Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast. We are excited today to talk about a super hot topic that we've been, on the one hand, talking about for years. But I don't know about you, Diane. It was our topic and group coaching this week, and it hit so many buttons, right?

Diane Dempster: And it was really funny. I was talking to a longtime client today, and we were talking about a concept that we've been teaching for 13 years. It's sort of, we've been teaching it forever and ever and ever. And I was like, oh, we're going to have a podcast about that coming up. Go listen to the podcast because it's got our newest spin on it. And so I love when we refresh these topics that we might have a blog on or teaching on because every time we teach it-

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: We learned something.

Diane Dempster: -we learned something. Absolutely. And you called me yesterday, and you're like, oh, my gosh, this whole thing came up in this group today, and I added it to my group today. And then you added it to your group today. I mean, it's just been a hot, hot, hot thing.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, I had an epiphany. Okay, so the topic here, y'all, is we're talking about this whole issue of asking for help. And you know, you've heard us talk about how we want to help our kids learn to ask for and accept help. So it's both of those things and how do we get them to a point, when they're asking parents to always call us and say, my kid needs help. My kid wants a coach, whatever. It needs a coach. Were like, do they want help? No, but they need it. Well, then, that's usually a sign that it's our work to do. Focus on us as the parent.

Diane Dempster: I'm going to say that in a little more words, but it's like, we know our kids need help. They're not yet saying I want it, or they might be saying they want it because they want to get us off their back or whatever else. And so part of this is, how do we get them ready to accept or ask for help? 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And ask for and/or accept for help.

Diane Dempster: And how do we help them to do it effectively because there's actually two parts of the process.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And as I was teaching this in the group yesterday, we're talking about in the group, I had an epiphany that, after all these years, I hadn't realized. And so we're going to come to that at the end. I'm going to tease you all with it because it was so profound, so let's set the stage first, Diane, about why kids don't ask for help.

Diane Dempster: What?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Why don't they ask for help?

Diane Dempster: Well, there's a lot of reasons that all of us don't ask for help, right?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. Not just them. It's us, too.

Diane Dempster: Not just them. And so part of this is, honestly, a big tool in this is being able to model asking for help. So, if you're listening to this part of the lens, I'm going to challenge you too is how easy it is for you to ask for help. And we always joke about, well, I have somebody who cuts my hair. I have somebody mowing my lawn. I tell my partner, our gutters need to be clean. He broke his back a couple of years ago. And I'm like, dude, you need to not be up on the roof. He's like, I can be on the roof. This is a moment where it might be wise to ask for help. And so it's hard for all of us for a lot of reasons. And so, what's on our list here? It's not okay to make mistakes. That might be one [overlapping]

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Wait, I want to stop and explain the list Diane's talking about.

Diane Dempster: Yeah. I can get so excited.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So we were doing a presentation about this a couple of years ago and we sat down and brainstormed and went out to our community and we encapsulated what are the key reasons that people, kids, young adults, whatever, tend to resist asking for or accepting help, and these are the five.

Diane Dempster: So the first one has to do with your relationship with mistakes. So that might mean, like, oh, if I'm asking for help, that means that I'm not good enough, or I've made a mistake, or it might not be good, or somebody else might be coming into my space, and I might screw up and it might be more evident. So there's this whole thing around needing to get things right. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Perfectionism.

Diane Dempster: Perfectionism. Go back and listen to our podcast on perfectionism. Can we [overlapping] one of those?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It's okay to make mistakes. So there's this: I want to appear as if I've got it together, and that's one of the key reasons people avoid accepting help because somehow it's implicit it means something's wrong with me if I need help.

Diane Dempster: And related to that is I'm under stress. It's this sort of, I might be so overwhelmed right now and we've talked about coping mechanisms before, but one of the key coping mechanisms, there's two of them, one is avoidance, and one of them is control. So if I'm stressed out, I might be no, I don't need any help. I got to do this. I'm the only one that can do it. I got to take care of this. Or if I'm overwhelmed, I might be like, oh, no, no, no, no, I can't even think about this. So if they're in either one of those places, or we're in either one of those places, our availability to even think or problem solve is very limited, let alone our ability to go, oh, wait, it might be helpful to have somebody else come into this whole thing. So stress is the second one that sometimes leads us to not ask for help. What else?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I don't know. You've got the list in front of you.

Diane Dempster: Okay. The third one is our agenda, not their agenda. It's sort of so how many times do we say, okay, you need to do your homework after school, and how can I help you remember? We're coming to them with something we want them to do. And then we're asking them to accept help for something that we're asking them to do and not something they want to do.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So yes, it's their homework but we haven't shared it. We haven't collaborated. We're going to talk a little bit more in the next episode on whose agenda it is. But the bottom line for this purpose is sometimes kids, let's talk about kids for the moment, resist accepting help because it's not on their radar to do whatever it is we're asking them to do in the first place or they're not at choice in some way. They're not feeling an ownership of it. 

