What to Do When Your Son Seems Lost

A letter to parents of young men.

Something is happening with our young men.

Maybe you’ve felt it in your own house. A son who’s gone quiet in a way he didn’t used to be. Momentum that drained out somewhere between high school and whatever was supposed to come next. He might be back home after college. He might look fine on the surface while something behind his eyes has pulled way back.

You’re not imagining it.

The numbers back you up. Male college enrollment has been sliding for 2 decades. Women now outnumber men on campus roughly 60 to 40. Suicide rates among men 18 to 24 keep climbing. And there’s a whole population of young men in their 20s who aren’t working, aren’t in school, and aren’t building toward anything they could name if you asked.

Here’s what I think is underneath it.

These guys are grading themselves with midlife metrics. Income. Status. Certainty. Having it all figured out. They compare themselves to their friends, to their fathers, and to a feed that only ever shows them other people’s wins.

At 22.

It’s like judging a musician for having no hit record before he’s even found his sound.

So the verdict they hand themselves is brutal: already behind, before anything has started. And they freeze. Then they keep the freeze private, because saying “I have no idea what I’m doing” out loud to a parent or a friend feels like confirming the thing they’re most afraid is true about them.

Here’s what it looks like from the outside.

He drops things he used to love. The sport, the music, the friends. His talk about the future goes vague: “I don’t know,” “still figuring it out.” He gets defensive the second school or work comes up. And watch how he reacts when someone his age succeeds. If a friend’s win lands on him flat, or heavy, he’s using it as a measuring stick against himself.

Now the uncomfortable part, which is about you.

If you’ve built things, if you’re successful, you are the measuring stick in the house. That’s true even if you’ve done everything right. Your track record sits in the room with him, silently, every day.

I watched my son Dashel spend an entire season on a club soccer team barely getting off the bench. Clearly unhappy. Staying loyal to a situation that was going nowhere for him. I still don’t know, to this day, whether I should have stepped in sooner. What I do know is that every conversation we had about it was loaded, no matter how carefully I walked in. I coach people for a living, and I still couldn’t make my own presence neutral. Because I’m his dad. Whatever I said arrived carrying everything I’ve built.

So what can you actually do? A few things that hold up.

Name what you see, and leave the verdict off. “I’ve noticed you seem quieter lately” opens a door. “I’m worried about you” hands him your anxiety to carry on top of his own.

Resist the urge to fix. Every solution you offer tells him he’s a problem to be solved. He can feel that, and it shuts him down faster than almost anything.

Tell him about the times you were lost. The job that fell apart. The years with no plan. I’ve got mine: I built the Whole Life Challenge, an online health program that grew from scratch to 250,000 participants and a few million dollars a year, and then I watched it collapse out from under me in 2019. It was supposed to be my proof, and my exit, and it took the ground with it when it went. That story will do more for your son than any pep talk, because it takes you off the pedestal he keeps measuring himself against.

Consider finding him someone else to talk to. A coach, a mentor, an older man he respects who has no stake in the family scoreboard. Some conversations can only happen outside the house.

And help him set daily standards. Goals live in the future, which is exactly where he’s stuck. Standards live in today. Get up at a set time. A short workout, even just squats, push-ups, a plank. Drink something green. Make the bed. Read 5 minutes. Write 5 minutes. Sit quietly for 5. Small on purpose. Each one kept is a message he sends himself: I keep my word to me. Over time that moves him from performing to owning. From a life that happens to him, toward being someone who happens to his life.

Two books help here. Admiral William McRaven’s Make Your Bed is short and direct. David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me goes longer and deeper, and the audiobook is the way to take it in.

Underneath all of it, what your son needs most is to feel seen, exactly where he is. Every fix and every redirect delivers the same quiet message: where you are is wrong. Being seen delivers a different one: I’m with you, and I trust what’s taking shape in there.

Because he’s early in the music. And the music gets better when he learns to play each note fully. The uncertain ones. The hard ones. The ones where he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.

That’s the whole game.

With love, Andy

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