This article uses the term ‘failure to launch’ for consistency with literature and because it is a widely recognised term. We do not use the term as a judgement about young adults.
Ahead of his APS webinar series, Dr Randy Paterson unpacks the increasingly prevalent ‘failure to launch’ phenomenon among young adults and outlines his approach to treatment.
‘Failure to launch’ is an informal term used to describe young adults who experience prolonged reliance on family alongside significant difficulty participating in education, employment, relationships or activities outside the home.
The term itself can be uncomfortable. As Dr Randy Paterson, founding director of Changeways Clinic in Vancouver and APS webinar series host, acknowledges, it places the word ‘failure’ front and centre.
“I prefer to refer to it as ‘delayed transition to independence,’ because it truly is a delay, not an outright failure. Some people find it easier to cross the gap from adolescence to full adulthood, some find it harder,” he says.
Related concepts such as NEET, hikikomori and ‘lying flat’ are sometimes mentioned in public discussions on this topic, says Paterson. However, these are not interchangeable concepts: they reflect distinct social, cultural and economic conditions and should not be treated as describing the same phenomenon (Berger et al., 2026; Bowker et al., 2019; Plenty et al., 2021; Zheng et al., 2023).
Cultural expectations, disability, mental health, housing affordability, employment conditions and access to services all shape what independence and adult participation look like (Cooper & Luengo-Prado, 2018; Lou et al., 2012; Shields et al., 2023; Veldman et al., 2015).
The difficulties with adult participation can nevertheless have a substantial impact when a young adult is isolated, distressed and unable to move towards goals that matter to them, says Paterson.
At the same time, he emphasises that the evidence base remains limited. “The research on the area is relatively scanty,” he says.
While the evidence does not yet establish a clear or consistent causal profile, Paterson has identified several possible contributors based on his clinical experience, which he outlines below.
What may contribute to prolonged dependence and disengagement in young adults?
1) Opportunities to develop practical skills
Young people differ in when and how they develop confidence with tasks such as travelling independently, managing money, preparing meals and contributing to a household, says Paterson.
In some families, understandable efforts to protect a young person or prioritise study may inadvertently reduce opportunities to practise these skills.
Paterson suggests gradually building responsibility and capability rather than assuming these will appear automatically at adulthood.
2) Anxiety, avoidance, and mental health
For some young adults, anxiety, depression, trauma, disability or neurodevelopmental differences may make participation outside the home more difficult.
Where anxiety and avoidance are prominent, Paterson describes a self-reinforcing cycle: “The more we avoid, the more we want to avoid.”
Consequently, outward inactivity should not be assumed to reflect laziness or a lack of motivation. It may instead be associated with fear, shame, demoralisation, reduced confidence or a lack of realistic and accessible opportunities.
3) Cultural messages about work and adulthood
Some young people encounter competing messages, says Paterson.
There is this idea in our culture that you should be driven by what you’re passionate about and fascinated by,” he says.
In contrast, adulthood is often portrayed mainly in terms of pressure, danger and lost freedom. This contradiction can make ordinary first steps into employment or adult roles feel disappointing or threatening, he says.
At the same time, aspirations and participation are shaped by the opportunities available to the young person, not simply by their attitudes.
Entry-level work can provide income, structure, social contact and a pathway towards greater choice, even when it is not closely connected to a young person’s longer-term interests, says Paterson.
“Most entry-level work has nothing to do with our great passion, even if we have one. These jobs, and most other daily activities, are more instrumental in nature: we do them so that something else happens. So that we can eat, pay the rent, have clean clothes, and see our friends. If we focus in early years exclusively on finding our passions, we will generally get stuck.”
4) Family patterns and support
Families may provide extensive practical or financial assistance for many reasons, including concern about a young person’s wellbeing, disability, economic pressures, cultural values or uncertainty about what other support is available.
In some circumstances, this can unintentionally make change more difficult.
Paterson suggests this is best approached without blame, by considering which forms of support protect wellbeing and which might be gradually adjusted to strengthen confidence, participation and autonomy.
“Parents sometimes suspect that the solution – which they are unwilling to use – is to cut off support entirely. But this isn’t advisable,” says Paterson. “Instead, we want to shift from support for dependence (allowances, buying gaming equipment, providing laundry service) to support for independence (e.g., helping with educational expenses, training in self-care).”
Parents may also need support with their own uncertainty and ambivalence, says Paterson. His approach aims to reduce conflict, increase supportive communication and help families make deliberate rather than reactive decisions about assistance.
5) Other potential impacts
Factors such as housing affordability, insecure employment, low entry-level wages, educational costs, discrimination and access to appropriate services can all potentially constrain a young adult’s pathways, says Paterson.
