When Your College Student Comes Home for the Summer Struggling: A Parent's Guide
By Denise Takakjy, PhD, LPC-NJ | Healing Hearts Healthy Minds
You have been counting down to the day your child comes home from college for the summer. However, within 48 hours, you feel something is off. They might be sleeping until noon, barely leaving their room, snapping at you for no reason, or sitting with you at dinner but remaining distant. You do not know whether to push, to give space, or to say anything at all. - you just do not want to make it worse and you are not sure what you are even dealing with.
This guide is for you.
First, Understand What Just Happened to Them
College is its own world. Your child student has spent the past eight or nine months managing their own schedule, social dynamics, emotions, often without any of the foundation they grew up with.
Coming home is not a return to normal, but rather, an identity shift.
They are not the person who left last year and they do not fully fit the role of "kid at home" anymore. That gap, between who they have become and what the home environment expects, is disorienting in a way that is hard to articulate. What often looks like attitude, withdrawal, or ingratitude is frequently something quieter: exhaustion, disorientation, and in many cases, a mental health picture that the pace of the school year kept them from dealing with. The summer, for a lot of college students, is the first time the busyness stops. And when it stops, everything they were outrunning catches up. Remember, the body keeps score.
What You Might Be Noticing (And What It Can Actually Mean)
Sleeping a lot or at irregular hours. This is not laziness by default. Sleep disruption is one of the most consistent signs of anxiety and depression. It is also a normal nervous system response to months of chronic stress. Observe the pattern before drawing conclusions.
Irritability or withdrawal at home. Young adults often hold themselves together in public and decompress near the people they feel safest with. If they are harder at home than anywhere else, that is not a rejection of you. It is, in a complicated way, the opposite.
Avoiding conversations about school or the future. This is worth paying attention to. When a young adult cannot talk about what happened or what comes next, it often means they are sitting with something unprocessed. Academic struggles, social loss, identity questions, or experiences they have not told anyone about can all live in that silence.
A noticeable change in eating, hygiene, or motivation. Any single one of these can be context-specific. All of them together, over an extended period, is a signal that something more than summer slump is happening.
What Actually Helps: A Practical Guide for Parents
1. Renegotiate the Home Dynamic Before Anyone Gets Reactive
One of the most common sources of summer conflict is unspoken expectations colliding. You expect a certain level of presence, contribution, and communication. They expect a certain level of autonomy. Neither of you is wrong. But without an explicit conversation, both of you end up reacting to the gap.
Have a low-stakes conversation early, not as a list of rules, but as an honest exchange. What do you need from each other to make this summer livable? This does not have to be formal. It can happen in the car or over coffee. The point is that it happens before resentment builds.
2. Connect Without an Agenda
This is one of the most important tools I draw from in DBT-informed work with families: validation before problem-solving. Most parents, because they love their kids and are worried, come into conversations with an agenda. They want to understand what went wrong, what the plan is, whether therapy is needed, whether there is something serious happening.
Your young adult feels that agenda before you say a word. And it closes them down.
Connection without an agenda looks like sitting with them during something they enjoy, even if you find it boring. It looks like resisting the urge to redirect a neutral conversation toward the topic you actually want to discuss. It looks like being someone they want to be around, which is the only real foundation for the harder conversations later.
3. Ask Better Questions
"How was your year?" is impossible to answer honestly. "Are you okay?" almost always gets a yes regardless of reality. Questions that actually open things up tend to be specific and low-pressure. "What was the best week of your semester?" "Is there anything from this year you are glad is over?" "What do you want this summer to feel like?" These give your student something concrete to respond to and signal that you are interested in their experience, not just auditing it.
4. Know the Difference Between Adjustment and Something Clinical
A few rough weeks at home after a hard semester is normal. It does not automatically mean your student has a diagnosable condition or needs immediate intervention.
What warrants a closer look:
Withdrawal that intensifies rather than eases over two to three weeks
Statements that suggest hopelessness, worthlessness, or not seeing a point
Any mention, direct or indirect, of self-harm or not wanting to be here
Significant changes in eating, functioning, or hygiene that persist
A history of anxiety or depression that appears to be resurging
If any of these are present, the question is not whether they need support. The question is what kind and how to introduce it without triggering resistance.
5. Bring Up Therapy Without Making It a Crisis
The way therapy is introduced matters enormously. When it comes out of a confrontation or a moment of high emotion, it lands as a consequence or a judgment. When it comes out of a calm, ordinary moment, it lands differently.
A framing that tends to work: "I have noticed you seem like you are carrying a lot. I am not trying to diagnose anything. I just want you to have someone in your corner who is not me, because I am your parent and that limits me in certain ways." You cannot be your child's therapist. The relationship does not allow for it, and trying to fill that role usually backfires for both of you.
What I Work With in These Situations
When college students come home and are struggling, during virtual therapy, I often find is not one single problem but a layered picture. There may be unprocessed experiences from the school year, relationship losses, academic shame, or identity questions that have not had space to be worked through.
For anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and patterns of avoidance, I work with DBT skills that give young adults concrete tools for managing what they are feeling, including distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. These are not abstract concepts. They are practical skills that translate directly into how someone handles a hard moment, a difficult relationship, or a spiral that feels out of control.
For young adults who are carrying experiences that feel stuck, things they cannot stop thinking about, things that affect them more than they feel they should, I work with EMDR. This is particularly relevant for students who went through something significant during the school year, whether that is a traumatic event, a period of severe anxiety, or the kind of ongoing stress that the brain files away incorrectly and keeps returning to.
All of this is available virtually throughout CT, DE, PA, AND NJ, which means your child does not have to get in a car, drive somewhere unfamiliar, and sit in a waiting room to access real support. For a young adult who is already resistant to asking for help, removing that barrier is not a small thing.
When Your Child Is Not Ready
Sometimes the child is not ready to engage with therapy, and pushing harder only increases resistance. If that is where you are, there are still things you can do.
Take care of your own mental health in this season. Having a struggling young adult home is genuinely hard. Your anxiety about them, your grief over what you hoped this summer would look like, and your uncertainty about how to help are all real and worth tending to. I work with parents navigating exactly this, and that support has a direct effect on the home environment your student is in.
Be consistent and patient. Research on young adult mental health consistently shows that a stable, non-reactive home environment is one of the most powerful protective factors available. You cannot fix what your child is going through, but you can be a regulated, predictable presence while they figure out how to ask for help.
When they are ready, make it easy for your adult child. First, know who to call and look into therapist. I offer a free consultation so that the first step is not a commitment.
You Do Not Have to Figure This Out Alone Either
If your college student is home and you are not sure what you are dealing with or how to help, I am glad to talk it through. A free 15-minute consultation is a starting point, not a contract.
Virtual therapy is available throughout Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania for teens, young adults, and the parents trying to support them.
Denise Takakjy, PhD, LPC-NJ, C-DBT, CATP, is the founder of Healing Hearts Healthy Minds Counseling Services PLLC. She specializes in teen and young adult mental health, trauma, anxiety, and emotional regulation using DBT and EMDR. Virtual therapy available in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut.