Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another conversation on the Parenting with Impact podcast. We’re excited today to talk about a super hot topic that, on one hand, we've been discussing for years.

But I don’t know about you, Diane, it was our topic in 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 discussing a concept that we've been teaching for 13 years.

It’s something we've been teaching forever. I mentioned, "Oh, we’re going to have a podcast about that coming up.

Go listen to the podcast because it has our newest spin on it." I love when we refresh these topics that we’ve blogged or taught about because every time we teach it—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: We learn something.

Diane Dempster: …we learn something. Absolutely. And you called me yesterday, and you were 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 too. I mean, it’s just been a hot, hot, hot topic.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, I had an epiphany. Okay, so the topic here, y'all, is that 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—how do we get them to a point where they’re asking? Parents are always calling us and saying, "My kid needs help. My kid wants a coach," or "My kid needs a coach."

And we’re like, “Do they want help?” No, but they need it. Well, then, that’s usually a sign that it’s our work to do. We need to focus on us as the parents.

Diane Dempster: I’m going to say that in a few more words, but it’s like, we know our kids need help. They’re not yet saying, “I want it,” or they might say they want it because they want to get us off their back or for some other reason. 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 help.

Diane Dempster: And how do we help them do it effectively? Because there are actually two parts to the process.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And as I was teaching this in the group yesterday, while we were talking about it, I had an epiphany—after all these years, I hadn’t realized something.

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. But first, let’s set the stage, Diane. Why don’t kids ask for help?

Diane Dempster: What?

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

Diane Dempster: Well, there are a lot of reasons why none of us 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, honestly, is being able to model asking for help. So, if you’re listening to this, I’m going to challenge you as well—how easy is it for you to ask for help? We always joke about how I have someone who cuts my hair, someone who mows my lawn, and I tell my partner that our gutters need to be cleaned.

He broke his back a couple of years ago, and I’m like, “Dude, you need to not be up on the roof.” And he says, “I can be on the roof.” But this is a moment where it might be wise to ask for help. It’s hard for all of us for a lot of reasons. So, what’s on our list here? It’s not okay to make mistakes. That might be one...

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. We sat down, brainstormed, and reached out to our community, and we summarized the key reasons that people—kids, young adults, anyone—tend to resist asking for or accepting help. These are the five reasons.

Diane Dempster: So, the first one has to do with your relationship with mistakes. That might mean something like, “Oh, if I’m asking for help, that means 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’ll be more obvious.” 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...

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

Diane Dempster: And related to that is stress. It’s this sense of being so overwhelmed right now, and we’ve talked about coping mechanisms before.

But one of the key coping mechanisms, there are two of them—one is avoidance, and one is control. So if I’m stressed out, I might say, “No, I don’t need help. I’ve got to do this. I’m the only one who can do it. I’ve got to take care of this.” Or, if I’m overwhelmed, I might say, “Oh 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 ability to think or problem-solve is very limited, let alone our ability to think, “Oh wait, it might be helpful to have someone else come into this situation.” So stress is the second reason 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 like, 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.

Then, we’re asking them to accept help for something that we want them to do, 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’ll talk a little more about whose agenda it is in the next episode.

But the bottom line for now is that sometimes kids—let’s focus on kids for a 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 don’t feel a sense of ownership over it. They’re not feeling like they have a choice in the matter.

Diane Dempster: Yeah. And so the next one is that the language we use might leave them unprepared for what's expected of them. They’re not yet bought into or aware of the expectations. So, it’s like, if I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to do, how can I ask someone to help me?

And shouldn’t I already know what I’m supposed to do? There are two sides to that. One is, I don’t know what to do, and the other is, shouldn’t I already know 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 I don’t think I can do.

I don’t think I’m ready to do it. So sometimes our kids will resist because we’re so busy telling them they can do it, but we haven’t paid attention to the fact that they think they can’t, or they don’t believe they can, 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 overwhelm. I know this happens to us at work sometimes.

It’s like, “Okay, there’s so much to do. I don’t even know where to start.” And you ask, “How can I help?” And I’m like, “I’m not even in a place where I can think about asking for help because I haven’t wrapped my head around it enough.

I’m overwhelmed or stressed, or whatever it is.” So there’s this process of figuring out what help is really needed, which is the fifth reason.

The other thing I’d add, particularly for younger kids—not necessarily little kids, but kids in general, not adults—is that a lot of times, kids equate independence with not needing help. It’s this idea of, “I’m growing up, and when I’m independent, I won’t need anybody.”

So they want to be independent. They may even technically be independent, from an age perspective, like being over 18. But they think, “Okay, if I’m independent, I shouldn’t need help.” And part of what came up earlier this summer in group was that we don’t teach kids that asking for help is an adulting skill. It’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. How will you figure out when you do need help, and how will you know? All that sort of stuff. We don’t even teach it as a skill because our kids think, “Okay, when I reach adulthood, I’ll know everything. I won’t need help.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And I know everything, and I know how. I was thinking about one of my kids, who recently went back to graduate school. She’s in medical school. She was telling me about one of her peers who had never really cultivated the skill of asking for help.

