You have probably been scanning for it for a while. The one consequence that will finally get your 25-year-old out of their room and into a life that looks like forward motion. You can't ground them. You can't take the phone. And you've already decided you will not make them homeless, so what's left?
Kim Muench knows that question from both sides of the kitchen table. She's a Jai Institute for Parenting certified coach, the founder of Real Life Parent Guide, and a mom of five whose oldest son's drinking in his early twenties sent her back to college and into coaching parents of young adults who are stuck. Hundreds of thousands of parents follow her on Instagram and TikTok, and her new book, Lost in Place: How to Support, Motivate, and Launch an Adult Child, comes out November 24.
Kim doesn't hand out the perfect consequence, because she doesn't believe there is one. What she offers instead is a shorter list of what is actually yours to control, and a way of sorting helping from enabling that I kept turning over long after we hung up. She also tells a dog-sitting story that is so ordinary and so telling that every one of us will see ourselves in it.
We talk about the fear that keeps so many of us frozen, especially when self-harm has been part of the picture, and Kim asks a question I had never heard framed this way: why is it only our kids who get to hit rock bottom?
She also explains why she refuses to use the phrase "failure to launch," and her reason made me exhale a little.
If you have a 20-something at home who seems to be standing still while you do all the running, this one is for you.
YOU'LL LEARN:
The three things Kim says are truly yours to control once your child is an adult, and what's missing from that list
One simple question that helps you tell whether you're helping or enabling
What a family dog revealed about how one mom was over-functioning for her son
The four C's Kim teaches parents who have lost their footing
Why Kim believes parents are allowed to hit their own rock bottom
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