What are the signs that your child might be suffering from failure to launch syndrome?
Dad, Max speaks out about his son Nate that has Failure to Launch Syndrome.
There are quite a few different signs that your child might be stagnating and suffering from failure to launch. I am going to discuss my son Nate who suffers from the failure to launch syndrome. Things seemed to be going great for Nate. He was a high school senior, good grades, lots of friends and a good home life. One day, without any warning, Nate asked to move to Colorado. Now, being 18 years old, his step-mother and I let him know that we thought this was a bad idea but couldn’t do much to stop him. Little did we know that isolation is one of the first signs of a failure to launch child. Nate wanted to move as far away from his parents as he could, and Colorado is about as far from Maine as you can get! While we didn’t approve, we didn’t stop him. His step-mother and I thought maybe he would just grow wings and fly and not fail. At least that is what the therapist told us to do. Parent from afar, she said.
After about two weeks, we began having trouble getting Nate on the phone. When your child is on the other side of the country you want to at least establish phone contact with him or her and in my case, this just wasn’t happening. Time and time again, the phone would just ring and ring with no answer from my son. Whenever I would finally reach him and discuss this with him he would say that he didn’t want to have to explain to us as to why he didn’t know what he wanted to do in life, so he didn’t want to answer the phone. Before I understood failure to launch and its symptoms I couldn’t understand why he felt this way. I would ask myself what I did wrong for him to feel this way and mull over how I failed as a parent. I never assumed it was him and his failure to launch syndrome, not me.
So, after my son moved away and isolated himself, the next symptom we noticed after paying his bills for six months was lack of steady income and work. He texted (not called) that was having trouble finding work and keeping work unless it was someone we knew that supplied the work for him. I would talk to my son’s bosses when he would go into complete darkness and ignore us and they would tell me the same thing, that he would be very cyclic with his job. He would work great for six weeks then disappear. Everyone would be completely frustrated because when working, Nate was an excellent employee. Was he bipolar? Was he schizophrenic? He tested negative for both. The therapist said he simply had ‘anxiety’ and offered Xanax, which he did not take because he said it made him ‘tired’.
To make it worse, after isolating himself and not keeping a job, Nate began having trouble getting out of bed. When I would go visit him he went to bed at 7 pm and would crawl out of bed around noon. These unusual sleep patterns show a sign of depression and possible anxiety. Failure to launch syndrome seems to encompass both. Again, when I would press my son to explain these odd behaviors, he would always go back to “not wanting to let us down” and “not knowing what he wants to do”. As I think back on how my son got to this point and can’t help but blame myself and his upbringing. Nate’s mother and I split up when he was a year old. On his mother’s side there was zero structure and on my side, there was over an overbearing upbringing to the point of almost complete enabling. It hurts to say that with an upbringing like that the kid didn’t stand a chance.
So now what? Well, we here at The Addictions Coach
http://www.theaddictionscoach.com 1-800-706-0318 specialize in reversing failure to launch syndrome. Call us today to get information on Failure to Launch to and help someone suffering from this disabling syndrome.