Parenting Your Emerging Adult: Launching Kids From 18 to 29

by Varda Konstam

They’re back or maybe they never left, your eighteen- to thirty-year-old emerging adults. They have been called narcissistic and self-absorbed. These Millenials, Generation Y or Boomerang Kids, face higher costs of living, higher college debt loads and a sense of material entitlement and they are clinging to the parental nest. Some 56 percent of men and 48 percent of women eighteen to twenty-four years old are living with their already recession-strapped parents. Parents of emerging adults are clearly “stressed-out” and in need of practical, credible advice. Parenting Your Emerging Adult is empowering and “uplifting”, offering strategies parents need to get their emerging adults living successfully on their own.

Parents will develop an understanding of this developmental period and how it intersects with the current economic, social and political times. They will become better grounded and confident in their abilities to make informed, sound decisions and will learn how to pick their battles, see the big picture and find effective solutions.

Konstam demonstrates how learning to "work with the grain” and fostering independence, rules and consequences, parents will end the codependency, coddling and poor modeling so their emerging adult child will be successfully launched.

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 22, 2013

Reviews

[Alaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

It wasn't a bad book, just not what I was looking for. I would say this book would be more appropriately titled "How to Understand Your Emerging Adult." For a situation like a child actually not launching at all, this book is no help. It's about understanding why your child might choose one job over another, or one college major over another, or make decisions less related to money and more related to something else important to them. It's not about understanding why your child is content to stay in their childhood bedroom and do nothing after they graduate from high school. I'm still looking for the real "launch" book, but this isn't it.