Project Parenthood presents, a special audiobook excerpt from the book "You're Not Done Yet: Parenting Young Adults in an Age of Uncertainty", by B. Janet Hibbs, M.F.T., Ph.D. and Anthony Rostain, M.D., M.A. A clear-eyed, optimistic guide for parents with adult children who need help navigating the challenges to launching an independent life.
Project Parenthood presents, a special audiobook excerpt from the book You're Not Done Yet: Parenting Young Adults in an Age of Uncertainty, by B. Janet Hibbs, M.F.T., Ph.D. and Anthony Rostain, M.D., M.A.
A clear-eyed, optimistic guide for parents with adult children who need help navigating the challenges to launching an independent life.
You can listen to the full audiobook at Audible, Apple Books, the Libby App, or wherever else audiobooks are sold!
Project Parenthood is hosted by Chelsea Dorcich. A transcript is available as Simplecast.
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Excerpt from "You're Not Done Yet"...
Chapter 1. The New Normal. Time to Reset Your Thinking. If you truly want to understand something, Try to change it, Kurt Lewin. Kurt Lewin, the 1940s founder of modern social psychology, didn't have parents expanded role, generational stereotypes, or this book in mind. Yet, his timeless aphorism aptly sums up our task.
To understand the new normal for parenting young adults, we must first evaluate, understand, and then, possibly, change our thinking. Formerly, parents relied on their own young adult experiences to adequately guide their twenty somethings, but the recent size and scope of economic, social, and pandemic disruptions has profoundly influenced the expectations of parents and their young adults alike.
We begin with the thorny question of what we mean by normal and why we care so deeply about it. What's normal? Look around. Look around. Things are definitely not what they once were for young adults. Six years is the new four years to attain a college degree. A college degree no longer guarantees a living wage job.
Financial independence often means living with roommates and eating ramen to manage student debt. Text me when you get home is the new umbilical cord. Marriage, if it occurs, is postponed and may be decoupled from parenthood. Many of these socioeconomic and cultural changes that delayed full adulthood were underway long before the pandemic.
Without a path to the good life, young adults now run a gauntlet of uncertainties and find themselves in a bind of either trying against the odds or, as our friend Tyler was doing, And, like Tyler, 20 somethings no longer refer to themselves as adults, but consider themselves kids who poke fun at adulting.
Beyond the misery of Tyler's floundering, his story acquaints us with a generational reality. Some of this parent and young adult struggle isn't new. The transition from adolescence to adulthood has often been fraught with anxiety, especially in times of economic strain. The third decade of life has long been recognized, written about, and bemoaned by its current inhabitants as one of the most tumultuous periods of life.
One young man summed up the general consensus, The Twenties are like the hardest online game of Elden Ring. You play it, but only understand what you've done wrong in hindsight. It's fun, but punishingly hard. There is no guide. You learn by making costly mistakes. Paradoxically, most of its tasks sound joyful.
Make your own money, get your own place, date and partner up, even enviable in the abstract. So, in this hardest game of young adulthood, what do we even mean by normal? Its definition depends on which expert you ask. Statisticians explain normal as a distribution of scores in the usual range, such as the average for a particular population.
Doctors refer to a disease model. Mental health professionals talk about culturally accepted behavior as an indication that a person is mentally healthy and has no psychological disorder. Historians who study family life remind us of the past cultural, societal, religious, and moral expectations for intergenerational relationships.
But when parents are wondering if their child is normal, they most want to hear from an expert on child development. Earlier, parents turned to pediatricians for reassurance that their child was on track. Eventually, though, teens outgrew their pediatricians. Parents also looked to educators to tell them whether their kids were on target academically and socially.
Parents once assumed that a college degree implicitly confirmed that their work was done. Presumably, diploma in hand, the young adult was ready for primetime adult life. The truth is, parents are not done. Normal has lost its center. Let's try another set of experts for an understanding of normal. Twenty somethings.
According to one young adult, normal is nothing more than the average of man's eccentricities. Another jokes, normal is just a setting on a dryer, while a young man ridicules the premise. No one has a normal childhood. There is no such thing as normal. These young adults haven't read Freud. But their answers express his century old assertion that normality is an ideal fiction and that every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average.
Parents are not so glib. They care deeply about a child's expectable, safe trajectory to maturity. It's in their job description, found on page one of Evolution's Survival Guide. Protect your child from danger and raise them to thrive. Of course, today's dangers are rarely the mortal illnesses or diseases that claimed the lives of so many children in the pre modern millennia.
Yet, our brains do not read textbooks to detect danger, but scan our bodies. When our brain senses heightened physical distress, it triggers a fight or flight rush of adrenaline that creates a long and sustained release of the stress hormone cortisol. High levels of cortisol are linked to parenting stress, which begins to increase in expectant and new parents and boosts their responsiveness toward infants.
