If Your Son Left College and Is Stuck at Home (The Hannah Maruyama Show #7)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
And at first you kind of just told yourself he just needs time. College wasn't the right fit, or maybe trade school didn't work out. And you were just like, oh, he'll find his path eventually. But now it's been a few weeks or a few months or maybe longer, and you're starting to feel something you maybe never expected, which is fear. You worry if he's depressed and you worry if something deeper is wrong, or if you missed stuff that you should have seen earlier. So like any parent would, you start looking for help, therapy or motivation, or you suggest things and you just say, oh, what about this? Or what about this? And nothing just seems to be hitting. But what if the lack of direction is actually the cause and everything else is just the symptom? So the hopelessness, the anxiety, the lack of energy, the isolation, the anger— even those reactions make a lot of sense when someone feels like they have no path forward and no real place in the world yet. Any of us stuck in that position would start to feel really defeated.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:53]:
So if you don't really see how this is going to pan out and you think that he doesn't see a way out of this, let me tell you, there is. And in a lot of ways, it's a lot simpler of a process. So this family hired their 19-year-old son a life coach. He went to college and then he left college cuz it wasn't working for him. And then he went to trade school because what a lot of families do is if their young adult leaves college, they just assume that trade school is the right next option. And then he left that too. That never works because if they don't have a clear direction, then no matter where you put them, it's not gonna work out. Now he was at home.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:23]:
He had left 2 different options cuz again, the same problem existed, which is he had no direction. So he's depressed. Understandable. Then somewhere, somehow, these parents decided that the answer to this depression is a life coach. I'm Hannah Maruyama. I've worked with hundreds of young men in this exact same position, and the pattern is just so consistent that I can recognize it with my eyes closed. The answer is never a life coach. It's work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:48]:
And I don't mean any job. I don't mean go bag groceries, go work in a restaurant, even though there's nothing wrong with that type of work, but specific work. Strategic entry-level work that channels his energy into something that the real world pays him to do. So bagging groceries would be great if he knew that the career that was going to meet his needs was to be the manager of a grocery store. Working at a restaurant would be excellent work if he knew that his goal was to become a chef or to work as a sommelier or to own his own restaurant someday. The reason so many young men feel directionless is because they don't know why they're doing what they're doing. That's because of the way that we've taught them To go about picking work and proving themselves in the real world. Depression is the symptom, and not doing anything that he sees moving him forward is the cause of it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:31]:
And you don't fix that with talking. You have to fix it with a plan of action. A young man at 19 does not feel like he's building anything because he's not building anything. He doesn't feel like he's going anywhere because he's not going anywhere. That feeling is just information. It's not a malfunction. Nothing is wrong. You can't talk young men— Out of an accurate feeling.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:49]:
A life coach or therapist is trained to do one specific thing. Now, disclaimer before we get into the rest of this: I'm not talking about young people who have genuine mental disorders. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about young men who are directly depressed because of the circumstances in which they find themselves and no clear goal and no clear path for them. That is a problem that is a direct result of the situation that they are in, and that is fixable. Now, a life coach or therapist is trained to do one specific thing. They're going to help him manage the emotional weight of being stuck. They're going to teach him it's okay to feel this way.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:19]:
They'll teach him to let go of the pressure and just try to be okay with where he is. Now, this is not like the Stoics teaching people who were working from sunup to sundown to be content and to be okay with their circumstances in life because they were already doing all the work. What we were doing is we were telling young men who have the most energy, the most ability to do hard work and move things and build things, we're telling them to just sit. And just be okay that, yeah, I know you're not doing good. Okay, just sit in that. That is quite literally, if I could think of the worst possible advice to give a 19-year-old young man who has nowhere to channel its energy, it would be, yeah, just, it's bad. Just feel okay about that. Just work on your executive function.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:59]:
Executive function is code for, I don't know what to do. And so I don't really have any reason to do anything because the underlying problem is not Up here, it's the fact that he has nothing to do that's positive. His bank account, he's not making any money. He doesn't have respect, and they have to earn that from society by doing things. And he has no path forward, and his past tries have been failures. And the reason they've been failures is cuz there was no clear goal. They were never gonna work out. And so we're making these young men feel like failures for something that is completely optional, completely avoidable.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:32]:
We don't actually have to make them into failures. We tell them to do things that will make them failures. And then they get depressed, which is understandable. And then we tell them to just be okay with that. But the data is actually backing what young men are feeling. So NEETs are young adults who are not in education, employment, or training. They have the worst mental health outcomes of any group their age. And the cause of it, as someone who works with this age group and sees the transformation when they have some real purpose that they see, oh, if I put my energy into this, I can learn this skill.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:59]:
This skill will be worth this. When I have something that is worth this, I will be able to start moving towards the things that I actually want in my life, a house. A spouse or travel or business ownership or any amount of things that they care about. The core problem is they're sitting at home. So this whole episode is about 2 key points: talking is not going to fix anything. Work and a clear place to apply energy will fix the cause of the depression and the anxiety. You might want both— well, therapist and a coach and a job— and that's fine. But if you can only do one, the only thing that's actually going to change his environment, change his circumstance, is work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:33]:
The work will change the real facts of his life, and then his feelings will follow that. And I say that again, not as a therapist, not as a life coach, but as somebody who sees the difference in these transformation in the young men when in a matter of weeks they go from paralyzed by fear and anxiety because they have been made to feel that the only way to be successful is to do X, Y, and Z, and when X, Y, and Z inevitably does not work because it doesn't serve anybody right now They are made to feel like failures, and then they feel like they have no clear direction forward, and they're afraid to make mistakes because we've made it so expensive for them as a society for them to fail when the system we're sending them into is inevitably going to fail at least half of them. So teaching young men to be at peace with going nowhere, building nothing, and gaining no position in society is a great way to ruin our whole country. And it's also a really effective way to make young men angry, depressed, anxious, and detached. And it's also how we keep them stuck there, never moving forward at all. So if you're a parent trying to figure out how to actually help your son who has already left college, please subscribe because this show exists to give you real information so that you can make better decisions for your family and so your son can make better decisions for himself. Why am I talking about young men and why does this hit them so hard specifically? Because at 18, 19, 20, your sons have more energy than they will ever have again. Like, they have more raw physical capacity, they have more need to be in motion doing hard things, earning respect, and learning from the actual real world.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:55]:
This is the peak of what biology hands human males. It is a tank with basically no exhaust pipe. It has to go somewhere. So when you give them the right vehicle, they're gone. They're building careers. They're failing at hard things. They're getting back up. They're making real money.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:09]:
They have a reason to get up and do things. You take this vehicle away, or you make it so that when it gets a flat tire, they feel like they failed. And that same energy just goes inward. They withdraw. They avoid doing anything hard, even if they're confident normally, or even if they were high achievers. this expensive failure that we artificially put on them right after they graduate high school, we'll take all of that away from them. We tell them college is the vehicle. They believe you, and then they go, and then it doesn't work out.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:34]:
And then they try maybe trade school, or they've tried both. And now we just have them with no vehicle at all. And we're telling them, you know what, maybe you just need to work on your executive function. Maybe you just need to feel a little bit better about yourself, cuz I know you're depressed and anxious because you're not getting anywhere. And the reason this happens is cuz so few young men actually need to be in college. That was the wrong place for them. And we put them there and said, this is the only path forward. When that was just not true at all.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:56]:
Not only was it not true, it's actively keeping them from being successful in the right place for them, because there is the right place for everybody in the whole economy. And I'm not talking about, oh, some consolation job. I'm talking about real jobs, better than college graduates are going to get because they can't get employed now. I'm talking about putting them in the right place at the right time where they're getting paid for their energy, or they are learning a ton and they're going to move up and have experience Have real-world resumes when their peers graduate college in debt with that same lack of direction that is currently making your son depressed. That same energy that should be building and turning into something just turns into self-attack and paralysis when they don't have direction. And that paralysis just turns into depression. Depression is what their energy does when it has nowhere else to go. Direction is the medicine, and it always has been.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:44]:
If you think about it like this, it makes complete sense that so many young men feel lost. feel really overwhelmed about making the right choice and are so afraid to make the wrong one and then get stuck in a job that they hate or go into debt and then also get stuck in a job that they hate. And so this early direction of helping them figure out what they need from their work, what they actually need to learn to get into it, which is almost never a college degree. And I'm talking about high-paying jobs, tech jobs, financial, any job under the sun because we do this. And so I know that it's much easier to get young men into the right entry-level jobs before they graduate college as opposed to after. So when you channel this energy that's currently being channeled at himself into the right vehicle, you're looking at a completely different person inside of weeks, weeks, not months, the same exact young man. It just now he knows what he's doing and why he's doing it. And then what he has to do to get what he wants.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:34]:
Because when you connect those dots for anybody, it's always much more effective. You're not convincing, you're not arguing, you're not pushing, you're not nagging. You don't have to anymore. He knows. Oh, this is what I have to do. And also what inevitably happens is after getting so much negative feedback from their actions that they were the right actions that they were supposed to do, when they, the barest amount of strategy is applied here, all of a sudden they get this positive feedback loop, which they have been lacking so often for so long for many young men. And then they go, oh, and they get a little bit of confidence and then they get a little bit more. And then they just go in willing to work, which many young men are.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:08]:
And when they are willing to work on the right things, They gain their respect. They get money. They get things that help them to feel like they're actually building a life that they want. A lot of parents will hear he needs to work and they just default to like, oh, just get any job. Just get him outta the house, like mow lawns, do whatever. So a young man who's already feeling defeated does not get pulled out of it by busywork. Busywork is more of the same nothingness because there's still no goal attached to it. Now there's just a little bit of money, which does help, but is not going to fix the overall problem.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:37]:
Which is a lack of direction. So what he needs is what we call SEO, strategic entry-level work. And there is a difference, a big one. Strategic entry-level work is a real role in a field that's going to lead him to his big career. The feedback comes from a person who has done this for a long time, and what he'll learn this week will make him more valuable next week. And getting this entry-level experience will make it so he never encounters the problems that recent grads are having, which is not being able to get hired because they have no experience. So here's some examples of roles I'm talking about. Manufacturing floor roles, lab techs, field service engineers, entry-level sales, operations, IT support, often through Google search or even something like the IBM New Collar program.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:15]:
These are entry-level roles where they can actually learn and earn real money and get into a real in-demand or high-growth industry. Then your son will learn what he's good at and what he's not from the world by doing real work instead of sitting on a college campus being told you have to check all these boxes before you try to do anything. Why does SEW, which is strategic entry-level work, effective when self-work is not effective? Well, young men don't have enough experience to do very much self-work. They haven't really done anything. They haven't really built anything. And so they need to be able to actually exercise themselves in the real world, doing real things, solving real problems before they're doing self-work. Right now, they don't have life experience to be doing much self-work. They have to actually go out and do things in order to be able to even figure out how they would fix themselves.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:59]:
And I'm sure that somebody will take issue with this, but I don't see how that's controversial. Teenagers in general just don't know enough about real life to be working on themselves. They have to go out and be able to even make mistakes before they're able to fix anything. They haven't done anything yet. And this is what flips them from being defeated back to moving and going forward in their life. So it's not just self-talk, it's actual outcomes from working with people and being out and doing things. Young men's self-worth is downstream from the facts of their life. It's not the other way around.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:27]:
You can't talk your way out of this. When your 19-year-old son has left college, what are most parents doing wrong? Well, there's 3 things. The first wrong move is maybe a different school, but he is telling you with his actions that school is not the problem. The core problem, which is a lack of direction, is not gonna be solved by different schools because buying paper from a school is not gonna solve a direction problem. You have to know what you're doing, why you're doing it, what you really need to do in order to get into whatever career that is, and then what you need to learn in a way that actually fits you. So that's not gonna be effective. All it does is waste time, waste money, and make young men feel way more defeated. For absolutely no reason.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:02]:
Wrong move number 2 is let's get a therapist or a life coach. The root cause is that he doesn't know how he's going to do anything or build anything in his life. And that's causing depression, anxiety, anger, all kinds of things. And a therapist to talk him through all of these personal inner things is not going to fix that. You have to help him fix that outwardly, which is actually changing his situation in a tangible way that he can see so that he sees how he can go about Getting into the life that he actually wants. Words are not going to fix what only work can. And then the third wrong move is, I'll just give him time. Just buy time.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:35]:
Time without direction makes the problem that we're trying to solve even harder because every week that he sits at home, the hole is just going to get deeper. What he needs is an action plan of what am I going to do? And then why am I doing it? And how is it going to help me get what I actually want in life? Because once you show young men that there's a direct path Where they can apply their energy that will help them to do what they want in their life, you don't have to nag them. They will just move and they become different people in a matter of weeks. So here's the right thing to do, which is shortening the distance between him and a real career. And I'm sure people are wondering, well, why do I have to do this? Because getting a job these days is a full-time job. How do I know that? Because I employ multiple people whose job it is to do that because it's so difficult to navigate that on your own. When you know what you're doing, in a matter of 4 weeks, they can go from sitting at home to being on a real path to a great career that will help him live a life If he wants. And you do that by reverse engineering and mapping it backwards.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:28]:
And I'm gonna tell you exactly what we do because you can do this at home too. If you get overwhelmed and you want a neutral third party, we can do that. degreefree.com/launch. But I'm gonna tell you exactly what we use. So step 1 is what life does he actually want? Not what career does he want? Not what school does he wanna try? What does he want his life to look like in plain English? What income, what schedule, what work environment, and what location does he wanna live and build his life? And if that's difficult to get those things out, start with what he does not want. What income is too low? What schedule is horrible? What work environment would he hate? And what location does he not want to live in? That's usually a lot easier for young adults to come up with. Step 2, what careers objectively— do not filter by degrees because 90% of the jobs in our country do not require degrees at all— filter by what careers objectively deliver that life. Because if you do this correctly, some very small portion Some of your young adults will go back to college, but they're gonna go back to college for jobs that legally require degrees because the right career for them may require them to get a college degree.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:28]:
Again, very slim chance. 1 in 4 of those jobs that require degrees are actually K through 12 teachers, and then about 12% are RNs, and then the rest of them are going to be physician roles. Actually, less than 20% of the employed engineers in our country are PEs, which legally require an engineering degree in order to get into that job. So. There are so many careers, great careers, high-paying tech, high-growth industries, automotive manufacturing that do not require degrees at all. Now, step 3 is gonna be what skillset does he need to learn or get? He's probably just missing a license or a certification or some specific skill that's hardware, software, soft skill. What will help him get into one of those careers the fastest? How is he going to start? And then step 4 is going to be how is he gonna learn those things so he can put them on his resume? And then the last thing you're gonna do is then look for strategic entry-level roles, which is what I was talking about earlier, that will help him to get into the right industry as fast as possible. And then a little bit of extra, if your child is applying for strategic entry-level work, the best time to apply is on Sundays and then to call or email Monday morning, depending on the size of the company you're applying for.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:30]:
That's gonna be the most efficient way to get a human to look at your resume. There is not a single job in our country that does not require a college degree that takes more than 12 months to start unless it is a trade that legally requires a 4-year apprenticeship. That should be paid. So a stuck young man does not need to be in college for 4 to 6 years in order to get a good career. This should not take more than 12 months. And actually making moves and learning the things he needs to learn to get into the entry-level career that will help him get what he wants out of life is the antidepressant. He does not have to be at the destination. He just has to be moving towards it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:58]:
And now a line I hear from parents more than any other is, he won't even try. We've talked to him 100 times and then anything we suggest, he just shuts down. So I wanna explain what's happening. There is a real answer and it has nothing to do with him being lazy or being broken. A lot of the times young men shut down because they've been told before that this is the plan and this is what we need to do and this is going to work. And the first plan he was sold was pretty abstract if you think about it. Go to school, pick a major, and then in 4 to 6 years you'll get a job somehow, a good one somehow. And then this system, he tried that one, and then while he was trying to buy that $100,000 paper, it failed, which it's gonna do most of his peers anyway.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:34]:
They just won't figure it out until 4 to 6 years in the future. Now the second plan that gets pitched to him, usually if you do that, is worse than the other one because he already feels bad. And then it's, oh, just go to trade school or go to community college or just work here while you figure it out, which he's not going to figure it out because he already would have if he could have. Just get a job or just try trade school or just become an electrician. And it's whatever is accessible, but it's not whatever is going to fit him the best because there has not been a lot of strategy put into What does he want out of his life? And then does this fit that? And so it feels like giving up. It feels like a consolation prize. And if he feels that way, he's not wrong about it. What he's never seen is an actual plan that goes, what do you need from your work? What careers are objectively gonna fit that? Which ones are the most interesting to you? What skills do you need in order to get into it? And then how are you gonna learn those? Only the things that you actually need to learn in order to get strategic entry-level work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:28]:
They're actually driving the whole process. They move because they have stewardship, because they feel ownership. And for the first time in their lives, they don't feel like someone is telling them what to do. The young men that we work with are understandably allergic to plans that have already failed them multiple times, often being suggested for the third time. They're not lazy, they're not broken. They just have no faith that doing what everyone else is telling them to do is actually gonna work out because it hasn't. So when he has a real plan that he's actually built and had control over, It's amazing what happens because we've watched it happen hundreds of times. The same young men who wouldn't leave their rooms are suddenly gone.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:02]:
They're never home anymore. And they're trying to move out because they're earning money and they have this sense of independence and of stewardship. And for the first time in their lives, they feel they're doing something that will earn them respect. And that all comes from a clear plan of what they need from their life and then how they're going to get it. If your son is in the spot, he's already left college or tried trade school and he's just at home. Not really knowing what to do next, our application link is below. In 4 weeks, our launch program will build him a clear career plan that will help him to start the career that fits his needs in the next 12 months. Before we wrap up, I want to talk to the parent who's listening to this directly for a second.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:40]:
His feeling of failure is not who he is. It's the failure of the path that he was put on. He didn't fail college or trade school. They failed him. There's no other industry that we allow to charge young people the amount that these programs are charging. And then get the results that they get, which is half of young adults will leave college cuz it doesn't work for them. And only 22% of them will even end up working in their field of study. And that doesn't necessarily mean that their job actually has positive ROI.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:06]:
It just means it's loosely related to their degree. When you look at that objectively, you realize that there was very little chance that this was gonna pan out at all. And so in a way, you should feel relieved because many people are going to realize what your son has already realized. They're just gonna realize it 4 to 6 years in the future. And it's going to be much, much harder to fix. Breaking out of college when your son did was actually the right call. Young men are needed and they are valuable and we are destroying them. They need to be actually applying their energy somewhere that someone will pay them to learn where they can start to prove themselves.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:37]:
A life coach is not going to be able to do that. They're going to talk to him and talk to him and talk to him. And words are not the solution. Work is. Real work will fix the cause because the work will change the actual day-to-day facts of his life. The feelings will follow the facts of his life. It's not going to work the other way around. You made all that effort to send him to school and the system failed you too.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:58]:
He needs a real plan and you are the one that can help walk him through how to build it. So do that. Don't hire life coaches. Help him figure out what he needs from his life so then you can figure out how he's gonna get it. If this helped you, please subscribe and share it with another parent of a son who has already left college and doesn't know what to do next. The application for the Launch Program is in the show notes, or you can go to degreefree.com/launch.