You Only Know What You Know | They’re Legally an Adult. You’re Still Their Parent. featuring Melissa Blitz, M.Ed., LCPC and Greta Holt, LCSW
Episode Overview
When your child turns 18, the relationship changes overnight — on paper. They’re legally an adult. They can make their own decisions. And yet, the worry, responsibility, and desire to help doesn’t disappear.
In this episode, Beth and Britt sit down with Melissa Blitz, M.Ed., LCPC, Director, Center of Excellence and Greta Holt, LCSW, Principal Family Therapist, to explore what it means to parent at the edge of autonomy when a young adult is struggling with their mental health. Together, they talk about how to stay connected without overstepping, how to express concern without damaging trust, and what support looks like when you’re no longer in control of the decisions.
The conversation also addresses a growing concern many families describe as “failure to launch.” Listeners will hear why today’s path to independence often looks different than it did in previous generations.
→ Click here to download the Parent Guide
Meet the Guests
Melissa Blitz, LCPC
Melissa is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor who has been with Compass Health Center for eight years. She has worked with young adults throughout her career in group settings, as an individual primary therapist, and as a director of the Young Adult Team. She now leads over-18 program development for Compass Health Center.
Greta Holt, LCSW
Greta is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and family therapist who has been at Compass Health Center for five years. She works weekly with young adult patients and their parents or caregivers and brings a unique generational perspective by sitting between most of her young adult patients and their parents in age, helping her bridge that gap in the therapy room.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Britt Teasdale
Remember that film from the early 2000s, Failure to Launch, where Matthew McConaughey plays a guy in his mid-30s still living at home, and his parents are so frustrated that they hire someone to essentially engineer his independence for him? It’s a comedy, but that phrase — “failure to launch” — has become part of our cultural vocabulary, and it carries judgment. The reality for many young adults right now is complex. The financial landscape is changing. It’s taking longer to graduate from university. Rates of anxiety and depression are significantly higher than in previous generations. The path into adulthood is less predictable, and our expectations of what that path should look like really haven’t shifted to match.
Beth Hope
And that gap between expectation and reality creates a complicated space for families. When a child turns 18, everything changes on paper — they’re legally an adult with the right to make their own decisions. But a parent’s instinct to protect and support doesn’t simply turn off. So the question many parents find themselves sitting with isn’t “How do I fix this?” It’s “How do I stay connected and supportive while my child finds their own footing?”
Britt Teasdale
That tension is really at the center of what we’re discussing today — what it looks like to parent at the edge of autonomy. How do you stay present without overstepping? How do you express concern without breaking trust? And how can we tell the difference between avoidance or low motivation versus mental health challenges or overwhelm?
Beth Hope
Joining us today are Melissa Blitz and Greta Holt, both of whom work closely with young adults and their families navigating this stage of life. We’re so glad you’re here. To get us started, we’d love for you to share a little bit about yourselves and the work that you do. Let’s start with you, Melissa.
Melissa Blitz
Thanks, Beth. I’m a licensed clinical professional counselor and I’ve been with Compass for eight years — which is wild! My whole time here at Compass, and even before, I’ve worked with young adults. I’ve worked in the group setting, as an individual primary therapist, and then was one of the directors of the young adult team before shifting into my current role, where I get to do general over-18 program development for the entirety of Compass. I’m really excited to be here for what I think is going to be a complex yet exciting conversation, where we can take multiple perspectives and highlight different approaches, as well as the facts that can’t be ignored when someone steps into their 18th year.
Greta Holt
I’m a licensed clinical social worker, and this July I will have been at Compass for five years. That whole time I’ve been a family therapist — doing weekly sessions with our young adult patients, their significant others, and mostly their parents or other adult caregivers. I’m in a kind of unique position where, age-wise and generationally, I’m smack dab in the middle of most of my young adult patients and their parents. I think it gives me a perspective to see all sides and hopefully bridge that gap a little bit.
What Has Changed for Young Adults?
