It started in a middle school music room, in the days after September 11th.

Ken Rabow was the music teacher, and there was no way he was walking in to teach singing and scales as usual. So he asked each class two questions instead. What makes you feel safe? What makes you feel unsafe?

The answer came back the same from so many of them. Being humiliated in front of other people.

So he built the opposite. Every student got a turn being the teacher: sing a song, play an instrument, present a musical book report. One rule, and all of them knew it. Never tease or mock another student for their performance, in class or on the playground, or you would face the wrath of Ken. After each turn, three students had to name something good about what they had just heard.

It worked. And when a parent arrived to save their child from having to get up at all, Ken had his answer ready. Let your son or daughter know that Ken will not let them go up until they say they are ready.

That is still the whole method. Safety first, and the young adult decides when.

Word spread past music. Young people started coming to him for anxiety, for school, for making friends, for everything landing on the first generation to grow up online. Then in 2007 a car accident meant he could no longer play or conduct the way the work required. He asked his wife a question that changed the rest of it: I wonder how many more young people need this than the three or four I see each week.

There were a great many. Over more than twenty years and thousands of one-on-one sessions since, Ken has worked with young adults and their families, written The Slacker’s Guide to Success, a thirteen-step method for helping an under-motivated young person find their own drive, trained professional mentors in that method for more than a decade, and written on mentoring for the Huffington Post.

He has worked with young adults who could not get out of bed, who lost every job, who could not finish a semester, who could not name one thing they were made for. Many arrived after therapy had already been tried. What they had not found yet was someone who worked across all of it at once, discovered the pattern underneath, shared it with them, and stayed until it changed.

One principle has never moved. Young adults do best when they are in charge of their own journey, with a mentor walking beside them.

The first step is a free fifteen-minute consultation. You describe your situation. Ken listens. He will tell you honestly whether this is a fit and what working together would look like. No pressure. No script. Just a real conversation about your child, with someone who has had this conversation hundreds of times and has never stopped believing in the person on the other end of it.

Yes. There is a way, and it starts with one conversation.

See what mentoring costs