A packet for the transition years, when the pen changes hands
Somewhere in high school, the question starts arriving at your table: what happens after? Counselors ask it with forms. Relatives ask it at dinner. The culture answers it with one picture: a packed car, a dormitory, an empty bedroom, and a family that has successfully worked itself out of a job. This packet holds a bigger truth. There is more than one good road out of the school years, and the measure of every one of them is the same: how fully this particular person gets a say in their own days, whatever the address.
These pages were written for every family, and this edition is set for ours: families raising children of color, families carrying more than one language, families whose emerging adult has an intellectual or developmental disability, families whose children learn differently and always have. And if your child is still small, and someone has recently handed you a diagnosis and a folder of fears, this packet is for you too. It is what the far end of the map looks like when a family walks it on purpose, and it is a better picture than the one the folder gave you.
The road out: college, apprenticeship, service, work, a place of their own. The family becomes the home base they choose to return to.
The long runway: home for a while, on purpose: community college, first jobs, savings, and time. Most of our cultures never measured adulthood by the moving truck, and the runway is part of the flight.
The shared home: living together as the chosen, built, meaningful arrangement, with the emerging adult's agency as full as it can reach. For many families, including many with I/DD emerging adults, this is the road, and it is a whole one. Page two is its page.
How to use this packet: One page at a sitting, read aloud, in any month of any year. Nothing here has a deadline and nothing breaks if life interrupts. Page two is for the family table. Page three belongs to the emerging adult; hand it over whole. Page four gets written together, and then it lives on the refrigerator.
Good Protocols · The Family Resource Library · goodprotocols.org
The Family Resource Library · A Table Edition · New in the Community Edition
The Shared Home, Chosen on Purpose
For families building an adult life together under one roof · read aloud, about three minutes
The picture everyone is handed says that success at eighteen is an empty bedroom. Hold that picture up to the actual history of families, and it turns out to be the odd one. Across most of the world, and across most of our own families' pasts, the generations shared a roof and called it wealth. The grandmother in the kitchen, the uncle on the porch, the emerging adult learning adulthood beside people who loved them: that was the architecture, and it raised the people who raised us.
For some families, the shared home is a season. For others, including many whose emerging adult lives with an intellectual or developmental disability, it is the long arrangement, the one that fits the actual person rather than the brochure. Here is the sentence this page exists to say plainly: a shared home can be a full adult life, and choosing it is not a failure of independence. Independence was never the deepest goal; the deepest goal is agency, a real say in your own days. An emerging adult can hold enormous agency inside a shared home, and a person living alone across town can hold almost none. The address was never the measure.
The difference between a shared home that works and one that quietly hurts is the difference between chosen and drifted. A drifted arrangement keeps yesterday's habits: the parent still deciding, the old bedroom still a child's room, the days still shaped around waiting. A chosen arrangement gets built, and the building has parts you can name. Their own space, entered by knock. Their own money, and their own say in how the household runs. Real roles that the house actually depends on: the cooking of certain meals, the care of certain things, the keeping of certain days. A schedule that is theirs. Company they choose. And a meaningful day, every day: work, or contribution, or learning, or making, whether or not a paycheck is attached. Where decisions are hard, supported decision-making means they choose their helpers and stay the author; Washington law recognizes this, and it is worth knowing before anyone mentions guardianship.
One more thing must be said with care. You, the parent, are the crew they trust, and you are not their case manager. The arrangement stays alive by being renegotiated out loud, at the table, as seasons change (page four of this packet is that conversation, written down). For the rights and the systems (DDA eligibility, DVR and supported employment, the alternatives to guardianship), lean on the people whose work this is: PAVE serves Washington families, Open Doors for Multicultural Families walks with families like ours in our own languages, and your parent group holds the families who have already built this. None of this road is meant to be walked alone. It never was.
Try this week: Say the arrangement out loud at the table, as a choice: "We are choosing to build this home together." Then hand over one real household role, whole, this week, and do not take it back.
This page is meant to be given away. Who needs it next?
The full letters, sixteen of them, live on the Open Shelf at goodprotocols.org
The Family Resource Library · A Page for the Emerging Adult
Agency in Every Arrangement
This page is yours. Whoever handed it to you, it is addressed to you · read aloud, about three minutes
You are becoming an adult. Maybe you are heading somewhere new. Maybe you are staying home for a while. Maybe home together is the plan, for a long time, and it is a good plan. This page is true on every one of those roads.
Being an adult was never really about the address. It is about having a real say in your own days. Your say can grow on any road, and it is allowed to grow as far as it can reach. Here is what your say is made of.
Your space. A door that people knock on. A room that is arranged your way, even if it is the room you have always had. It becomes different when it becomes yours.
Your time. A schedule that belongs to you: when you rest, what your mornings are, what your good week looks like. People who love you can know your schedule. It is still yours.
Your money. Whatever money is yours, you should know where it is, what it does, and have a real say in it. Learning this takes time. Taking the time is part of the say.
Your work. Everyone needs a reason to get up: a job, a craft, a class, a person you help, a thing you are getting better at. Paid or not, it counts, and it is yours to build with the people around you.
Your people. You get to choose company. Family is given, and friends are chosen, and an adult gets room for both.
Your helpers. Everyone uses help; adults choose theirs. If big decisions are hard, there is a way called supported decision-making where you pick the people who help you decide, and the decision stays yours. You can also choose how much you want your family in on things. Choosing them is allowed. It is one of the strongest choices there is.
Try this week: Pick one decision that becomes fully yours this month. Say it at the table: "I want this one to be mine." Then take it, with help if you want help, because the help you choose is part of the say.
This page is meant to be given away. Who needs it next?
The full letters, sixteen of them, live on the Open Shelf at goodprotocols.org
The Family Resource Library · Written Together, Kept on the Refrigerator
The Co-Pilot Agreement
One page, two voices. The emerging adult writes first. Read it over food, sign it, revisit it when the seasons change.
This page is an agreement, not a contract. It says out loud what families usually leave to guesswork: whose say is whose, now that the say is changing hands. The emerging adult is the pilot. The family is the crew they choose. Crews get chosen out loud.
I write first (the emerging adult):
Decisions that are mine alone now:
Decisions I want company on, and whose company I want:
How I want to be asked about my life (asked, not told; and when):
My helpers, chosen by me, and what each one helps with:
One thing I am building this season (work, learning, craft, a role in this house):
We write next (the family):
What we will always be, on every road (the crew, the table, the place that holds your story):
What we are handing over this year, whole:
One thing we will stop doing, because the pen has changed hands:
We write this part together:
How we repair when one of us gets this wrong (someone will; the repair is the teaching):
When we will read this page again (a season, a birthday, a change, not a schedule):
Signed, the pilot:
Signed, the crew:
The measure is the say, not the address. May the say keep growing.
The full letters, sixteen of them, live on the Open Shelf at goodprotocols.org