Britt Teasdale
As we were saying in the introduction, life looks a lot different for young adults now in 2026 than it did in the late ’90s and early 2000s. So what has really changed? How is life different for young adults today?
Melissa Blitz
Greta and I had a chat last week to think through the most important things to bring forward in this conversation. When we looked at the difference between 1996 and 2026, three themes came up. The first is this increased information era — people are getting access to smartphones or smart devices at such a young age that by the time they’re 18, they may have had that technology for a decade or longer. The amount of information, the accessibility of it, the ease of it, but also the social pull toward those devices is something that wasn’t present to the same degree in 1996, when we maybe had dial-up internet at home that didn’t go in our pockets or travel with us. The second theme is this desire to know information — social, societal, educational — there’s an overabundance. And then once we have it, what do we do with it? The third is the sheer accessibility of things like online dating and services like Uber and Lyft, which a teenager or young adult in 1996 simply didn’t have access to.
Greta Holt
Technology was really the primary difference — both for young adults and for parents. Our young adults have a lot more connection to social media and apps, but parents do too. A lot of the parents I work with use Life360 to track their young adults, and that gives parents a lot more information. But they may not always know how to use it or what to do with it, and that can be overwhelming. The overall point is: there’s so much more information and connectedness now, but our ability to be discerning and intentional with it hasn’t necessarily kept pace.
Beth Hope
That’s such a great point. As someone who’s a parent of teens, you set up Life360 for a reason — to try to give your kids more independence while also knowing where they are. As a family therapist, are you coaching parents on how to allow for more independence when they can track their kid’s location 24/7? When do we tell parents to turn that off — or turn it on selectively when there’s a concern?
Greta Holt
It can come in handy to uncover struggles a young adult might be having, especially if they’re across the country at college. Parents will come in and say, “Hey, I know my kid was supposed to be in class right now, but I see they’re still in their dorm,” and that’s often where it starts. It can be really helpful in those moments.
But it can lose its utility over time — like when a young adult is back home and parents are still tracking whether they’re going to program, doing errands, or out with friends. Part of what we’re doing in treatment is helping young adults learn to discern the difference between when they’re unsafe versus when they’re uncomfortable. And we have to teach that distinction to parents too: what’s the difference between your kid going through a tough time and being able to handle it versus being genuinely unsafe?
Defining Young Adulthood
Beth Hope
I want to pause and zoom out to define young adulthood. At Compass, we treat young adults separately from adolescents and the adult program, because there are so many unique developmental factors specific to this stage. What makes young adulthood distinct?
Greta Holt
We’re roughly talking about people ages 18 to 25 — though that’s not always cut and dry, since people have different levels of maturity and insight. What we’re really looking at is the commonality: some sort of transition is happening, some sort of flux between adolescence and adulthood. Something we talk about a lot is that our young adults are often legally adults with the brain of an adolescent. That’s a really important piece to remember. There is a biological basis for developmental adulthood — the frontal lobes in the brain are typically not fully formed until around age 25. The brain is growing and changing very rapidly during young adulthood.
Melissa Blitz
I actually find this topic a little funny, because when someone turns 18, more options become available legally — in terms of purchases, societal decisions, and even in treatment, where it looks different what an 18-year-old can do regarding family involvement compared to a minor. And yet, the prefrontal cortex — our decision-making center — isn’t fully developed until at least age 25. So we have a person who has way more decisions presented to them, with more expectations to make those decisions more independently, while the part of their brain that governs decision-making has years of development still to go.
This is a really tricky, special time. Understanding that — from a caregiver perspective, and as a young adult themselves — can be really impactful in navigating this stage.
Beth Hope
How does that play out in family therapy? When you’re parenting a young adult who is struggling — who lacks insight, or is struggling to a degree that they need help but aren’t buying into it — that can be so much harder than parenting a child. How do you address that?
Greta Holt
We have to adjust our approach. The same justifications that worked when a child was younger just aren’t going to cut it anymore, largely because we have a person who is coming into their own and growing more independent. We have to shift from an authoritative style to a more collaborative one.