Just the right amount of cortisol keeps parents alert for problems that they may misinterpret as dangers. For A parent's elevated level of cortisol persists throughout child rearing, rising more during the adolescent years and then, if all goes well, slowly ebbing in the transition to young adulthood.
The parents of 20 somethings remain on alert, wondering, If normal is no longer normal, and if I'm not done yet, then what am I in for? Worrisome stress can signal a slow leak in a parent's own resilience. One mom fretted, I was looking forward to being an empty nester, but we didn't even get five years between their college graduations and needing to help my elderly parents.
Parents might also resent the unexpected extension of the two decades long tour of duty. One dad protested, I didn't sign up for this. Another added, What if we aren't prepared to be there emotionally, or can't finance another decade of support? A young adult's delayed independence translates into an individually born emotional and financial burden for their parents, whose own tasks of middle age are deferred.
We share a secret hidden in plain sight. Normal is difficult to define. Chasing normal does little to help us guide our twenty somethings into full adulthood. Despite our best efforts to be good parents and to help our children flourish, we can achieve only a partial measure of control, no matter how much we try.
Rather than pressure ourselves or our kids even more, we might release ourselves from the stressful, performance driven striving for normal and send youth a reassuring message. Learn You will be okay, even if you weren't accepted by your dream college, even if that special job didn't work out, and even if your original life plans haven't materialized yet.
But even if you or your adult child wants to believe this message, even if your own experiences bear it out, embracing future uncertainty feels like a leap of faith. Perhaps a foolish, or even dangerous one. You are contending with both the conscious and the largely unconscious resistance to change. A change that could upend your beliefs about what's normal in young adulthood and middle aged parenting.
The search for the new normal takes us to the first of five resets to our thinking. We begin with the premise that normal is on a continuum. And sometimes it's okay not to be okay, no matter your age. You Reset 1. Defining a new normal of emerging adulthood. The phrase, the new normal, isn't new. It was first used to describe the period of societal settling following the crisis of World War I.
Over the next hundred years, the new normal has repeatedly tagged post crisis eras. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The 2008 financial meltdown and global recession, and the COVID 19 pandemic. Recent and repeated societal and economic upheavals have impacted the realities of young adults and their parents.
In today's new normal, our first reset requires accepting a developmental progression in young adulthood that is not mired in the past. This new developmental stage is flexible and dynamic, with interludes of dependence and independence. It also has a new name. Emerging adulthood. Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett defines emerging adulthood as a stage between adolescence and adulthood.
It is as an in between period of delayed adulthood that features multiple job changes, career restarts, and deferred decisions about marriage and children up to and often past age 30. The delays of better resourced 20 somethings are often on behalf of prolonged education, with ongoing financial reliance on parents.
Young adults with limited access to these opportunities typically experience milestone delays due to insufficient education or skills training. In either case, emerging adulthood is no longer age defined by stable, linear markers. There is no clear rite of passage, but rather a highly individual experience where adulthood relies on the subjective feeling of self sufficiency.
Yet advice to parents about how to respond to the stops, starts, and stalls in their young adult's progress has been limited. Even the guidance that does exist is confusing and even contradictory. For many years, parents have been encouraged to help their young adult grow up by letting go, and have been chastised for being too involved.
For Now they're being advised, hold tight, they're not ready yet. Parents grapple with a range of topics influencing their involvement and relationship with their young adult children. Who's to say what advice to follow? Popular opinion, even expert opinion, has become a surprise.
For every talk show guest, op ed writer, or researcher who says that young people need more parental support today than they received historically, there are others who advise us to beware of our smothering tendencies and to mock egregious examples of helicopter parenting, which was once viewed as a corrective to the prior generation's more hands off style.
Bye for now. Our advice? Don't fault yourself. It's a confounding time for parents, because much of what affects all our lives is beyond our control. What we can control is our response to unfolding events and uncertainties, and how we relate to each other. To gain clarity, allow yourself to ask deep questions about your general assumptions and beliefs about young adulthood.
Among the broad questions you might Are these, how different are my adult child's experiences from that time in my life? Do I need to give them more parental or adult guidance than I got? Do I think of my adult children as kids or adults? Do I judge myself or them if they're not flourishing? Is this delay in growing up a period of self discovery or self indulgence?
What signs of progress should I expect to see? There are no one size fits all answers. For now, allow yourself some understandable confusion. Chapter Two explores how these aspects of emerging adulthood play out in the daily lives and challenges of parents and their young adults. The shift from old beliefs about adulthood to new information about emerging adulthood takes us to Reset Two.
How we make up and change our minds and our beliefs. Reset to making up and changing our minds. Once we've made up our minds, it's hard to change them. As parents, we must make up our minds about what's good for our children. Our parenting beliefs inform our decisions that become rules for the basics of bedtime, nutrition, table manners, behavior, and grades.
