There is a particular kind of parental anxiety that arrives somewhere around the time a child turns twenty-two or twenty-three. The degree is finished, or nearly finished. The friends seem to be getting jobs, getting serious relationships, getting on with things. And your own child is doing something that looks, from where you’re standing, like drifting.
They might be back home. They might be in a job that seems beneath them. They might be changing direction for the second or third time, or not changing at all, just sitting with an uncertainty that you find increasingly difficult to watch.
The instinct is to intervene. To push. To have the conversation about plans, about timelines, about what exactly is happening. Sometimes that conversation is necessary. Often it makes things worse in ways parents don’t anticipate.
What I want to offer here is a different frame, one that most parents find genuinely useful once they understand it, even when it’s not what they were hoping to hear.
Emerging adulthood is a life stage, not a failure to launch
The psychologist Jeffrey Arnett spent years researching the period between eighteen and twenty-five and concluded that it represented something distinct from both adolescence and settled adulthood, a stage with its own developmental logic, which he called emerging adulthood.
The features of this stage are commonly observed in many industrialised societies where emerging adulthood has been identified. Identity exploration across relationships, work, and values; instability as a structural feature rather than a problem to be solved; a focus on the self that is not narcissism but necessity; a felt sense of being in-between; and a particular form of optimism about the future that coexists with genuine confusion about the present.
What this means practically is that a twenty-three-year-old who has changed jobs twice, ended a relationship, moved back home, and is uncertain about almost everything is not necessarily failing at adulthood. They may be doing what many people experience during this stage: working out who they are when nobody is telling them who to be.
Without this framework, some parents understandably interpret normal young adult development as a sign that something is wrong. That pathologising communicates something to the young adult that is harder to undo than most parents realise.
Why the timeline parents carry is often the wrong map
Most parents are navigating their child’s emerging adulthood using a map drawn from their own experience of being young and that map is, in many cases, thirty years out of date.
The age at which people marry, establish careers, achieve financial independence, and settle into stable identities has shifted significantly across generations. The labour market that exists now is not the one parents graduated into. The housing situation in most cities is not comparable. The psychological research consistently shows that the markers parents associate with adulthood, stable job, own home, and committed relationships are arriving later across the board, and that this delay does not predict worse outcomes in the long run.
When parents hold onto an old timeline and apply it to a young adult who is navigating a genuinely different landscape, what the young adult receives is the message that they are behind. Behind some standard that exists in their parent’s mind but doesn’t map onto the world they’re actually living in. That message tends to produce one of two things: anxiety that compounds whatever uncertainty already exists, or a shutdown of communication because being around the parent feels like being assessed rather than known.
Neither of these outcomes helps.
The difference between support and scaffolding that never comes down
One of the things family therapy surfaces fairly regularly is that what looks like parental support is sometimes parental scaffolding that has never been removed.
Scaffolding is appropriate and necessary during construction. The problem comes when it stays up after the building is finished or after the building needs to find out for itself whether it can stand. A young adult who has every practical problem solved by a parent before they’ve had the chance to feel the problem fully, or work through it themselves, does not develop the confidence that comes from having done that.
This is not an argument for withdrawing support suddenly or completely. It is an argument for asking, honestly, whether the support being offered is serving the young adult’s development or the parent’s anxiety. Those two things can look identical from the outside and feel very different from the inside.
The practical version of this question is: if I stopped doing this, what would actually happen? If the honest answer is “they would figure it out,” that is useful information. If the answer is “they genuinely cannot manage this yet,” that is different and worth taking seriously on its own terms.
What young adults actually need from parents during this period
This is where I find the most misalignment between what parents offer and what their adult children need.
Parents tend to offer advice, direction, and evaluation. What most young adults in this stage need is something considerably less structured: the experience of being known by someone who is not trying to change them.
That distinction matters. A parent who asks “what are you thinking about doing” and then listens without visibly calculating whether the answer is good enough is offering something different from a parent who asks the same question and then pivots to the reasons why a different path might be more sensible. Most young adults can tell the difference. They know within a few exchanges whether a conversation is a real one or an intervention with better manners.
