Are Your Adult Kids Ready for the Real World?|364

How to Support Your Adult Kids Without Doing Everything for Them

You remember standing in the grocery store doing math in your head, so you didn’t have to put something back at checkout. Figuring out how many miles you could get out of $10 of gas. Staring at your first electric bill wondering what exactly you were paying for.

If you’re the parent of a teen, a college student, or a young adult, you’ve probably asked yourself a version of this question: am I helping my kid, or am I making things harder for them long term?

No parent sets out to raise a dependent adult. Most of us are just trying to spare our kids the parts that were hardest for us. But somewhere between helping and handling everything, the line gets blurry.

I sat down with career coach and former recruiter Liz Lewine, who spent 20 years hiring for companies like Spotify and NBC Universal, to talk about what’s actually happening with teens and young adults entering the workforce, and where parents, with the best intentions, get in the way.

Why So Many Young Adults Aren’t Prepared for the Workforce

Liz has interviewed thousands of candidates. Her take: it’s not about the degree.

At Spotify, her hiring teams cared less about what school someone went to and more about whether they had what she calls “the it factor”, grit, a growth mindset, transparency, the ability to walk into an interview and hold their own. Companies don’t want to hire someone and then backfill the role six months later. That costs real money. So, they’re screening hard for soft skills employers actually want, not just credentials.

Which means a 4.0 and a diploma won’t carry a candidate through the room anymore. The conversation will.

The LinkedIn Message That Says It All

Here’s the story that stopped me. Liz said parents have messaged her directly on LinkedIn about job openings, not their kids, the parents. “My son would be perfect for this role. Can you tell me more about it?”

Her response, every time: he can reach out to me himself.

It’s not malicious. It comes from love. But think about what it signals to an employer before the candidate has even entered the room. Sometimes the most useful thing a parent can do is let their kid send the email.

Supportive vs. Fixing: The Line Liz Draws

Liz told me about her own dad, an entrepreneur with an MBA from Columbia. When she was in her twenties, floundering through unpaid internships in San Francisco, unsure how to turn “I keep finding jobs for my friends” into an actual career, he didn’t fix it for her. He didn’t make a call. He asked one question: have you ever thought about the employment industry?

That was it. No Yellow Pages full of contacts, no introductions. Liz did her own research, cold-called every temp agency in San Francisco, and landed her first job at a staffing agency. That’s how her recruiting career started, not because someone handed it to her, but because someone pointed her in a direction and then got out of the way.

That’s the difference between supporting your adult child and doing it for them. Supportive looks like a question. Fixing looks like a phone call you make on their behalf.

What to Do If Your Adult Child Is Still Living at Home

More young adults are living at home than in past generations, and Liz is clear that this isn’t automatically a problem. Housing is expensive. Some kids are saving. Some are still figuring out the next step.

The problem isn’t the address. It’s the absence of a plan.

Liz recommends every family set an actual timeline, whether that’s three months, six months, or a year, and get specific about what “support” looks like inside that window: contributing to groceries, doing chores, working toward a job or a trade or an internship, checking in weekly on progress. Living at home should come with structure and an expiration date, not silence and a shrug.

She also shared something few career coaches would admit out loud: she lived it herself. After twelve years of living independently across San Francisco and New York, Liz moved back into her parents’ house at 30 and stayed for five years. She said it plainly, it was hard on her, and it was hard on her parents. But even during those five years, she kept job hunting, kept building skills, kept moving toward the door. Living at home wasn’t the failure. Standing still would have been.

The One Question Every Parent Should Ask

Liz’s litmus test isn’t “are they paying rent” or “have they moved out.” It’s simpler and harder to dodge:

Are they growing?

Not are they comfortable. Not are they happy every single day. Are they moving somewhere, even slowly.

Letting Your Kid Fail Is Part of the Job

Liz was direct about this: you have to let your kid fail. Bill Gates failed. Mark Cuban failed. Everyone fails. What builds resilience isn’t avoiding the fall, it’s handling it without someone rushing in to catch it first.

If a parent marches into a principal’s office to argue a grade or calls a college registrar to fix a transcript problem, or answers a job posting on their kid’s behalf, they’re not preventing failure. They’re just delaying the version of it that shows up later, when the stakes are higher and nobody’s there to soften it.

Where to Start This Week

If this hit close to home, Liz’s advice isn’t to overhaul everything overnight. It’s to start asking the one question out loud, in your own house: is my kid growing right now, or are they just staying comfortable?

That question alone tends to surface where the help stopped helping.

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