Vanessa Van Petten is the teen author of the book “You’re Grounded!”—a parenting book from a young perspective. She keeps an active teen blog for parents who want to know what their kids are really doing online, at High School parties or when parents are looking the other way. Her candid and young perspective, as well her constant survey of resources and updates about this generation of young people are a treasure trove for parents.

I was on the perfect track. Was student body president of an upper snuff Los Angeles private school. Got accepted into a top 20 University and became a Mandarin and East Asian Studies major before the wave hit?????–so everyone was in desperate need of white female Asia specialists. Wrote an honors thesis and graduated Magna Cum Laude.

I had a bid from a top investment banking firm in New York—everything was perfect. It was not until my parents were filming me with the family video camera “how do you feel!? Are you excited? Sad the best years of your life are ending!?”

How did I feel?
Tired.

Are you excited?
No.

Sad the best years of your life are ending?!
Those were the best years of my life…oh my god, I just realized, I hated college.

I did hate college—but I didn’t realize it until graduation day. That’s when I knew I was on the wrong track. I wrote a thesis because that is what I thought you were supposed to do, I was a Mandarin major because it ‘was the golden ticket into any job you want’ and it sounded impressive. I realized it was so shallow.

I’ll spare you the details of my obnoxious meltdown and subsequent soul searching melodrama and fill you in briefly to the first part of the story. When I was in High School I did get into some trouble, nothing serious, a little boy crazy that’s all, had trouble with the whole curfew thing. HARD TRANSITION In that time, I decided that all of the parenting books out there had to be doing everything wrong because all of my friends were doing dumb things and hated their parents.

So, I started interviewing hundreds of other teenagers to compile our own parenting book, with advice we wish our parents would know. It was awesome, it was fun, it was empowering, it was challenging and the parents who read it loved it. Then I got back on track, and left the book in my computer.
Somewhere in the deepest depths of my mental break I remembered the passion I had for helping teens and parents…and knew that’s what I had to do. I turned down the IB offer, ran from the world of finance and started to work on convincing my parents I wasn’t crazy—but that I had just woken up.

It wasn’t easy spending my savings on publishing my book and hiring six employees in India to help me develop my website idea for parents and teens to connect in the online arena, but my goodness has it been fun.

As an entrepreneur, pro-blogger, author, youth coach and parent speaker (got to bring in the money somehow right?)—the hardest part is my own fear of failing and that I am my own worst boss. But, finally I made a choice for the right reason, finally I am having fun at what I do, finally I am awake…and living my life, not the life I think I should live.

As adults with college age or twenty-something kids, you’ve seen a lot of changes in our society and definitely in the working world. And your kids saw some of those changes happen, whether they were very aware of them or not. For those young people what they saw was ‘The Way Life Is’. So the dot com boom and the incredible money that many people in their twenties made, the huge press that these people got, along with the toys, homes, and subsequent opportunities is probably one of their assumptions about ‘The Way It Is’. Add to that the rise of women in a whole host of careers and the relatively new expectation that women can and should be able to achieve any professional level they want if they’re willing to go for it. Then add the incredible rise in Celebrity Star Power and Reality TV stardom, where the value of being on TV or in a magazine has soared in popularity. Everyone can and should be Famous. Then top all of that glamour and chaos off with our national disaster of 9/11 and the scary insecurity of all the ‘what ifs’ that silently pressure all of us to gobble up everything life has to offer because we just honestly don’t know what will happen tomorrow…This is what our twenty-somethings are walking into as they begin their careers and adult lives.

Of course, what many of us have seen and lived through are the hard and fast fall of those whose dot com dreams didn’t materialize, the thousands upon thousands of people who went through multiple layoffs and the companies that disappeared as fast as they’d begun. Many very qualified professionals experienced the prolonged job searches of the sluggish economy.

So here you are, having seen so much, experienced so much and you are helping to launch your kids into this wonderful and crazy world of new work worlds and positions that have titles you and I have only just heard of. How do you know how to effectively support your kid(s) as they try to get going? How do you answer their questions and concerns? Or answer your own?

This category (Parenting) is about helping parents to know what they and their kids can expect to experience as they enter and maneuver through their twenties. Why should parents know about this? Because let’s face it, being in the twenties is being in the new adolescence . The Los Angeles Times reported on a study by the University of Pennsylvania which concluded that young people are less likely to reach the expected milestones of adulthood such as ‘leaving home, getting married, having a child and being financially independent’ by age 30 then they were in 1960. The increasing cost of a first home, the length of time it takes to get out of school debt, the lower starting salaries, the rising age of (first) marriages and subsequent parenthood…all of these components of launching a life translates into the lengthening of active parenting of adult children for many families.