I tell families: lead with curiosity. This is your young adult’s first time being a young adult, and it may be your first time parenting this specific person at this stage. There is no manual. There’s a lot of uncertainty. So instead of “I need you to do this because I’m the authority,” it becomes “I’m noticing you’re having some trouble with this — can you tell me more about that?” Combining curiosity with vulnerability is key. We were all young adults. When your own young adult hears that you struggled with similar things, that can increase connection and their willingness to be receptive to guidance.
Britt Teasdale
I wish I’d been having conversations with my parents about the fact that my prefrontal cortex wasn’t fully developed. We weren’t having those conversations. If you’re struggling during those years, you can start feeling a lot of shame — why aren’t I making the right decisions? Why is this so hard? There can be a lot of shame if you feel like you’re behind your peers. I feel like there’s real power in that knowledge.
Beth Hope
If my parents had told me as a young adult that I wasn’t making great decisions because of my developing prefrontal cortex, I don’t think I would have responded, “Wow, that is really interesting, thank you.”
Britt Teasdale
Maybe not at the time — but maybe later! I just feel like there’s power in it. Maybe knowing your brain isn’t fully developed yet is a reason to pause before making a huge life decision.
Melissa Blitz
And that’s the tricky bit — there’s power in the knowledge, but it’s about knowing who you’re talking to, and when your young adult is most receptive. Before we can have any of these conversations, we have to level-set: What does the landscape of your life look like? What do I need to understand about your life so I can best support you? That’s a conversation that can cultivate a lot of the vulnerability Greta was talking about — coming together versus seeing it as a conflict where one side is right and one side is wrong.
Greta Holt
Taking a team-based approach is key — in the therapy space, but also in the household. We are now technically two adults: parent and child. There will always be an imbalance in that relationship, but it’s also now two adults, and that requires a more collaborative approach. Getting clear that blame doesn’t really have a role here is important.
When mistakes happen, the conversation needs to happen as a learning opportunity for both the young adult and the parent — not to shame or blame, but to learn together. I hear a lot from parents that they’re being directive because they don’t want their kid to make the same mistakes they made. That’s so valid. But we have to think back to when we were young adults and ask: I only know what I know now because I went through it. How can I still be a safety net while making sure my young adult has their own chance to have learning experiences?
Melissa Blitz
What we haven’t talked about yet is the emotional experience of caregivers. When something doesn’t go the way we anticipated, or our young adult makes a mistake, it makes sense that a caregiver will have a strong emotional reaction. And when we’re experiencing heightened emotions, we tend not to be the most effective communicators or make the most mindful decisions. The psychoeducation for caregivers is important: if you’re feeling really upset — which is valid — it’s not the time to have the conversation. We need both parties regulated so we can come together and problem-solve.
Proactive Support & Healthy Foundations
Beth Hope
A lot of what you named — social anxiety, depression, ADHD — didn’t start when these young adults turned 18. For listeners who are parenting children and adolescents right now: are there proactive things we can do to set our kids up for success in young adulthood? Life skills, coping strategies, preparing for more independence?
Melissa Blitz
There are, and it’s going to look different for every child, because everyone has different needs and every family dynamic is different. Whatever we’re proposing has to be mutually agreed upon — there has to be buy-in from both the young adult and the caregivers. This leads me to two categories: What are the non-negotiables — the things essential to their wellbeing? And where do we have some flexibility and more independence? If we can start those conversations early, by the time 18 comes around, we’re not scrambling to institute something overnight when suddenly more freedoms have opened up. Proactive, rather than reactive.
Greta Holt
I’m a big fan of getting in the habit of talking about the why behind the things we do. If you can model that as a parent, especially as kids get older and can understand more complex reasoning, any rules or boundaries will seem less arbitrary. You get more buy-in from your children when you’re able to explain why something matters and approach it collaboratively.
