is something that can be learned and practiced. It doesn’t come naturally when you’re frightened for your kid — but it’s learnable, and it changes things.
It also helps to understand what’s actually happening beneath the surface. Is this depression? Anxiety? Developmental stuckness? Identity confusion? The experience of failure to launch looks different from the outside than it feels from the inside, and what a young adult needs varies significantly depending on what’s driving it. Getting curious about that — rather than just focused on behavior change — tends to open doors that urgency closes.
How Parent Coaching Changes the Dynamic
Our parent coaching work at Noble Mentors is built around a simple premise: when parents shift, young adults often shift with them. Not always immediately. Not always dramatically. But the relationship changes, and that change creates room that wasn’t there before.
Parent coaching isn’t about telling you what you’re doing wrong. It’s about helping you see patterns that are hard to see when you’re inside them. It’s about developing language for hard conversations — language that opens things up rather than shutting them down. It’s about learning to hold firm limits without letting fear run the decision-making. And it’s about helping you find your own ground again, so that your relationship with your young adult isn’t the only thing defining you right now.
Parent coaching isn’t therapy for you, and it isn’t about diagnosing your young adult from a distance. It’s practical, relational, and grounded in what actually moves things — small shifts in communication and presence that quietly change what’s possible in your family system.
Sometimes, parent coaching is also a bridge to more direct support for your young adult. When a parent shifts their approach and the relationship stabilizes a little, young adults often become more open to having someone else in their corner — a mentor, a therapist, a coach. Our therapeutic mentoring work is built for exactly this kind of moment: when a young adult is ready for real engagement with someone outside the family, but therapy alone isn’t quite enough.
What Shifts When Parents Get Support
I’ve watched this happen enough times that I want to describe it concretely, because it’s easy to be skeptical when you’re exhausted and nothing has worked yet.
One mother I worked with had been in a pattern with her 24-year-old son for nearly three years — arguments that escalated, long silences, rent subsidies she resented but kept paying because she didn’t know what else to do. She came into parent coaching expecting to get a script. What she found instead was that she was doing most of her communicating from a place of panic — and her son could feel it. Over about four months, she learned to slow down, to stop having the same circular conversation, to set a financial limit she could actually hold. Her son didn’t transform overnight. But the arguments stopped. He started returning her calls. Six months later, he reached out to ask about a mentor.
Another father came in convinced the problem was his daughter’s anxiety and avoidance. He was right — that was part of it. But what coaching helped him see was that his own intensity in conversations was making her anxiety worse, not better. He was trying to reason her out of fear, which doesn’t work. When he started meeting her in a different way — less logical, more present, more genuinely curious — she began to open up for the first time in years.
You don’t have to wait for your young adult to be ready for help before something can change. When parents get support, the family system shifts — and that shift creates new openings that weren’t there before.
These aren’t fairy tales. They don’t always go this smoothly, or this fast. But the pattern holds: when a parent stops trying to control the outcome and starts working on their side of the relationship, something moves. Not always what you expected. Sometimes better. Sometimes just different enough to matter.
When It’s Time to Get Outside Help
If you’ve been managing this alone for a long time, it might be worth asking yourself honestly: is what I’m doing working? Not is it the right thing? Not have I tried hard enough? Just — is it working?
If the answer is no — if the same conversations keep ending the same way, if your young adult is more withdrawn than they were a year ago, if you’re feeling resentment or despair more than hope — that’s a reasonable signal that it might be time for something different.
Getting outside support doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re doing the most strategic thing a parent can do: changing a pattern that isn’t moving instead of doubling down on more of the same. In my experience, the parents who reach out are often the ones who care the most. The ones who have been carrying this the longest, trying the hardest, and are finally willing to try something they haven’t tried before.
If you’re wondering whether parent coaching might be right for your family, or whether our mentoring programs might be a fit for your young adult, start with a conversation. No commitment, no pressure. Just a chance to talk through where things are and see what might help.
Founder, Noble Mentors
James Farmer has spent over a decade mentoring teens and young adults through their hardest transitions. He founded Noble Mentors to make therapeutic mentoring available to more families across Colorado.
About the Author
James Farmer
James Farmer is the founder of Noble Mentors. He has over a decade of experience mentoring teens and young adults through wilderness therapy, residential treatment, and private practice along Colorado’s Front Range. His approach is rooted in lived experience, depth psychology, and a deep belief in the transformative power of authentic human connection.