Diane Dempster: Yeah. And so then the next one is that the language we use is unprepared for what's expected of them. So they're not yet bought in or know what's going on or are aware of the expectations. And so it's like if I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to do, how can I ask somebody to help me, and shouldn't I know what I'm supposed to do? There's two sides to that. One is I don't know what to do, and the other which is, shouldn't I know what I should do, what I'm supposed to do?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And there's so much here if they're unprepared for what's expected of them. My kid used to say, if I haven't done it, I haven't done it wrong. I don't want help because that means you're going to hold me accountable to do something that I don't think I can do. I don't think I'm ready to do it. And so sometimes our kids will resist it because we're so busy telling them they can, but we haven't paid attention to the fact that they think they can't, or they don't believe that they can't, or they don't feel ready for whatever it is. So that's another area.

Diane Dempster: And then the last one is that they really don't know what help they need and this goes back to maybe overwhelm. I know this happens to us at work. Sometimes it's like, okay, that's so much to do. I don't even know where to start. And you're like, how can I help? And I'm like, I'm not even in place where I can even think about asking you for help because I don't even have my head around it enough, and I'm overwhelmed or stressed, or whatever it is so there's this sort of process of figuring out what help do I really need is the fifth one. The other thing I would add, particularly for younger kids, not younger kids, kids, not adults, is that a lot of times kids equate independence with not needing help. So it's this sort of, I'm growing up. And when I'm independent, I'm not going to need anybody. And so they want to be independent. And so they may be even independent, technically, from an age perspective, let's say they're over 18. But they think that, okay, if I'm independent, I shouldn't need help. And part of what I think came up earlier this summer for us in group was we don't teach kids that asking for help is an adulting skill. That's one of the most important adulting skills there are. When you get older, when you're independent, you'll know when you need help and when you don't need help. How will you figure out when you do need help? And how will you know, and all that sort of stuff? I mean, we don't even teach it as a skill because our kids think magically, okay, I will reach adulthood. I know everything. I don't need help.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And I know everything, and I know how. I was thinking. One of my kids has recently gone back to graduate school. She's in medical school. And she was telling me about one of her peers who had never really cultivated that skill of asking for help. And so she got something really wrong on their first exam and it was technical like she misunderstood the program, and so she answered all the questions wrong and so she was sure she had failed it because she did it wrong. And she didn't feel safe. This is an adult medical student who didn't feel like it was okay to go to the administration and say, wow, I totally misunderstood that. I screwed that up. Can I take it again? And it was only because she was in conversation with my kid who's like, you got to ask for some help here who felt safe asking for help, but this kid had been so driven that she had to do it on her own, that she was ready to drop out of medical school after working all these years to get there. So that one thing because she never learned that skill.

Diane Dempster: Let's talk about safety and how it ties in because I think that that's the other piece of it is how do you create an environment where kids do feel safe, asking for help.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So we talked about this a lot this week in various groups. I just got off the call with one of our PSS groups with parents of older teens. We were talking about if you think about the independence pyramid, and we did a podcast episode on the independence pyramid, there's relationship, and then there's trust, on top of relationship, and those two create healthy communication, and then we get to collaboration. So sometimes we have to lead in the relationship to build trust. And what we came to understand this week is that very often, our kids don't trust that we're actually trying to help them in a way that's useful for them. When we say we want to help you, they experience that trust as control or as an imposition because the trust isn't there to believe that we're not going to do what we've always done in the past, which is step in as director and control things.

Diane Dempster: And that's what I was going to say because that's what came up in our group is we recreate these patterns. And the mom that was on the phone today her kid has just gone off to college. And she's like, well, if he had been home in my house, I would have done this. I would have emailed the teacher. I would have blah, blah, blah. And she's like, I know, I'm not supposed to be a director, but I don't know what else to do and he's expecting that you're just going to jump in because you've been jumping in for 18 years now. And so part of this has been able to rewire and build that trust, again, that you're not going to just take over if you get involved. And that's why one of the tools I love around asking for help is to give me a job instead of asking for help. I used to do this with my kids like they're working on their homework, and I'm like, give me a job. Do you want me to bring you popcorn? Do you want me to give you a backrub in an hour? Do you want me to help you keep track of your time? Just give me something to do because if you-

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: To support you.

Diane Dempster: To support you. It's your job to do your homework. It's my job to help set you up for success. They can see that. They know that. I'm anxious. I want you to be healthy and happy and all that other stuff. Giving me a job feels very different from what I can help you with.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah. So I want to go back to what you just said a minute ago, this notion of creating an environment of safety. So one way to do it is to say you direct me, and that's part of what we talked about in group today was somebody [inaudible] on enrolling his trust to direct me in supporting him. And so we were talking about our job as parents. Ultimately, when they're ready to take leadership or take ownership, our job is to move into a support role, which is like being the roadie, not to do it for them. And so if they don't have the trust that we're actually going to control it, then they go to that I think I'm being helpful. He thinks I'm being controlling. That was the line that came up a lot. She thinks I'm being controlling. So one of the moms said I have to let go of being sure of what help she needs so that I can ask her to guide me in what help she needs. The shift is not to help them with what they think they need help with; it's to find out from them what they think help looks like and they have to feel safe enough to do that. Can I give an example?