Beth Hope
This makes me think of two books I’ve read recently. One is Untethered by Doug Bolton, which talks about the importance of creating connections through childhood and adolescence that will last — with family, peers, and mentors. The idea is that these relationships are there as life’s challenges arise. And then there’s The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which talks about technology and social media, but also this idea of free-range parenting — the importance of giving kids appropriate autonomy. How do we balance creating connections and letting go a little, so that kids can take chances, fail, bounce back, and build resilience? So that once they reach young adulthood, they have the tools they need.
Britt Teasdale
I recently read The Anxious Generation and immediately started letting my almost six-year-old go into our neighborhood coffee shop to pick up our online order while I wait in the car. Just these little moments of independence. It’s hard not to feel anxious about letting your children go, but it’s so important — and you can start early.
Beth Hope
Are you seeing a lot of helicopter parenting with young adults? Parents reaching out directly to their kid’s professors, showing up at job interviews? It comes from a place of good intentions and anxiety. How can we help caregivers let things play out without accidentally sending the message to their kids that they need their parents’ involvement?
Greta Holt
Definitely seeing it a lot, especially around college. A parent wanting to email their young adult’s advisor — though, to be fair, if parents are paying for the education, that creates another layer of involvement that may genuinely need to be there.
I love what I think of as “trial runs.” Find opportunities to experiment with sitting with discomfort a little more. Whether that’s turning off Life360 for two days, or turning it off during the day while keeping it on at night — have that conversation with your young adult so you’re both on the same page and there’s transparency. Those little trial runs are absolutely key.
Melissa Blitz
And if we’ve been priming those helpful habits in adolescence, by the time young adulthood comes, a weekly check-in or Sunday FaceTime feels natural — we’re already used to it, and we already know it’s helpful.
Technology, Tracking, and Letting Go
Britt Teasdale
Do you think tracking technologies like Life360 are detrimental overall? When I was a young adult, I’d tell my parents where I was — and whether I was actually there, who knows! I feel like there was a lot more freedom. Is it a positive tool or is it hurting young adults’ resilience and development?
Greta Holt
Frankly, if I could have everyone take a 90-day detox from social media, I would. There are a lot of positives to technology, but it comes back to discernment — what are we doing with the information we have? I’ve had young adults who have Life360 as a family, and many of them keep track of their parents too, wanting to know if mom and dad got home okay. The anxiety that comes with information overload is pretty universal. The key question is: why do I want this information, and what am I going to do with it? If I know my kid isn’t in class, what’s my next step — am I going to check in with them, or am I just going to sit in my discomfort?
Melissa Blitz
There are kids who find that parental visibility supportive — “My parent can see if I made it to my 8 a.m. class, and that actually helps me get there.” If that’s an agreed-upon mechanism within the family, great. But if the young adult wasn’t part of that decision, we don’t really get to answer whether it’s helpful. And your parent can also see where you slept last night — and it wasn’t necessarily your own dorm room.
Beth Hope
Right — and when does it stop? At what point is it enabling dependence versus setting someone up for success? Are we going to have Life360 running when someone is 27?
Greta Holt
And are there other ways to get what we’re actually seeking? Because what we’re really seeking is connection, knowledge, and some level of certainty to calm our nerves. There’s a wide range of options between constant tracking and zero communication. Maybe instead we institute a once-weekly call or FaceTime, or a family agreement that “I’ll text you at 10 a.m. to make sure you made it to class.” There are a lot of ways to stay connected that feel more autonomous and less intrusive.
When Something Feels Serious
Beth Hope
What do you do when your young adult is struggling and refusing any connection or intervention when it’s genuinely needed? They can turn things off on their phone. What do we do when they won’t allow it?
Melissa Blitz
It’s so hard. The only certain answer is that whatever is happening now isn’t working. So it starts with dropping the rope on the current dynamic — recognizing that the current approach isn’t getting to a place of connection. And that first step — just stopping what you’re used to doing as a parent — can be the hardest.
Greta Holt
Modeling consistency is also key. Signal to your young adult: “Clearly this isn’t working right now, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to continue to support you, even if that looks a little different than it has. I’m always going to be thinking about you and loving you.” As long as you can model that consistently, hopefully your young adult will come around.
