Meet Kim Muench
Kim Muench is a Jai Institute for Parenting Certified Coach and the author of the forthcoming Lost in Place (November 24, Wiley), a guide for parents of young adults who have launched but not quite landed, to include kids in their late teens and twenties who are stuck, struggling, or drifting, and parents who don’t know whether to step in or step back. Kim works with these families every day through her practice, Real Life Parent Guide. She came to this work the hard way: her own oldest son was twenty when he called from across the country in crisis, failing out, about to lose his job, and out of control with alcohol. As a mom of five adult children, she speaks from lived experience as much as professional training, and she’s coined the phrase “lost in place” to name something a lot of parents are quietly living through without language for it.
You have coined the phrase “lost in place.” How do parents know the difference between a young adult who’s simply finding their way and one who is quietly falling through the cracks?
A young adult who is finding their way may be uncertain, change directions, make mistakes, or take longer than we expected, but they’re still engaged in their life.
When someone is lost in place, their world tends to get smaller. They may begin withdrawing, avoiding things that make them uncomfortable, sleeping all day, staying up all night, spending more and more time online, using substances to cope, or giving up on school or work without moving toward anything else. Their confidence starts to erode, and dependence on their parents often increases.
What I tell parents is: don’t look only at the milestones. Look at the trajectory. Are they slowly building capacity, even imperfectly? Or are they becoming less engaged, less hopeful, and less able to manage their own life?
Many parents feel trapped between rescuing their children and letting them struggle. Where is the line between healthy support and enabling, and why is it so difficult to see?
I think it’s difficult to see because enabling usually begins with love.
Parents aren’t thinking, “How can I keep my child dependent on me?” They’re thinking, “My child is hurting. How can I help?”
The question I encourage parents to ask is: Is what I’m doing helping my child build capacity, or am I repeatedly protecting them from something they are capable of handling themselves?
Healthy support might mean helping them think through a problem, finding resources with them, or temporarily providing financial help while there is a clear plan forward.
Enabling is more likely when we continually remove discomfort, consequences, or responsibility because watching our child struggle is unbearable for us.
And there’s an important middle ground here. The opposite of enabling is not abandonment. We can be deeply loving and supportive while still allowing our adult children to experience the natural consequences that help them grow.
Do you believe we have unintentionally raised a generation that fears failure, or are today’s young adults navigating challenges previous generations simply never faced?
I think it’s both, and I’m very careful about blaming an entire generation.
Many of us did become very involved parents. We wanted to protect our kids, advocate for them, and give them opportunities we may not have had ourselves. Sometimes, without realizing it, we stepped in so quickly that our kids didn’t get enough practice being uncomfortable, failing, recovering, and discovering, “I can handle this.”
But today’s young adults are also growing up in a very different world. They’ve had social media documenting everyone else’s highlight reel, enormous pressure to figure out who they are and what they’re going to do with their lives, a pandemic that disrupted important developmental years for many of them, and a very different economic reality around housing and independence.
So, I don’t think the answer is, “Kids today are too fragile.”
I think the more useful question is: What skills and experiences do they need now to build confidence in themselves?
Your own family’s story began with a devastating phone call from your son. Looking back now, what do you wish someone had told you before that moment arrived?
You’re right, there was a moment back in 2008, when my oldest son called me from across the country in crisis. He was failing his community college classes, losing his job, and his alcohol use had spiraled out of control.
What I wish someone had told me before that phone call was that loving my son fiercely was not going to give me control over what happened to him.
I spent so much energy trying to figure out what I should say, what I should do, and how I could somehow get him back on track. I wish someone had helped me understand much earlier that my job was not to control his outcome. My job was to learn how to show up differently.
I could love him. I could have boundaries. I could offer resources. I could stop doing things he needed to learn to do for himself. And I could work on my own fear so that it wasn’t driving every interaction we had. The shift changed my parenting, and me as an individual.
Parents often blame themselves when their adult children struggle. How much responsibility should parents actually carry, and when does guilt become its own obstacle to healing?
I believe parents should be willing to look at themselves. I certainly had to.
There may be things we wish we had done differently. Maybe we rescued too much, controlled too much, avoided conflict, missed signs that our child was struggling, or parented out of our own unresolved fears.
We can take responsibility for those things without taking responsibility for another adult’s entire life.