Later, we make age appropriate determinations for chores, screen time, and smartphone use. By the time a child becomes an adolescent, parents set new rules for curfew, driving, dating, and alcohol use, among many others. Educationally, parents make decisions that are scattered throughout the childhood and teenage years.
Over time, parents gradually ease up on their rules and trust that their earlier guidance and their implicit values have taken hold. With all these decisions, parents make up their minds and rely on their beliefs. Yet we only have to look back a few decades to see that certain beliefs regarding what children need and what parents should do are changeable.
We pivot from babies should be picked up and coddled to let babies cry it out and self calm. We've exchanged children should be seen and not heard for listen to kids so they'll talk to you. We've reframed video games are harmful to video games can be okay and promote social bonding. More recently, we've debated striving for the brand name college against performance stress is the path to burnout.
These shifts in attitudes clearly show that our beliefs are not absolute truths. but rather rest on a particular construction of a socially shared reality. We often think of reality in the cause and effect terms of physics. The apple falls from the tree to the ground according to Newton's law of gravitation.
Physical reality is predictably stable. Social reality is not. Social reality. Or the relationships and understandings among people is a communicated and inherently unstable belief construction. Yet, when people make up their minds, they call it reality. Polarization and mistrust often result when people argue their conflicting versions of reality.
Family life is the proving ground for the ability to talk about and resolve our differences. Rethink our misunderstandings. and strengthen our relationships, but how do parents and young adults constructively discuss or even consider opposing beliefs when they've made up their minds? When the mind is closed, when your mind, full of firm beliefs, is made up, We call it a mindset.
The very term mindset contains the word set, suggesting convictions, thoughts, and ideas that are resistant to change. Mindsets matter. Mindsets inform our understanding of others and shape our behaviors that underpin all of our relationships, including our relationship to ourselves. Though most of us enjoy novelty, When it comes to how we organize our thinking, individuals prefer the consistency of familiar, predictable beliefs.
We are comfortably stuck. When our beliefs are fixed, we're less open to entertaining other perspectives. We have a closed mindset. The upside of a closed mindset is its efficiency. We arrive at one answer, or belief, and can stop looking for another answer. The downside to this efficiency is a learning trap that abruptly halts the exploration we need for creative problem solving.
Closed mindsets are vulnerable to distortions that reduce reality to all or nothing thinking. People with closed mindsets cling to unevaluated, rigidly held beliefs that are often self defeating. you Returning to young adulthood, one example of a closed mindset is the belief in a linear, on schedule arrival to adulthood.
When parents and twenty somethings hold on to this color by numbers, age based mindset, the likely result is disappointed expectations. This closed mindset. which is most often based on a parent's own experiences, leads to an unrealistic anticipation of a similar timeline for their 20 something. When reality falls short of expectations, a closed mindset makes things worse for both generations.
For instance, When a young adult flubs a test, the Closed Parental Mindset settles on its first fault finding answer, you didn't study enough. Closed minded thinking does not allow curious or empathic exploration. Our Closed Mindset reactions can feel reasonable in the moment, though they may neither meet the goals of improved family relationships, nor support a young adult's competencies.
Instead, a parent's open mindset response in this example might be, Gee, that's tough. What do you think was going on for you? The young adult then has a chance to share. I studied, but I got so nervous that I blanked on some answers. Closed mindsets, though quick to react, are not always critical or blaming.
Parents may overreact protectively with increased control and monitoring of a young adult's progress. Parents may also reflexively urge their children to fail forward for success and turn mistakes into future stepping stones. While the good intention is for growth, it goes awry when a parent's feedback is limited to achievement markers, grades, scores, and accomplishments.
over mastery and learning. Authors Bell Lange and Tim Klein describe the emphasis on achievement as a closed performance mindset. It incentivizes children and young adults to minimize mistakes rather than learn from them. Instead of fostering resilience in a changing, increasingly competitive world, the performance mindset sends the message that success is a zero sum game.
You only win by beating others. This pressured focus often backfires by generating anxiety and depression in emerging adults, especially in those who are already struggling. Returning to the Millers, we see how their closed mindset approach results in Tyler's resistance. Early on in the family therapy, his parents led with pressured advice or judgment.
You need to get a job and move out. Smoking this much can't be good for you. And, just as predictably, Tyler reacted furiously. Even with a crummy job, I can't afford to move out. And don't you think I know that smoking is poison? But at least I enjoy it. Just leave me alone. Knowing what his parents expect hasn't motivated him.
Though their expectations, if not their presentations, are reasonable, their performative pressure has backfired. Feeling valued only if he measures up to their standards, Tyler feels worthless. becomes more defensive and angrily disengages. We introduced them to an open mindset approach with conversational tips to avoid meltdowns.
They needed both prevention and repair skills. Prevention relies on respectful, open ended questions that show curiosity rather than judgment. Repair skills include naming feelings, asking for time to calm down, and owning up to blaming or critical responses.