For all of the reasons mentioned above, and several others I’ll be highlighting below, kids these days have tremendous challenges that make decision making even harder and more complex then ever.

After working as a career counselor with literally hundreds of high school, college and graduate students, as well as working adults in their twenties and early thirties I know that the pressures and questions that young adults face are daunting. And whether their parents take the position that ‘we support you in whatever you want to do’ or that of ‘you should be an X and follow in the family footsteps’ the resulting confusion is the same. The fear of making a wrong step, a life altering miscalculation, the ‘what if I make the wrong choice out of all of these choices’ – these decisions or indecisions can be deafeningly loud and crazy making.

My Services: I am expanding my career coaching services to work with parents of adult children to help them, the parents, to know what to expect (of and for their kids) in order to minimize the frustration level and to be prepared to face what may inevitably come to pass. I am available to help you to develop sane strategies to cope with your adult kids moving back into their old rooms. New rules need to be established regarding rent, household responsibilities, communicating with each other and setting goals and expectations. I am collecting data from clients and others who are in their twenties and early thirties to learn more directly what it is that helps young adults establish themselves as adults. I have worked with hundreds of clients to develop new habits and ways of dealing with themselves to get what they want in their lives. Now I’d like to make a difference in families by working with parents who want to know the best way to parent their kids.

I am still also working with clients of all ages as they deal with all sorts of transitions.

No matter what age we are we can hear the negative voice in our heads as we start to contemplate a move to change something in our lives that says ‘why can’t you be more like X and know what you want and just do that’. “What’s wrong with me/my kids/my spouse that I or they haven’t gotten it together’. Please know that the quiet majority of people don’t know their path. My services, and this website, are for anyone who wants to learn how to support and understand the often messy and delightful realities of launching a life. The launch can be confusing and haltingly bumpy and still result in a fascinating, surprising, stimulating and ‘successful’ life.

For More, see LifeStages

You know I read a lot. Lately there are a lot of articles around about helicopter parents…parents who hover over their kids seems to be the usual definition of this phenomenon. These articles have been cropping up a lot lately because school’s just started and administrators are aggravated by these ‘over involved’ parents, and parents are now getting worried that they are becoming this type of parent if they are trying to be helpful to their kids. Well, I’m in favor of parental involvement. I’m in favor of parents educating themselves about what the world offers and how important it is for parents to know what kids are facing in the world. Parents shouldn’t be doing for their kids what their kids can do for themselves, but there’s nothing wrong with parents or teachers or other mentors showing kids how to do something the first time. Why not help someone who’s new at something to know how to do it so that they can do it for themselves the next time, and then feel good about it?

The times they are a changing — and on this anniversary of 9/11 I think it’s fair to say that the times are not getting easier. The times are getting more demanding. More is demanded — not asked — of all of us. We are all stretched (I’d like you to believe that I, as a coach and strategist who works with people to find balance, am a great example of a balanced working mother but it’s a daily challenge) and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. I do a pretty good job but it is not by any means easy, and with a son who is very, very easily distracted and overwhelmed by ‘executive processing’ tasks it means I work harder to help him organize his life. That means I’m organizing me — and I’ve got a lot going on – and him, and our home so we feel like we have a hub. I’m not doing anything unusual here…parents everywhere are doing this. And they are doing it because they love their kids and their kids are overwhelmed because they need to know more to keep up with the pace of life.

Parents get a bum rap because their kids are in ‘too many scheduled activities’, kids have ‘playdates’ instead of freely running around outside, or parents are criticized because kids are ‘over scheduled’. But the fact of the matter is that parents need their kids to be somewhere that’s supervised, doing something ‘good’ because the parents are working to provide a level of income that makes the other future options available to those beloved kids later in life. And plain and simple because life is just so much more expensive then ever.

Ok, so what about the helicopter thing? I see it more as attempting to mentor and advocate. Sure there are parents who are over the top and getting too involved…but is that the norm? I doubt it. My parents, and the parents of a lot of my peers, weren’t very involved or present as we kids stumbled along. And some of us fell through some jagged cracks and realized that more supervision and connection with our parents would have been beneficial. Voila! We have parents today who are remember what it felt like when they made a bunch of mistakes that they wish they hadn’t made. The parents who are making a real effort now are trying to help their kids avoid the mistakes they made. And they recognize that life is different now. If you’re an involved parent and want tips for how to support your growing adult kid keep looking here. I’ve heard too many clients say that they wish their parents had known what to tell them about work. I’ve got some ideas for those involved and interested parents. More to come…