No one gets through parenting without offering a helping hand. We all help our kids when we feel they’re struggling, offer help because we know it will help them learn new skills, or even make things go faster!
But offering a helping hand when none is needed or wanted can actually hinder your child’s development.
Offering too much help to young children can have a negative impact on their self-confidence, leading them to believe that they are incapable of handling difficult situations on their own. It can also make it harder for them to cope with failure, even as adults.
When a child receives too much help, he or she becomes dependent on that help. That’s why a child who is used to doing homework with his or her parents may find it difficult to do homework on his or her own.
In other words, too much help can have a negative impact on children’s social and cognitive development. It can prevent them from learning important skills such as problem solving, handling difficult situations, dealing with new information, and resilience.
Instead of teaching them to look at a problem from different angles to come up with different possible solutions, it can teach them that there will always be someone to smooth their path. Offering too much help actually undermines your child’s development.
When you’re a parent, offering help comes almost naturally: you give advice whether it’s needed or not, you fix things, you mediate, you tell your child how to solve a problem, you tell them exactly what to do and when…
When you intervene too quickly, you prevent your child from learning to do things independently. You increase his anxiety and decrease his confidence.
But offering too much help also increases your anxiety about your child’s ability to succeed on his own, and often leads to frustration for both of you.
One of the biggest downsides (and paradoxes) of overhelping is that the more you help your child, the more helpless and entitled he or she is likely to become.
While every child needs support and guidance, it is important to strike a balance and allow them to learn and grow through their own experiences and efforts in order to foster resilience, self-confidence, and a sense of accomplishment.
But how do you stop the destructive pattern of always “saving” your child? How do you find the right balance? Here are three things you can do today to strengthen your child’s social, cognitive, and emotional development.
How to offer help that’s really helpful
1) Ask more questions, give fewer answers
Giving your child advice often seems like a good solution, but it rarely is. Instead, it is important to empower him so that he learns to find solutions for himself.
This means that your role is to ask questions that help him see situations from different perspectives so that he can come up with solutions on his own.
Instead of giving your child advice or suggesting a solution, you can say something like
– I don’t know, what do you think?
– How would you do it?
– How else would you do it?
– Why do you think that didn’t work?
– What will you do next time?
2) Let your child fail early and often
If you never let your children fail, they will not be able to pick themselves up when they finally do. Failure helps children learn resilience and problem solving, and it also helps them overcome their fear of failure.
But failure is only beneficial in a supportive environment that helps children develop a growth mindset, which means they learn to see obstacles as challenges rather than insurmountable barriers. This article has everything you need to know to help your child see failure as a learning opportunity.
3) Respect your child’s limits
If we’re honest, most of our attempts to help our children stem from our desire to assuage our own fears. We are afraid that they will fail or that they won’t be “good enough.
In other words, our fears push us to invade our children’s boundaries and prevent them from making their own decisions and learning important skills.
The next time you feel the need to intervene, ask yourself this important question: Am I doing it for my child or for myself?
Offering less help doesn’t mean you should stop monitoring your child completely. It just means taking up less space and allowing them to make their own decisions, to work things out for themselves. It is important not to withdraw, but to explain to your child that you have confidence in his or her ability to succeed on his or her own. You might say something like:
“We’ve been revising together every time you’ve had an exam, but now you’ve become a good problem solver and have developed the skills to revise on your own. I have great confidence in your abilities and know you can do this on your own, but I’m here if you need help”.
Some resistance is not uncommon when you first let go, but don’t give up. Your child will eventually come around. If you need a little more convincing, simply say to yourself: “If he doesn’t learn to do this on his own now, will he ever learn?”
You might also like
5 scientifically-proven strategies to implement growth mindset parenting
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The Association Between Parents’ Growth Mindset and Children’s Persistence and Academic Skills
The Origins of Children’s Growth and Fixed Mindsets: New Research and a New Proposal
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