I’d also look at what other support systems they have. Do they have friends? Professors they’re close to? People at their job? Ideally, their own therapy team? And knowing that developmentally, young adults are supposed to become more reliant on those sources of support than on their parents — that’s appropriate. How do we foster that?
Melissa Blitz
And that’s a great way to discern whether something is developmentally appropriate versus a clinical concern: Are they stepping away just from me while remaining connected to their peer group, academics, and therapeutic supports? Or are they isolating across the board? Stepping away from a caregiver while most other connections remain intact is developmentally expected. Isolation across multiple domains is a signal to pay closer attention.
Healthy Resilience in Young Adulthood
Britt Teasdale
On the flip side — what does healthy resilience look like in young adulthood? What are signs parents can hold onto that signal their young adult is on a healthy developmental track?
Greta Holt
Looking to the foundational basics is always a good place to start: personal hygiene, eating, sleeping, taking medications. A healthy young adult is doing those things on their own and feels motivated to do them — there’s some buy-in to self-care. I’d also look at whether your young adult can express emotions. There are so many emotions at that stage of life, and the goal is to be able to sit with them without being totally derailed. If they have a tough conversation with a friend, can they still eat dinner that night? Can they still go back to their job the next morning? That resilience of feeling the emotion and being able to live alongside it is a really important marker.
Melissa Blitz
Another marker is a young adult being willing to ask for support when they notice they need it — which almost feels paradoxical to independence. There’s sometimes a misconception that independence means being fully self-sufficient or not needing anyone. What we actually want to see is balance: Can they make independent decisions while also knowing when to lean on others? No one gets through life without support. Saying “I’m making the independent decision to get some help right now” — that’s a sign of real maturity.
Supporting Connection and Building a Network
Britt Teasdale
If a young adult needs help but doesn’t want to talk to their parent about it, who can the parent point them toward?
Greta Holt
Point to other adults who are part of both your lives — a mutual family friend, someone from church or a shared hobby. Therapy is also amazing, regardless of whether someone is struggling clinically. Young adulthood is a perfect time to explore that — whether it’s family therapy or simply saying, “You don’t have to talk to me about it — is it okay if I help you find someone else you could talk to?” Either option is a good one.
Melissa Blitz
There’s what I call “door number three.” When we’re in an emotional spot, we tend to see things in binary: I either talk to my parent, or I say nothing. But there’s always a door number three: connecting with a therapist, bringing in a supportive family member, or at the very least having a conversation where I say, “As long as you’re safe, I’m going to respect your privacy — but it’s clear something’s on your mind. Who are you willing to talk to?”
Beth Hope
And proactively — if your child is college-bound, throw in a question on the campus tour: Where’s the counseling center and what do they offer? When things aren’t tense, talk through how to find local resources. Helping to build those skills around seeking support, when there isn’t already a crisis, can go a long way.
Melissa Blitz
That’s the difference between doing it for the young adult versus supporting them. Let’s work on this together, so you know how to do this for yourself when you need it. It’s empowering the young adult to help themselves, while making sure they know those tools exist. Not leaving them to figure it out alone — but also not skipping over their role in their own decisions.
Beth Hope
Because when we do everything for them, we send the message that they can’t do it themselves. At each developmental stage, a certain level of caregiver involvement is needed and appropriate — but if we don’t adjust that as our kids grow, we keep sending the message that they can’t, that they don’t know how. And that’s not anyone’s goal.
Greta Holt
Diversifying that support system is so key, and it’s another sign of healthy young adulthood. The number of times I’ve been in a great family session and the parent says, “I’ve been telling you this forever — why haven’t you listened until now?” That’s such a universal human experience: sometimes we just need to hear something from a different source for it to really stick.
Britt Teasdale
And that speaks to our partnerships with universities and colleges, too. We partner directly with those institutions so they can better support students seeking mental health care and help identify when a higher level of care — like PHP or IOP — might be needed. It gives young adults another touch point and more responsibility to seek out support on their own.