"We shouldn’t underestimate the impact of cultural changes that have genuinely made it more difficult to be a young adult in the 2020s than in past decades.”
Other potential risk factors include pre-existing social difficulties, a history of bullying, elevated anhedonia or academic challenges.
Screen use or gaming may be part of an individual presentation, but shouldn’t be treated as a defining feature or assumed cause. It may function as avoidance, coping, recreation or an important source of social connection.
Paterson notes there is not yet sufficient evidence to support a single causal pathway, and overall, prolonged dependence and disengagement are better understood as arising through varied interactions among personal, family, cultural and structural factors.
“We can think of the ‘failure to launch’ lifestyle as being predominantly avoidant in nature: avoiding being out of home, avoiding relationships. And, as psychologists, we know that the more we avoid something, the more fearful of it we [can] become.”
Supporting meaningful, self-directed change
While the roots of a ‘failure to launch’ presentation generally stretch back to early childhood, Paterson suggests psychologists balance psychotherapy and behavioural therapy when working with these young adults.
He describes engagement with the adult client as central: “What do you actually want? What would be a better way of living your life, not better in your parents’ eyes, but in yours?”
Within his clinical model, Paterson uses a predominantly behavioural approach when avoidance and disrupted routines are maintaining distress or limiting participation. This may include establishing more consistent sleep and daily routines, increasing activity, developing practical skills and reconnecting socially.
“It might be helping them leave the house or encouraging them to engage socially. I strongly advocate that the therapist gets out of the office with the client: go to the store, go to the coffee shop, or find some other way of integrating behavioural exposure skills into your actual sessions,” says Paterson.
Sometimes, family therapy with parents and young adult can be fruitful, he adds.
In other cases, he works with the young adult’s parents independently. “Often, the preferable modality is to work with the parents as the primary clients,” he says.
Parent-focused work can help them review patterns of financial and practical assistance, reduce unproductive conflict, and shift support towards the young adult’s agreed goals without abruptly withdrawing care.
“The phenomenon is an interactional one: If one person is receiving supports that they do not actually require – and that may be undermining their autonomy – then someone else must be providing it,” says Paterson.
“Often parents have fallen into nurturing their young adult as they did their much-younger child, and by shifting their perspective toward a peer-to-peer model they can provide a small vacuum into which their offspring can grow.”
Paterson’s three-part webinar series explores the nature of this presentation and possible risk factors, strategies for engaging and working with the young adult, and approaches to parent-focused intervention. Sign up here to access the entire series on-demand.
References
Berger, U., Silverman, W. K., & Lebowitz, E. R. (2026). Risk Factors and Trajectories of Highly Dependent Adult Children (Failure to Launch): An Add Health Study. Emerging Adulthood (Thousand Oaks, CA), 14(2), 306–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/21676968251410272
Bowker, J. C., Bowker, M. H., Santo, J. B., Ojo, A. A., Etkin, R. G., & Raja, R. (2019). Severe Social Withdrawal: Cultural Variation in Past Hikikomori Experiences of University Students in Nigeria, Singapore, and the United States. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 180(4–5), 217–230. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221325.2019.1633618
Cooper, D., & Luengo-Prado, M. J. (2018). Household formation over time: Evidence from two cohorts of young adults. Journal of Housing Economics, 41, 106–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2018.06.002
Lou, E., Lalonde, R. N., & Giguère, B. (2012). Making the Decision to Move Out: Bicultural Young Adults and the Negotiation of Cultural Demands and Family Relationships. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 43(5), 663–670. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022112443414
Plenty, S., Magnusson, C., & Låftman, S. B. (2021). Internalising and externalising problems during adolescence and the subsequent likelihood of being Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) among males and females: The mediating role of school performance. SSM - Population Health, 15, Article 100873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100873
Shields, M., Spittal, M. J., Aitken, Z., Dimov, S., Kavanagh, A., & King, T. L. (2023). Does employment status mediate the association between disability status and mental health among young adults? Evidence from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Occupational and Environmental Medicine (London, England), 80(9), 498–505. https://doi.org/10.1136/oemed-2023-108853
Veldman, K., Reijneveld, S. A., Ortiz, J. A., Verhulst, F. C., & Bültmann, U. (2015). Mental health trajectories from childhood to young adulthood affect the educational and employment status of young adults: results from the TRAILS study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (1979), 69(6), 588–593. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2014-204421
Zheng, X., Jing, C., Liu, Y., & Zhang, Y. (2023). Why are people ‘Lying Flat’? Personal relative deprivation suppresses self‐improvement motivation. British Journal of Social Psychology, 62(2), 932–948. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12611