When Your Kid Says ‘I Just Need Some Encouragement’: What It Actually Means and Small Things That Help
The kitchen table was scattered with goldfish crumbs, a crumpled permission slip for the field trip, and my 4th grader Leo’s math worksheet, torn at the corner from too much erasing. I was mid-loading the dishwasher, dish soap bubbling up my wrist, when he pushed his pencil away and said it, quiet but clear: “I just need some encouragement.”
I wiped my hands on my jeans, ready to give the pep talk I give a dozen times a week: You’re so close, you just need to slow down, you’ve got this. But Leo shook his head before I could get the words out. “Not that kind,” he said. “The other kind. The real kind.”
That stopped me. I’ve been a parent for 10 years and a part-time substitute teacher for three, and I’d always thought I was pretty good at encouragement. I keep a jar of stickers for hard days, I write little notes in lunch boxes, I cheer louder than anyone at soccer games. But sitting across from him, watching his shoulders hunch like he was carrying something too heavy, I realized I’d been misunderstanding what that phrase actually means.
I pulled out the chair next to him and asked him to explain what he wanted from me. He tapped the three wrong answers scrawled on the page, each one crossed out so hard the paper underneath is indented. “Everyone else in class gets this already,” he said. “Even Jake got a 100 on the quiz last week. I’ve been working on these for 20 minutes and I still get the multiplication step wrong every time. When you say ‘you got this,’ it feels like you’re saying it’s easy, and it’s not easy.”
I leaned in and looked at the worksheet. The first problem he’d started, he’d gotten the divisor and dividend right, lined up all the numbers perfectly on the lines he’d drawn himself. I pointed to that. “You got that entire first step right,” I said. “That’s the step I always mixed up when I learned this. And you’ve already tried three times on these problems. That’s three more tries than I would have given it at your age, that’s for sure.”
He blinked, like he hadn’t heard that before. I grabbed a yellow sticky note from the junk drawer by the fridge and wrote it down: You got the first step right, and you’ve already tried 3 times. That’s awesome. I stuck it to the corner of his worksheet, then stood up to go back to the dishwasher. I didn’t hover, I didn’t offer to walk him through the next problem unless he asked. He sat there for a minute, staring at the sticky note, then picked up his pencil again.
A week later I heard the exact same line from a 2nd grader I was subbing for. Mia was supposed to write a paragraph about her favorite holiday, but she’d crumpled up two pieces of paper and was just drawing tiny snowflakes on the border of the third. When I reminded her we had 20 minutes left before turn-in, she mumbled into her hoodie, “I just need some encouragement.”
This time, I didn’t say it didn’t have to be perfect. I leaned over and looked at her snowflakes, each one with six sharp points, drawn perfectly even. “You worked really hard on these,” I said. “Getting all six points that neat takes a lot of focus. What’s your favorite part of Christmas you were going to write about?” She perked up right away, told me about baking sugar cookies with her grandma, and wrote three full sentences before time was up.
That’s the thing I’ve started to notice lately. When kids say they need encouragement, they don’t want generic positive talk. They don’t want you to tell them it’ll all work out, or remind them of the time they aced a spelling test two months ago. They want you to name the hard work they’re already doing that no one has mentioned yet. They’re overwhelmed by how hard the thing is, and they just need someone to see that they’re showing up, even when it’s hard.
Generic encouragement like “you got this” puts the pressure back on them, like if you just believe enough it’ll be easy. Naming their specific effort takes the pressure off, because it says the effort counts even if you don’t get it right yet. I’ve started keeping it small, too. A one-sentence comment, a sticky note they can look at when they get stuck, no “but fix this” tagged on the end. If they want help after that, they can ask. Most of the time, they just need the acknowledgment first.
It doesn’t work every time. Last week Leo was working on a Lego set that wouldn’t click together, he yelled that he needed encouragement, I said I saw how he’d already taken it apart three times to try again, and he still threw the instruction book across the room. Some days the hard is just too big, and that’s okay. But more often than not, that small specific observation is enough to unstick them.
I still mess up. I still default to “come on, you got this” when I’m in a hurry or distracted. But after Leo called me out on it that day with the math worksheet, I’ve started pausing. I look for the small effort no one’s noticed yet, I name it, and I leave it there. We’re still figuring it out, one sticky note at a time.
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