Substance Use and Process Addictions
Beth Hope
I want to shift gears to addiction and substance use. I’m hearing a lot about young adults with process addictions — sports betting, gambling, video games — as well as substance use, some of which becomes legal at this age. What are you seeing?
Melissa Blitz
It’s a loaded topic. Every year it becomes more prevalent in our milieu. What helps me is asking: are we talking about chemical dependency or emotional dependency? And what’s the mechanism behind either? It’s natural at the young adult stage to be curious and to have more opportunity to try new things. Add legal access, more independence, and the desire to experience something new, combined with a prefrontal cortex that isn’t yet fully developed — and you have what can feel like a perfect storm.
There’s no single answer, but I go back to being proactive. Before anything happens, have a conversation in your family: your young adult is approaching an age where they’ll have access to X, Y, or Z. Share information. Validate that they’ll have choices. Try to have that candid discussion before it becomes a problem. And we have to tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing what they’ll ultimately choose.
Beth Hope
The question of what’s problematic really comes down to: what could you be doing instead that you aren’t? How is this getting in the way of living your life according to your values? Small amounts of these things don’t have to be problematic. It’s when they start to interfere with functioning that we have a concern.
Melissa Blitz
And if the connection between the family and the young adult isn’t strong, we may not be having honest conversations about what’s actually happening. The most important common denominator: if someone is experiencing problematic behaviors and feels they can safely talk to their supports, there’s an inroad. If they fear blame or shame, they may not be honest — and we may only find out at a stage where it’s much harder to intervene effectively.
Greta Holt
Addiction can thrive in secrecy. Two things I look for, regardless of substance, screen time, or gambling: the impact on functioning, and secrecy. When things are being hidden, that’s when we’re really in trouble.
As much as it might be uncomfortable for parents to talk openly about some of this — and it is awkward — we have to confront the reality that these things exist and that our young adult might engage with them. One approach we use in treatment is harm reduction: if there’s a chance they’re going to engage in a behavior, how can we do it as safely as possible? Maybe that means setting ground rules together: “You can’t use substances in the house,” or “If you’re going to the bar, you’re never taking the car — we’ll Uber.” Coming up with those ground rules collaboratively makes the conversation as safe and transparent as possible.
AI, Loneliness, and Real Connection
Britt Teasdale
The Harvard Making Caring Common study from 2023 reported that 45% of young adults had a general sense that things were falling apart, 44% reported a sense of not mattering to others, and 34% reported loneliness. Are you seeing conversations about AI entering the picture around loneliness and connection?
Greta Holt
Not so much in the family therapy room specifically, but definitely with young adults in general. A lot of our folks came of age during the height of the COVID pandemic, when we had to rely on technology for social connection. And combating loneliness with AI tools is probably only going to exacerbate those issues in the long run — it will feel good and comforting temporarily, but we’re not engaging with a sentient being who can truly connect with us on the level that humans need. There are limited uses for it. But ultimately, we need human socialization. Reaching out to a person is going to feel more uncomfortable than opening up ChatGPT — and it will be so much more sustaining and beneficial in the long run.
Britt Teasdale
What about young adults using AI specifically to talk about their mental health? How problematic can that be?
Melissa Blitz
Like any technology, there are benefits and drawbacks. And just like Facebook, which has been around for over two decades and we’re only now seeing legal ramifications — we’re going to learn about AI’s effects in a reactionary way, before any protective precedent is in place. That’s very concerning. But it doesn’t mean we can’t have conversations to get ahead of it.
I think about the “before, during, after” framework: How am I feeling before I use this? During? After? And how does that compare to how I feel after connecting with an actual person? Because communication isn’t just words — it’s non-verbals, eye contact, the feeling of being truly heard. If those are the needs we’re trying to meet and we’re going to a chatbot, what are the barriers to meeting those needs with a real human being? That’s what I’d want to look deeper into.