What tends to keep the relationship functional through this period is a parent who can hold their own anxiety separately from the relationship. Not pretend it isn’t there. Hold it separately-meaning they deal with it somewhere else, rather than bringing it into every conversation with their child.
That is genuinely hard to do. It is also one of the most useful things a parent can offer.
When living at home complicates everything
The number of young adults living with parents into their mid-twenties has increased substantially, and it creates a specific set of dynamics that families often don’t have the language for.
The physical proximity of a parent-child relationship without the psychological structure of childhood produces a kind of ambiguity that both parties find uncomfortable. The young adult wants to be treated as an adult. The parent, in the home they run, finds it difficult not to revert to familiar patterns of oversight. Both of these make sense. They also collide constantly.
What I find helps in these situations is explicitly renegotiating what the relationship looks like now: not assumed, not hoped for, but actually discussed. What are the expectations? What is private? What kind of involvement is wanted and what isn’t? These conversations feel awkward and formal to families who aren’t used to having them. They tend to be considerably less damaging than the alternative, which is each person operating from assumptions the other doesn’t share.
The other thing worth naming is that returning home is not always regression. For some young adults, a period of living at home while they stabilise financially, emotionally, and professionally is a reasonable use of the resources their family represents. The question is whether it has a shape, even a loose one, or whether it is simply indefinite.
What I have observed as a psychologist
I want to say something that parents sometimes find uncomfortable: the young adults I work with who are struggling most are not, in many cases, struggling because something is inherently wrong with them. They are struggling because the gap between who they are and who the people around them need them to be has become too wide to carry quietly.
That gap is often created by love. Parents who want their children to be okay, who have invested enormously in that outcome, who cannot tolerate the uncertainty of watching someone they love navigate difficulty without intervening. The investment is real. The love is real. The impact is still sometimes the opposite of what was intended.
In family therapy, one of the things I work on with parents is separating their identity from their child’s trajectory. This is harder than it sounds. For many parents, how their child is doing is bound up in how they feel about themselves as a parent, and by extension as a person. When a young adult is struggling or uncertain, the parent doesn’t just feel worried. They feel implicated. That feeling of implication drives a lot of the behaviour the pushing, the advice-giving, the inability to let things be that young adults find suffocating.
What I have also observed is that parents who find a way to genuinely let go of the outcome-not give up, let go tend to see their relationship with their adult child improve. Sometimes the young adult’s situation improves too, though I am careful about claiming causation there. What I can say is that the quality of the relationship between parent and adult child is one of the more significant factors in how young adults fare during this period. It is worth protecting, even when protecting it means doing less.
Final thoughts
Young adult development is not a problem to be solved on a particular schedule. It is a process with its own timing, and that timing is not always the one parents would choose.
The parents who navigate this period most successfully are not the ones who have the best advice or the clearest plan. They are the ones who stay genuinely curious about who their child is becoming, without needing that process to look a certain way.
That is easier to say than to do. But it is, in my experience, what actually helps.
If you are finding the relationship with your adult child increasingly difficult to navigate, or if you are watching them struggle and unsure whether to step in or step back, a conversation with a psychologist can help you think it through more clearly.
Many parents find it helpful to have a space where they can step back from the day-to-day struggles, understand what’s really happening, and respond with greater clarity. Reach out to begin that conversation.
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FAQs
Q: What is emerging adulthood and why does it matter for parents?
A: Emerging adulthood, approximately from ages 18 to 25, is a period of identity exploration and transition. Understanding this stage can help parents support their children without misinterpreting normal development.
Q: My adult child seems stuck. How do I know if it’s normal young adult development or something that needs help?
A: Uncertainty is common in young adulthood. If they continue to be isolated, find life difficult or have ongoing anxiety or low mood, professional help may be helpful.
Q: Should I push my young adult to be more independent or wait for them to find their own way?
A: Meet in the middle. Offer advice and support, without too much pressure, and keep communication open and supportive.
Q: When does family therapy help with young adult issues?
A: Family therapy is helpful when communication is breaking down, conflicts are recurring, or families need help working through challenges together.
Q: Is it bad if my adult child still relies on me financially?
A: Not necessarily. In young adulthood, financial support is common. The important thing is that it encourages growth, responsibility and more independence over time.