This peer got something really wrong on their first exam. It was technical—like she misunderstood the program and answered all the questions wrong. She was sure she had failed because she thought she did it wrong. 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 up. Can I take it again?” It was only because she was in conversation with my kid, who said, “You’ve got to ask for some help here,” that she felt safe to ask for help.

But this other student had been so driven to do it all on her own that she was ready to drop out of medical school after working all these years to get there. That one thing—because she never learned that skill—was a big obstacle for her.

Diane Dempster: Let’s talk about safety and how it ties in because I think that’s the other piece of it. 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 for parents of older teens. We were talking about the independence pyramid, which we did a podcast episode on.

There’s the relationship, and then there’s trust, on top of the relationship. Those two create healthy communication, and then we get to collaboration. So sometimes we have to lead in the relationship to build trust.

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, 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 the director and control things.

Diane Dempster: And that’s what I was going to say because that’s what came up in our group. We recreate these patterns. The mom who was on the call today—her kid just went off to college—and she said, “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 said, “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.”

So part of this has been reprogramming and building that trust again, to show that you’re not just going to take over if you get involved. That’s why one of the tools I love around asking for help is to give me a job instead of just asking for help. I used to do this with my kids when they were working on their homework. I’d say, “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, and I want you to be healthy and happy and all that other stuff. Giving me a job feels very different from just asking, “What can I 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. One way to do that is to say, “You direct me.”

That’s part of what we talked about in group today, where somebody [inaudible] on enrolling his trust to direct me in supporting him. We were talking about our job as parents. Ultimately, when they’re ready to take leadership or ownership, our job is to move into a support role, like being the roadie—not to do it for them.

If they don’t have the trust that we’re actually going to support them instead of controlling it, then they end up thinking, “I think I’m being helpful, but they think I’m being controlling.” That’s 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 we think they need help with, but to find out from them what they think help looks like. 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, her kid has gone off to college. The agreement they had was that he had an 8 o'clock class, and he was afraid he might miss it. So he asked her to be the backup, giving her a way to check and see if he was out of his dorm by a certain time.

If not, she was going to call him. 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 said, “I’m afraid I’m going to be late to class. Can you help me for the first few weeks?”

Diane Dempster: Or, after they’ve missed a few classes, maybe brainstorm and troubleshoot by asking, “Is there something someone could help you with?” I remember I used to wake my roommate up. There’s always somebody somewhere who can help you.

And the thing I love about that same conversation is that it came up in our group. 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 you, then it’s your job.”

I have one of my kids who hired me for a period of time as their personal assistant because they were having a hard time keeping track of appointments. I said, “Okay, well, do you want to pay me? You can buy me dinner once a month.

What do you want me to do as your personal assistant?” And they’d say, “Can you do this, this, and this for me?” It’s a very different conversation than me saying, “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 it or that we’re making sure they get the help we think they need. Instead, help is enrolling them, building trust so that they’re open to asking for, accepting, or receiving help.

They need some sense of guidance, ownership, or direction so they feel able to ask for the help they think they need or work with us to collaborate and figure out what help they need. It’s about not feeling like we’re going to step in and direct, control, or dominate. It’s about trusting that we’re still letting it be their agenda.

Now, in the early stages, help means collaboratively figuring things out with each other. As the kids move further along in their independence and take more ownership, we move into more of a support role. I think a lot of what we’re talking about right now is support.

But the key idea 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, if they’re saying, "But they won’t ask for help," then you take a step back and ask, "Okay, 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, but 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—he got sick first. So I was like, "I really don’t feel good." This sort of, "Would you please?" I could have, but I felt like maybe he was feeling better than I was, so I asked for help. It’s hard for us. And a lot of times, particularly moms, are carrying a lot of weight.

I was with a mom today who said, "It’s so much easier just to do it myself." If we model asking for help, it really does give our kids permission. And sometimes, we ask our kids for help. It’s like saying, "Hey, will you please do this for me?" or "Hey, I need help with this."

Sometimes we do that with fun stuff, and sometimes we do it with, "Hey, we’ve got chores." But part of this is normalizing that asking for help is an adulting skill that everyone uses, 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 are so many different aspects to this.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I just want to mention, we’ll also put a link in the show notes to the podcast on designing because designing is something we use as a way to ask for something without creating a defensive response. So that can be a really helpful tool as well.

The bottom line here is, it’s complicated and important. 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 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’s the key. If they’re seeing it as control, imposition, or judgment, that’s the indication that they’re shutting down. This is a complicated topic, Elaine, and I guess I would say we talk about this in our programs all the time.

So if this is something that you’re really needing help with—like, my kid needs help but isn’t 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 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