Why Your Kid Asks “Can I Have Advice Please?” (And What To Actually Say)
I was stirring tomato sauce for dinner last month, splatters already dotting the faded apron I got for Mother’s Day three years ago, when my 10-year-old son Leo slung his backpack onto the kitchen table and pulled out a crumpled math quiz. A 62 glowed in red pen at the top. Before I could open my mouth to ask what happened, he looked up at me and said, flat out, “Can I have advice please?”
It caught me off guard. Usually Leo hides bad quizzes at the bottom of his backpack or blames the teacher for talking too fast or the clock for being placed where he can’t see it. This was new. I turned down the heat on the pasta to keep it from boiling over, wiped a stray drip of sauce off my wrist, and pulled a chair next to him instead of leaning over the counter like I usually do. I almost blurted out the first thing that popped into my head—just slow down when you read, right? Check your work before you turn it in—but I stopped. I’d said that exact thing three times before, and every time Leo had crossed his arms and said I didn’t get it.
As a part-time substitute teacher at his elementary school, I see this same dynamic play out in the classroom all the time. A kid will come up mid-lesson, nervous, and ask for advice, and the second you launch into a step-by-step fix, they shut down. Their shoulders hunch, they mumble okay, and they don’t try anything you said. I used to think that meant kids didn’t actually want advice, just validation. But after that afternoon with Leo, I realized it’s not that they don’t want help. It’s that most of us are answering the wrong question.
Leo told me he’d gotten every practice word problem right the night before, but the second the teacher called five minutes left, his brain went blank. He’d already asked his table partner for advice between classes, and his partner told him to just stop panicking. That didn’t help, he said.
I remembered what the school counselor had said at our parent-teacher conference back in the fall: when someone asks for advice, the first thing you do is ask them what they already tried. It takes ten seconds, and it weeds out all the ideas they’ve already thought of that didn’t work. So that’s what I said: “What have you already tried that didn’t help?”
He listed them off: reading every problem twice, taking a deep breath before starting, skipping the hard one first (but then he spent the whole time worrying about the hard one so he messed up the easy ones). That’s when I realized I didn’t have to come up with a fancy new solution. I just had to offer a small tweak to what he was already doing. I told him that when I get brain fog working on my lesson plans, I mark any hard spot with a tiny question mark, move straight to the next thing I know how to do, and set a little one-minute timer to come back to it later. That way, I don’t sit there panicking about the hard one while the easy points slip away. I didn’t tell him this was the only way to do it. I just said, “This works for me. Do you want to try it, or change it to fit how you take tests?”
He thought for a minute, said he’d try two minutes instead of one, and that was that. We folded the quiz back up and finished making dinner. No lecture about studying harder, no big talk about anxiety, just a small idea he could take or leave.
The next week, he brought home a new quiz with an 82 on it. He’d marked two problems with question marks, finished the rest, came back, and got them both right. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the first time he’d turned in a quiz that reflected what he actually knew all semester.
Since then, I’ve used this same pattern with kids at school and with Leo at home, and it works far more often than not. It breaks down into three tiny, easy things you can do the next time a kid asks you for advice, and none of them take any extra time out of your day. First, ask what they’ve already tried. It keeps you from wasting time repeating ideas they already dismissed, and it helps them see they’re already capable of problem-solving. Second, frame your idea as an option, not a rule. Instead of “you need to do this,” say “this works for me, what do you think?” That gives them control, which is the thing most kids are craving when they ask for help anyway—they don’t want to be told what to do, they want to pick what works for them. Third, leave the lecture at the door. If they messed up a quiz or a friendship, don’t tack on “if you’d listened to me earlier this wouldn’t have happened.” They already know that. They came to you for help, not a scolding.
It doesn’t work every time. Last week Leo asked me for advice on his science fair project, I suggested a simple baking soda volcano that fizzes for the audience, he told me my idea was boring and decided to build a working model of a wind turbine that he’s still gluing together at the kitchen table. That’s fine. Some days asking for advice just means they want to bounce an idea off you before they do their own thing anyway.
Just last week, a third grader I sub for came up to me during art class, twisting a crayon in her hand, and asked if I had advice for drawing a oak tree. I almost said “start with big branches first” before I remembered the pattern. I asked her what she didn’t like about what she’d drawn already. She said she wanted it to look like the big oak in her backyard, but it came out lopsided. I told her that when I draw, I turn mistakes into part of the picture, and suggested she add a tree swing to the big lopsided branch. She grinned, grabbed a brown crayon, and drew the swing right on. If I’d told her to erase it and start over, she would’ve spent the whole class frustrated and probably left without finishing.
Right now, we’re still figuring it out. Leo still argues with me sometimes, still shoves a bad quiz at the bottom of his backpack once in a while, but now he also asks for help when he needs it. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Not that you give the perfect answer every time. Just that you leave the door open for them to ask again next time.
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