My Autistic Son Will Not Leave His Room.
What Actually Helps?

Joan from Oceanside, California, typed “life coach young adult failure to launch” at eleven at night and booked a consultation for the next day. Her son Evan was twenty. He had great ideas and real talent, a digital illustrator with a tablet and a style of his own. He had also taken a break from college, and the break was turning into a life. He was frustrated with his own procrastination. His whole social world was one group text with his old college friends. Joan wrote one line on the intake form that I have never forgotten: “We want him to feel good about himself.”

When Evan and I first talked, he told me the truth about himself faster than most adults ever do. “There are a thousand things I would rather be doing. I know I am shooting myself in the foot and I still can’t make myself do it.” He said there was a twelve-year-old inside him who wanted to play video games, and that the grown-up part of himself kept giving in to the twelve-year-old. He wanted a work ethic, a routine, and to stop hating himself for not having them. That is where we began.

What if he says no?

He probably will, at first. He has said no to the therapist, the psychiatrist and the program, and you oversold every one of them because you were desperate. So we start with just you and me. Fifteen minutes on Zoom or on the phone, and you will know whether this is right for your family. Then I will show you how to put it to him, and if he hesitates, I will text him myself, with your permission. In my experience, autistic young men say yes to something concrete and short, offered once, by someone who is not their parent and who treats them as an equal in the process. They say no to being fixed.

How is mentoring different from therapy?

Therapy looks inward. Mentoring looks at this Tuesday. Evan kept his psychiatrist the whole time we worked together, and I was glad he had one. What I do is the practical part nobody else has time for: the email to the professor he is afraid to send, drafted together on the call and sent before we hang up; the phone call to the disability office, which he made himself from my screen; the drawers full of clothes and high school books that had not been touched in a year, which we cleaned together with the camera on. Every session ends with a committed action. Every session opens with what happened to it.

What does a week actually look like?

One hour on Zoom, once or twice a week, same time each week. We open with “How are you feeling?” and he answers honestly, because by then he knows I will not flinch. Then we go down the list we are carrying from last week. Some weeks it is a calculus exam, and we are working on the plan we made to study in advance. Some weeks it is a haircut he has avoided for four months. The routine gets printed and taped to the bathroom mirror. The laptop sleeps outside the bedroom. Three small things every day (different for each young adult on the spectrum): a five-minute walk, five minutes of breathing, something creative. When a week collapses, and weeks collapse, I say the same thing every time: “OK! How do we start again?”

What changed for Evan?

Slowly, and then in pieces you could point to. One A and two Bs in his first semester back, when he had failed almost everything before. He called the disability office himself (with our prep) and got the accommodations he had been entitled to for years. He scored 92% on a programming midterm. He wrote the sentence “I am a man of my word who gets things done” and read it back to me. He said yes to an internship that scared him: “I think I want to go for it.” When it ended, he told me the truth: “I have not been showing the passion. It is a bit of a wake-up call.” So we built him a job of his own, nine to three, weekdays, and he submitted his first real piece of work to a public project.

This year, after years of his parents begging and pleading with him to drive, he decided on his own to learn. He passed the written test in July. His first lesson was “super, super stressful, but it went well.” In August he went to a tabletop gaming night with strangers and came back with four words: “It was very fun.” He now drives with his father three times a week, cooks for the family, and books the gaming night every month himself. He is not finished. Nobody is. But the twelve-year-old does not run the house anymore.

What about his parents?

You are part of this, and you are not the problem. Joan drove him to campus and cut his hair. His father found the internship and edits his emails. Both of them worried in writing to me, and I answered in writing. I ask parents for three things: say yes to a lunch with him once a week; let him be bad at something new without stepping in; and email me the things you are afraid to say to him, so we can work on them together. The conflict at home comes down first. Everything else moves faster after that.

How long does it take?

Longer than you want and faster than you fear. The first changes you can point to are small: an email sent, a class passed, a shower before a meeting. The deeper change, where he starts the next step without being asked, takes longer, and most families stay with us for nine to fifteen months. His mother wrote to me last year: “He has been a trooper and has risen to the occasion socially.”

What does it cost?

Master Level Mentoring with me is $995 a month for once a week, and $1,995 a month for twice a week. 2nd Degree Mentoring with Jason Munroe or Philip Rowland, mentors I trained, starts at $449.95 a month. Every session is one full hour on Zoom. We work with families across the United States, young adults aged 14 to 28. Full details are on the Pricing page, and you can meet the mentors first.

Where do you start?

With fifteen minutes, just you and me. Tell me about your child. What makes him great. What are his challenges. What home life is like. There is no rush here, and you already know what he needs better than most teachers, psychiatrists, therapists and doctors. We are here to make his daily life into a success. Book a Free Parent Consultation.

Related: Mentoring for Autistic Young Adults. My Autistic Daughter Is Bright, Anxious and Stuck. Failure to Launch: What It Really Means. ADD and ADHD: The Ferrari Brain, and How to Steer It.