Guilt becomes a problem when it keeps a parent stuck in the past or causes them to overcompensate in the present. Sometimes parents keep paying, rescuing, tolerating unhealthy behavior, or avoiding necessary boundaries because somewhere inside they’re thinking, “I caused this, so I have to fix it.”
You can own your part. You can apologize where necessary. You can change how you parent today, but guilt is not a good parenting strategy.
Social media often showcases successful twenty-somethings building businesses, buying homes, and traveling the world. How has constant comparison changed both the expectations young adults place on themselves and the pressure parents feel?
We used to compare ourselves to the people around us. Now we can compare ourselves to millions of people before breakfast.
A struggling 24-year-old opens their phone and sees somebody their age buying a house, starting a company, getting engaged, traveling through Europe, or announcing some incredible new job. They don’t see the full story. They just think, “What is wrong with me?”
Parents do it as well. They see their friend’s child graduating, moving out, getting promoted, and becoming financially independent while their own child may be living in the basement and struggling to get through the day.
That comparison creates tremendous anxiety, and anxious parents tend to push harder.
One of the healthiest things we can do is stop parenting the young adult we thought we would have, or the one living next door, and get curious about the young adult who is actually standing in front of us.
What are they capable of today, and how do we build from there?
You have worked with countless families in crisis. What is the most surprising misconception parents have about what their struggling adult child actually needs from them?
That more pressure will create more motivation. Parents become understandably frightened when they see their child withdrawing or falling behind. So, they start reminding, questioning, lecturing, suggesting, researching, and trying harder and harder to get that young person moving.
Unfortunately, the young adult often experiences all of that as, “My parents don’t believe I can handle my own life.”
That doesn’t mean parents should back away from expectations or allow anything to happen in their home. It means we have to change the way we approach the problem.
Most struggling young adults need a combination of connection and accountability. They need parents who are curious enough to understand what is getting in the way, calm enough to stop reacting to every setback, and confident enough to hold reasonable boundaries.
Sometimes doing less for them creates the space for them to begin doing more for themselves.
At what point should parents stop asking, “How do I fix this?” and start asking a completely different question? What is that question?
I would change the question much earlier than most parents do. Instead of asking, “How do I fix my child?” I want parents asking: “What is mine to do here?”
That question brings us back to what we actually control.
I can control how I show up.
I can decide what I am and am not willing to provide for my adult child.
And I can control how I respond to their choices.
I cannot manufacture motivation. I cannot force insight. I cannot make someone get sober, go to therapy, find the right career, or want independence badly enough. Parents actually become much more powerful when they stop trying to control what they cannot control.
Then we can begin parenting with our adult child instead of trying to manage their life for them.
For parents watching an adult child battle addiction, anxiety, depression, or a lack of direction, how do they protect their own mental health without feeling like they are giving up on their child?
This is one of the hardest shifts because parents often believe that if their child is struggling, they’re supposed to struggle right alongside them.
But being consumed by your child’s life does not make you more helpful to them.
Parents need support of their own. They need people they can talk to honestly. They need sleep, friendships, movement, time with their partner, interests that have nothing to do with their child, and permission to experience joy even while someone they love is having a difficult time.
They also need boundaries. A boundary isn’t saying, “I don’t care what happens to you.”
It’s saying, “I love you, and I also recognize that I cannot live your life for you.”
You don’t have to choose between caring about your child and caring for yourself. In fact, taking care of yourself allows you to bring more calm, clarity, and consistency to the relationship. And you are modeling what stress resilience looks like to your adult child.
If every parent of a struggling young adult could hear one message from you before reading Lost in Place, what truth do you hope changes the way they approach their child and themselves?
I want parents to know that you do not have to choose between rescuing your child and giving up on them. There is another way.
You can love them deeply without taking over their life. You can have compassion for what they’re going through while still expecting them to take increasing responsibility for themselves. You can set boundaries without using them as punishment. You can be supportive without making their progress your full-time job.
And perhaps most importantly, you can stop measuring your worth as a parent by how quickly your adult child gets their life together. Your child’s path may not look anything like the one you imagined. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a path.
My hope with Lost in Place is that parents learn how to walk beside their adult child in a way that communicates two things at the same time:
I love you. And I believe you are capable of building a life that belongs to you.
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