Greta Holt
These programs are designed to keep you engaged. If you were to talk to a chatbot about your mental health, its goal is not to give you tools to go do the work in the real world — its goal is to keep you coming back to the program. In a way, it’s learning from you; you’re not really learning from it. So keep in mind: what is its goal, and what’s mine? Are those two things aligned?
Melissa Blitz
And what are you getting from the chatbot that you may not be getting from your supports? Maybe it just validates you endlessly — which feels amazing. And that might be a signal that you need to communicate to the real people in your life: “When we talk, we usually go right to problem-solving. What I really need is for you to just hear my feelings first.” If that conversation can happen, maybe the pull toward the chatbot won’t feel as strong.
Britt Teasdale
How would you suggest a parent bring up this topic to their young adult without it feeling combative?
Greta Holt
Always go back to curiosity. State your own observations, lead with “I” statements — they’re an oldie but a goodie for a reason. State what you’re observing, how you’re feeling, what you’re noticing. Then: “Can you tell me a bit more about that?” And have a fuller conversation from there.
Melissa Blitz
And if there’s a mutual recognition that something seems concerning, go back to the trial period. “For the next two days, what if we turned off the app and saw how you feel? Let’s talk at the end of those two days about what you noticed, what the challenges were, what the benefits were.” Small steps. We can experiment together, versus seeing things in an all-or-nothing way.
Closing: The Parent’s Role Now
Beth Hope
This conversation is giving me a lot of hope. It’s never too late to intervene. There are so many ways to approach young adulthood, which looks so different for everyone. If there’s one thing you’d want parents to remember about supporting young adults, what would it be?
Greta Holt
We’ve got to muddle through it together. There’s no manual — you and your young adult are each discovering something new. Figure it out together, and keep that connection. Connection is what will ensure healthy continued development for your kid.
Melissa Blitz
Try to embrace that it is messy, even when we feel like it shouldn’t be. And slow down in the moments where you feel the urge to go fast.
Britt Teasdale
One last question before we wrap: how can parents manage their own anxiety so they can stay steady and be a consistent presence during this stage?
Greta Holt
Number one: therapy. Get your own therapist and have a dedicated person to get all those feelings and thoughts out with. And build self-compassion and grace for yourself as a parent. Remind yourself when it gets hard: I love my kid, and I’ll get through this.
Melissa Blitz
I agree. Love is a verb. How are we expressing our love in actions? Our young adult can’t read our minds, and we can’t read theirs. The only way we’ll truly understand each other is through communication — and we can only communicate effectively when we’re in a place where we can access both our emotions and our logic. When both parties are in that centered space, that’s where we’ll have our best conversations and really form that connection.
Britt Teasdale
That was a perfect place to end. You both are amazing. Thank you so much for being here and talking with us about this complex but really important topic.
Final Thoughts from Your Hosts
Young adults are navigating more decisions than ever before during a time when the decision-making part of the brain is still developing. Understanding that can shift how we show up as parents and caregivers.
Any plan, any next step, only works if your young adult is genuinely part of making it. That buy-in is what makes the difference. Lead with curiosity, keep the door open for conversation, and remember that connection matters more than getting it perfectly right.
Healthy resilience can look like taking care of the basics, feeling hard emotions without being derailed by them, and knowing when to ask for help. Give yourself and your young adult grace in this process.
For the parents and caregivers listening: it’s okay if this stage feels messy and uncertain. Try to slow down when you feel the urge to fix things. Give yourself the same grace you’re trying to give your child.
Before we go, we want to leave you with a small reminder to check in with yourself today. Not just with your young adult, not just your to-do list — but with you. How are you doing? What do you need right now? You can’t pour from an empty cup, and taking care of yourself is part of taking care of them.
If today’s conversation resonated with you, share it with someone who might need to hear it and subscribe to You Only Know What You Know wherever you listen to your podcasts. It helps more parents and caregivers find us.
You can also follow us at @CompassHealthCenter on social. We’d love to hear from you. Send us a message or drop a comment and let us know what topics you’re interested in. You’re not alone in this. Thank you for being here, and we’ll see you next time.
