By Patty Laushman
If you’re the parent of an autistic emerging adult, there’s a good chance you’ve spent years focused on the gaps — the skills your child hasn’t developed, the milestones they haven’t hit, the things that are just harder for them than for their peers. That focus makes complete sense. You’ve been trying to help.
But here’s what I’ve seen over and over again in my coaching work: when support is built entirely around what someone can’t do, it slowly chips away at the one thing they need most — their belief that a good life is possible for them.
Strength-based coaching flips that script. And for autistic and ADHD emerging adults, it can be genuinely transformative.
The Problem with a Deficit-Only Lens
The historical way the world has approached autism and ADHD is through what’s called the medical model — a framework that defines these conditions almost entirely by their deficits. What’s broken? What needs to be fixed? What’s the gap between this person and “normal”?
The problem is that your emerging adult has likely absorbed this narrative. Even if they’ve never articulated it, many autistic and ADHD young adults carry a quiet but persistent belief that they are fundamentally broken. They’ve received feedback from the world their entire lives about what they’re doing wrong. They’ve struggled in systems designed for brains that work differently from theirs. And the cumulative effect of all that friction often shows up as low confidence, avoidance, and what can look like a lack of motivation — but is often something much more painful than that.
When your starting point as a parent is “what does my child need to fix?” — even with the most loving intentions — you risk reinforcing that narrative of brokenness rather than helping dismantle it.
The Spiky Profile: Why Strengths and Struggles Come as a Package
One of the most important concepts to understand about neurodivergent brains is what’s called the spiky profile. People who are “more neurotypical,” meaning their brains are wired more similarly to the average person, usually end up moderately good at most things and moderately challenged by others. Neurodivergent individuals tend to look very different. Their profiles are spiky: areas of dramatic strength exist right alongside areas of genuine difficulty.
The world is built for the neurotypical majority, which means the struggles in a spiky profile get a lot of airtime. What gets far less attention is the other side of that equation.
Here’s what I’ve noticed in working with autistic adults: the very same brain wiring that creates challenges almost always comes with corresponding gifts. The person who struggles to shift attention away from what they’re focused on? They can also hyperfocus in ways that allow them to become a genuine subject-matter expert — more deeply knowledgeable than most neurotypical people could ever be in the same area. The person whose executive functioning makes it hard to initiate tasks? They may think in systems, patterns, or creative solutions that leave others in the dust once they’re engaged.
If all of our attention goes toward shoring up the weaknesses, we leave those strengths sitting untouched — and we leave the emerging adult feeling like they’re nothing but a collection of things they need to overcome.
What Strength-Based Coaching Looks Like
Strength-based coaching doesn’t mean pretending challenges don’t exist. It means shifting the starting point of the conversation.
Instead of beginning with “what do you need to work on?” it begins with “what do you want for your life?” It asks: what are this person’s goals, their interests, their sources of energy? And then it builds from there.
This matters enormously for autistic and ADHD individuals because many of them have an interest-based nervous system. They’re not wired to perform tasks simply because those tasks are important or expected. They’re wired to engage deeply with what genuinely interests and motivates them. When coaching (and parenting) starts with their goals — their actual goals, not the ones we’ve assigned to them — it taps into that intrinsic motivation in a way that external pressure rarely can.
In practice, from a parenting perspective, this looks like:
Starting with their goals, not yours. This is one of the most significant shifts a parent can make. What does your emerging adult want their life to look like? That question is the starting point for everything.
Pointing out strengths in real time. When you notice something your emerging adult does unusually well, say so — specifically. Not “good job,” but “do you know that most people can’t do that as easily as you just did?” They’ve heard feedback about their struggles their whole lives. Many of them genuinely don’t know where their strengths are, because no one has pointed them out clearly enough.
Breaking goals into microcommitments. Many autistic and ADHD emerging adults struggle to connect where they are now with where they want to be. When a goal feels impossibly large, the response is often to not try at all because trying and failing feels worse than never trying. Coaching helps break large goals into the smallest possible next step, creating a win. Small wins build confidence. Strung together, they create momentum.
Presuming competence. Ask for their ideas before offering yours. Ask permission before giving advice. These small shifts communicate something powerful: I believe you’re capable, and I trust your thinking. That belief can do more to rebuild confidence than almost anything else.
Why This Matters for Mental Health
The stakes here go beyond productivity or independence. Research shows that autistic adults have significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality than the general population — and those rates are even higher for autistic individuals who also have ADHD or who are part of other marginalized groups.
Much of this risk is tied to years of experiencing the world as a place that doesn’t quite fit, of receiving messages — implicit and explicit — that they are deficient. The experience of chronic failure and misfit has a cumulative mental health cost.
Strength-based approaches directly mitigate this. When your emerging adult starts to develop a more accurate and balanced picture of themselves — one that includes what they genuinely bring to the table, not just where they fall short — it changes how they see what’s possible. Confidence isn’t something that arrives before effort; it’s built through the experience of succeeding at something real, however small.
That shift in self-perception is often the first sign that something has changed in a sustainable way.
Your Role as a Parent to an Emerging Adult
You don’t have to be a coach to bring a strength-based lens to your relationship with your emerging adult. You can start by becoming a dedicated observer of what they do well — and naming it out loud, regularly and specifically.
You can start asking about their goals with genuine curiosity, without an agenda. You can resist the urge to jump straight to advice or problem-solving, and instead ask questions that invite them to think through their own next step.
And when the path forward feels overwhelming — for both of you — you can trust that the goal isn’t perfection. It’s progress. One small win at a time.
Would You Like Help?
Your emerging adult has more to offer than the world has told them. Sometimes they just need someone — starting with you — to help them see it.
That said, once neurodivergent young people reach adolescence and emerging adulthood, a familiar dynamic often sets in: they stop taking advice from their parents. It’s not a character flaw — it’s developmentally normal, and for autistic and ADHD young adults navigating their own sense of identity and autonomy, it can be even more pronounced. The very person who knows them best is sometimes the least positioned to be heard.
This is where outside support can make a real difference. Coaches who specialize in working with neurodivergent emerging adults bring both the expertise and the relational distance that parents often can’t provide. They can help your emerging adult identify their own goals, build confidence through small wins, and take meaningful steps toward a more self-directed life — often in ways that feel less loaded than the same conversation coming from you.
If your emerging adult is stuck and you’re not sure where to turn, know that qualified help exists. Specialists in neurodivergent coaching like those at my organization are trained specifically for this work, and finding the right fit can be a genuine turning point.
About Patty Laushman
Patty Laushman is an author, speaker, and coach specializing in neurodiversity and the transition to adulthood for neurodivergent individuals. She is the founder and head coach at Thrive Autism Coaching, where she leads the Parenting for Independence coaching program for parents of neurodivergent emerging adults. She is the creator of the SBN® parenting framework – an evidence-informed approach that helps parents learn when to provide support, set boundaries, and give strategic nudges to activate intrinsic motivation so their emerging adults can build confidence and real-life skills. Patty is also the author of Parenting for Independence: Overcoming Failure to Launch in Emerging Autistic Adults (November 2025). Her coaching is grounded in both lived experience—parenting and homeschooling a profoundly gifted, multi-exceptional, autistic teen—and professional expertise, having worked with hundreds of families across the United States and beyond.
