Failure to Launch:
A Mentor’s Path to Transformation.

Parents often tell me how frustrated they feel when they see their child’s potential, yet all that seems to happen is a constant failure to launch.

In all my years of mentoring, it has become clear that failure to launch can be transformed within six months into empowerment, creativity, and a faith in oneself that lasts.

I want to share with you the challenges I see in parents trying to deal with this on their own, and how, when they join us as a team, mentoring can finally break the impasse.

Let’s begin with what parent’s experience when their child is facing failure to launch, and why what worked for them to “get stuff done” does not really work for a child who has grown up mainly online and not in the “real world.”

Clearly, you are motivated. You have a problem—your child’s failure to launch—and you did not decide to go online and play video games for 10 hours a day or meet new friends online while blowing up aliens. You are here, researching ways to make things work.

That voice in your head that inspires you, whether it says, “Just do it,” “Start looking for solutions, you son of a gun,” or “You are not allowed to do anything fun until you do this work,” feels like the right thing to try on your child.

When that does not work, pleading, arguing, or setting limits “for their own good” also seems to make sense. Yet those approaches rarely work for long. They might spark effort for a few weeks, but then you find yourself back at square one.

I am here to share with you what I would share when you become my parent partner, to help you see how I would help your child.

Whether your child arrived at failure to launch from the stream of coasting along or being a “just-in-timer,” the effect is the same. Things felt unsafe, and the online world allows them, when they hit a roadblock, to just go somewhere else. This reinforces running away from things that do not come easily.

As your mentor, one of my goals is to find what works in your child’s life and use that. It could be how they work on a sport or hobby. Somewhere they have risen above challenges but just do not know how to transfer that to other things like school, looking for jobs, or picking up their dirty clothes.

The goal is to create a daily routine, eliminate the constant false notifications they receive, get the calendar on their computer and phone to sync, and learn to pay attention to the good notifications, starting with reminders for their mentoring session.

From there, based on the goals they chose in their first mentoring session, we address each issue and look for the concerns that stop them from moving forward. For the laundry, it may be as simple as moving the basket to where they undress or cleaning the five drawers that are filled with high school books and labeling each drawer.

We work on launching the way we work on eating an elephant: one bite at a time. When things do not work, we use our detective skills to get them to remove the stumbling blocks instead of us doing it for them.

Then failure to launch slowly becomes the launch-master 5000.

There are so many pieces to the puzzle of helping your child succeed. This is one of many we will employ to help them thrive at school, with friends, at work, and in life.

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