Ask for Help

Learning to express your need for support

My baby girl has been saying this beautiful thing to me every morning. When she wakes up, she wants me to bring her the clothes she picked out or that I have helped her pick out. The clothes are hanging on her door. She yells out, “Mom, I need help,” and it’s so sweet to hear her so clearly and confidently ask for support. 

I love responding to her when she asks for help because I don’t want her to lose that ability. Everytime I respond to a request for help, I feel like she is learning that people will help her. Even when I want her to be a little more independent with certain things, I will still say to her, “I think you can do this on your own, but let me know if you need my support.” I don’t want her to think she has to do everything on her own. 

Many of us stop expressing the need for help as we were growing up because:

• We heard no in response to our request for help too many times.   

• The person we were asking for help was not responsive.

• The people who were supposed to be helping us were overwhelmed with what they already had on their plate. 

• We were trained to be independent before we even had a skill set, without any training or supervision.  

• We were told our needs weren’t important. 

What happens when we have a caregiver who doesn’t respond to our need for help? Many of us learn to stop asking, sometimes forever.  When children are denied help they adjust, but they adjust not because they decide they don’t need the help anymore, but because they have to. Not making requests doesn’t extinguish our needs, it just causes us to feel overwhelmed, lonely, unsupported, and burnt out. Our needs don’t go away, we just learn that no one is going to fulfill them. 

When we’re going through things, we sometimes hesitate to ask people for help because we assume that the help isn’t available. We do a lot of guesswork and decide that the people we would ask for help don’t have the space in their lives to come through for us. Sometimes, since we have trained ourselves not to ask for help, it can become challenging to accept help even when it is offered. When that happens, we need to remind ourselves that if someone asks if we need their help, that is an invitation to say yes. 

Right after I had my first baby my mother came to visit and asked me, “What do you need help with?” and I asked her to vacuum the stairs. That may not have been what she was expecting me to say, but that’s what I needed. 

I encourage people to have a list handy of what they need help with. What do you need help with when you’re :

• Moving

• Sick

• Having a bad day

• Starting your cycle

• In a busy season

• Grieving

We have to practice asking for help and receiving help. We don’t need to continue to operate as adults the way we were forced to as children. 

Journal Prompt

• What do you need help with?

• Who can you ask for help?

• What can you put on your “I need help with ____” list?

A Few Things That Caught My Attention This Week

• Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, by Devorah Heitner, PhD. This book is centered on helping parents with rearing children in a digital world, but so many conversations from this book can be relevant for any type of relationship. You can find it on Amazon and Bookshop. 

• What I Know: A List at Sixty, by Elissa Altman on the Poor Man’s Feast Substack. This listical is so good.

• Adorable Little Detonators: Our Friendship Survived Bad Dates, Illness, Marriage, Fights. Why Can’t It Survive Your Baby? by Allison P. Davis in The Cut. 

• Rust Out Is the New Burn Out, by Cassie Hurwitz on Oprah Daily. 

• Regret is Painful. Here’s How to Harness It, by Jancee Dunn in The New York Times.