When Your Teen Asks You to Fill Out a Survey for AP Psychology: What I Learned as a Parent
It was a Thursday night, around 7:30, and I was trying to get dinner onto the table before my son had to be at basketball practice. My daughter, a junior, looked up from her phone with that particular expression she gets when she’s about to ask for something she knows is slightly annoying.
“Hey, can you fill this out?” she said, holding the phone out. “It takes like 30 seconds. It’s for my AP Psych project.”
I took the phone. Google Forms. The title read: “Survey on Social Behavior.” There were maybe twelve questions, all with little circles for you to click on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Things like, “People often change their opinions when they feel pressure from others.” I clicked through it in about a minute.
“Done,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said, already texting someone else. “I need like 50 responses by Friday.”
That was it. A small request. But I kept thinking about it over the next few days, because every time I saw her with her phone, she was asking someone else to fill out the same survey. Her friend from chem, a kid on the soccer team, an older relative who wasn’t sure how to use the link. She’d say, “It’s so quick, I promise,” or, “Just do the first page, that’s enough.” The phrase I heard most often was, “I’m lowkey desperate.”
Her class was studying conformity and obedience. The assignment was to design a study, collect data, and write up the results. And the requirement—fifty responses—was the thing standing between her and a decent grade. She wasn’t stressed about the theory. She was stressed about the logistics.
Here’s what I noticed, watching her work the group chats: asking for survey responses is genuinely awkward for a teenager. It’s a favor that feels like it shouldn’t need to be a favor. There’s no way to make it sound important without sounding like you’re begging. So they do this thing where they lower the stakes. “It’s just a form for my class.” “Don’t overthink it.” “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.” The whole “lowkey” thing is part of that. It’s a way of saying, I know this is inconvenient, and I don’t want to act like it’s a big deal, but I still need you to help me.
I remember being in high school and having to do something similar. I handed out paper surveys to my classmates because that was what you did. You stood in the hallway between third and fourth period with a clipboard and a pen. You tried to catch people before they got to their lockers. You learned pretty quickly that most people will say yes if you just ask, but you also learn that a lot of people will say yes and then not actually do it, which is its own separate kind of education.
Now it’s digital. She shared the link to her story on Instagram. She sent texts with a little pleading emoji. She stood over her dad while he was trying to watch a basketball game and made him do it right then because she was worried he’d forget.
But here’s the part that made me pause as a parent. At one point I said, “If you need more responses, I can post the link in my neighborhood group or ask some friends at work. I could get you twenty in an hour.”
She looked at me like I had suggested something embarrassing.
“No,” she said. “Then people will think I couldn’t do it myself.”
That got me thinking. The assignment wasn’t really about conformity. It was about asking for help without making it weird. And that’s something you can’t learn from a textbook.
For parents, it’s tempting to jump in and fix the problem. When your kid is short on survey responses, your instinct is to fire off an email to the family group chat or post a request in a Facebook community group. But there’s a reason teachers assign these kinds of projects. It’s not just to practice making a survey. It’s to experience the weirdness of getting strangers to do something for you with no real payoff. You’re asking people to give you a little slice of their time and attention for the abstract benefit of “helping with a school project.” That’s a skill. And if we do it for them, they miss the practice.
What I’ve found helpful is doing what I did that night: filling it out, no commentary, then maybe asking one or two questions afterward. Not “Did you get enough?” like a nagging supervisor, but something like, “Who all are you asking?” or “Do you think your sample is going to end up being mostly people who already like you?” She rolled her eyes at that one. But she also said, “Well, yeah, so it’s biased,” and got back to texting.
That small question actually mattered. It made her think about response bias without me giving her a lecture. She started realizing that if all her responses came from close friends and family, her data would probably show much less conformity than it would in a more random group. She said, “I should probably ask some people I don’t know as well.” She didn’t love that idea. But she did it. She posted in a school-wide group for juniors. She even asked a quiet kid in her psych class who she never talks to. That was the part I didn’t expect to be proud of.
The practical insight for other parents is simple but not always obvious: when your kid asks you to fill out a survey, the most useful thing you can do is say yes and hit submit. But the slightly harder part is to leave the rest of it alone. Let them sit with the uncomfortable reality that people are busy and don’t always respond. Let them hear themselves say, “Please, it literally takes ten seconds,” and feel how that sounds. Let them get rejected. Let them have to ask three times as many people as they expected, because that’s where the learning lives.
There are also a few small things you can say that help without taking over. You can ask, “How many do you have so far?” and then actually listen to the answer. You can offer to send it to your friends, but only if you give your teen the choice. If they say no, don’t push. They’re allowed to want to do it on their own. You can also remind them—gently, once—that most people don’t fill out surveys because they forget, not because they’re rejecting your kid as a person. That reminder helps them interpret the silence.
By Friday evening, she had 47 responses. She said the teacher said she could turn it in with that many. She didn’t celebrate. She just closed her laptop and said, “Well, that’s done.” I don’t know what her data showed. She might not have a clear finding, or the finding might be completely boring. But I do know she learned what it feels like to ask for something small and have people actually come through. She also learned what it feels like when they don’t, and she survived it.
The survey is probably still open in someone’s browser. Maybe one more person will fill it out at 11:30 tonight. Or maybe they won’t. Either way, she’s already moving on to the next assignment. And I’m still a little struck by how much a simple form can reveal about how teenagers weigh the cost of asking for help.
She sent me a follow-up text the other day: “Did you actually fill it out or did you just say you did?”
I told her I actually did.
“Okay,” she said. “Good.”
That was it. No big thank-you. But I didn’t need one. Sometimes the most meaningful part of parenting is just clicking “submit” and letting the rest play out.
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