Close to 14 million adult children are still living at home. There are simple steps both parents & their kids need to take to make their lives more productive, fulfilling & healthy.

For Parents:

• Set boundaries without feeling guilt.
  Parents need to put down boundaries & stick to them.

Children often assume the victim role & say, "I can't do it. I have to live here."

Parents buy into this thinking & then feel guilty because they want to help their kids. When they feed that guilt, they ignore the fact that they're crippling their children's advancement in life.

• Let your adult children plan their own lives. Parents shouldn't try to make a life plan for their adult children; this is something they need to devise on their own so they'll follow it.

Parents can guide & support their kids, but treating them like babies may cause them to regress.

They need to be moving ahead & maturing, not regressing into childhood roles. Adult kids should be living as independent young people & making their own way.

They need to decide for themselves what they want out of life & devise a plan to obtain it.

• Think about the true meaning of help.
  There's an old saying:

"Those for whom you do the most, wind up resenting you the worst."

Are you really helping your kids if you're not showing them how the real world works?

Parents need to redefine what it means to help someone. Look at your motivation for helping your children. If you're doing it to feel better about yourself, then you probably don't have your child's best interest in mind.

You don't help people by taking away their self-sufficiency, pride of accomplishment & achievement.

Children need to take an initiative & find ways to achieve their goals on their own. If something is important enough for your children, they'll find a way to make it happen.

• Prepare your children for the world.

"When we talk about loving our children, loving them means preparing them,"

Dr. Phil tells his guests. In the world, your children will have to pull their own weight & make their own way. If you allow them not to require more from themselves, then they won't & they won't progress.

It's important for your children to learn self-sufficiency, develop high self-esteem & be motivated from early on in life.

If you're constantly helping them & taking care of their needs, you aren't preparing them for the real world & in fact, you're actually crippling them.

"It's not fair to enable them for a long, long time & then all of a sudden just put them on the street. You own the problem as well," Dr. Phil says. "There's got to be a plan. There's got to be a transition."

For Adult Children:

• Take responsibility for yourself. Oftentimes it's easier to sit back & let others provide for you, while you get accustomed to a comfort zone.

By taking the path of least resistance, you reward yourself with comfort & relief from anxiety that comes from reaching for something else.

You may feel safe when you don't attempt to change, but you're sabotaging yourself. You're selling out your happiness & putting up with something you don't want. Require more of yourself.

• Have a plan to get on your own. Find a job, something that gives you the pride & independence to be able to say, "I'm taking care of myself."

Start living where you can get up in the morning & look in the mirror & say, "I'm a grown person; I'm living on my own & I'm proud of that." 

Dr. Phil asks his guests, "Won't you feel much better when you're totally self-sufficient & running your own life?"

Start at an entry-level position if you have to & then build from there. Saving yourself for a management position isn't the place to start. You need to get whatever job you can & then build for another job.

Set some goals & make a timeline to get there.