Diane Dempster: Yeah, sure. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So one of the moms, the kid, has gone off to college. And the agreement she had with him, he had an eight o'clock class. He was afraid he was going to miss and so he asked her to be the backup so that she had a way to check to see if he was out of his dorm by a certain time. And if not, she was going to call them. She didn't suggest it. It wasn't her idea. She wasn't saying I'm going to check on you and make sure you're out. He was saying I'm afraid I'm going to be late to class. Can you help me for the first few weeks? [overlapping]

Diane Dempster: Or after they have missed a few classes to maybe brainstorm and troubleshoot and say, is there something that someone could help you with? I remember I used to wake my roommate up. It's this sort of somebody somewhere who can help you. And the thing that I love about that same conversation came up in our group because some moms said, well, he's in college now. I shouldn't be the one to wake him up. And I'm like, well, if he asked to. It's your job. I have one of my kids that hired me for a period of time as their personal assistant because they were having a hard time keeping track of appointments, and it's like, okay, well, do you want to pay me? You can buy me dinner once a month. What do you want me to do for you as your personal assistant? Well, can you do this, this, and this for me? It's a very different sort of conversation than I know you're forgetting to schedule your dentist appointment. Let me do it for you, which is me jumping in and micromanaging.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Jumping in and rescuing. So help is not about rescue. Let's wrap this conversation up. Are we ready?

Diane Dempster: Yep. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Okay. So help is not rescuing. Help is not doing it for them. Help is not making sure they do or that we're making sure they get the help we think they need. Instead, help is enrolling them, building the trust so that they are open to asking for accepting receiving help, that they have some sense of guidance or ownership or direction so that they feel like they're able to ask for the help they think they need or to work with us to collaborate to figure out what help they need without feeling like we're going to step in and direct control, dominate. But to really trust that we're still letting it be their agenda. Now, in the early stages, help me be collaboratively figuring it out with each other. As the kids move further along in their independence and they move into more ownership, then we move into more support roles. And I think a lot of what we're talking about right now is support. But the notion here is to really pay attention to making sure we're providing the help they feel they're ready for or that they need, not the help we think they should need. 

Diane Dempster: That's a great couple of reminders. One is like if they're saying but they won't ask for help, then you take the step back, and you're saying okay, so what can I do in the family environment to make it easier and safer to ask for help? And maybe we kind of alluded to this earlier, part of that is you asking for help, right?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, modeling it.

Diane Dempster: I wasn't feeling good earlier this week and my partner had also been sick, and he got sick first. So I was like, I really don't feel good. This sort of would you please, and I could have, but I felt like maybe he was feeling better than I was. So I was like, I'm going to ask for help here. It's sort of hard for us. And a lot of times, particularly moms, are carrying a lot of weight. I was with a mom today who's like, it's so much easier just to do it myself. And if we model asking for help, it really does give our kids permission, and sometimes we ask our kids for help. It's like going to hey, will you please do this for me, or hey, I need help with this. And sometimes you do that with fun stuff. And sometimes you do that with, hey, we got stuff that's chores, but part of this is normalizing asking for help isn't adulting skill that everybody does, and helping our kids learn when do I ask for help? When do I not ask for help? How do I ask for help? How do I advocate for myself? I mean, there's so many different flavors to this.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I just want to call up. We'll also put a link in the show notes to the podcast on designing because designing is something we do as a way to ask for something without creating a defensive response so that can be a really helpful tool also. So the bottom line here is it's complicated. It's important and so sometimes, rather than focusing on the outcome, we want to focus on creating a safe place, building the trust so that they feel safe with us helping and they don't feel help as an imposition. It's not a four-letter word, but it actually feels like support to them instead of control.

Diane Dempster: Yeah, and I think that that's the piece of it is like if they're seeing it as control imposition or judgment, that's that indication that they're just shutting down. And this is a complicated topic, Elaine, and I guess I would say we talked about this in our programs all the time. And so if this is something that you're really needing help on, it's like, my kid needs help, but they're not asking for it. Get some help for yourself to figure out how to position yourself and how to move your family forward so that helping one another and particularly getting your kids to a place where they can advocate and ask for help is something that's on your radar and a skill that they're beginning to develop.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Awesome, love it. All right, everybody, see you in the next one. You got this.

Helpful Links:

-Parent Expectations: 2 Steps to Success 

-Parenting is Leadership Guide