Why Your Kid Keeps Asking “Can I Have Advice Please?” (And What To Actually Say)
Last Tuesday, I was standing at the kitchen counter scraping burnt mac and cheese off the baking sheet when my 10-year-old Milo appeared at my elbow, holding a half-glued cardboard rocket and said, “Can I have advice please?”
His school’s annual maker fair was the next day, and this was his second attempt at a rocket that didn’t collapse halfway through build. I’d already watched him re-cut the fins three times that weekend, and my first instinct was to blurt out the fix I’d been thinking for days: just use hot glue instead of that dinky white craft glue. That’s what I would’ve done six months ago, anyway. I’d answer the question immediately, give step-by-step instructions for whatever problem he was having, and then wonder why he still got stuck the next time he faced something similar alone.
But two weeks before that, I’d sat in his fourth-grade classroom for parent-teacher conferences, and Ms. Henderson said something that stuck with me. She said that half the kids in her class come up to her every day asking for advice on everything from broken crayon bins to friend fights, and most of the time they don’t actually want her answer. They just want permission to trust their own. She told me she’d started pausing before responding, and 9 times out of 10, the kid will list three good solutions before she even gets a word in.
So that Tuesday, I wiped the mac and cheese gunk off my hands and leaned against the counter, and asked him the first question Ms. Henderson suggested: “What’ve you tried so far?”
He huffed, shifting the rocket to his other hip, glue sticky on his fingertips. “Tried white glue. It doesn’t hold the nose cone. Tried packing tape, but it makes the whole front too lumpy to fly straight. I thought about hot glue, but I burned my thumb on the glue gun last month and I don’t want to do it alone.”
I nodded, and asked the next one: “What do you think you want to try, then?”
He stared at the floor for 10 seconds, kicking a granola crumb across the tile. “I guess I could ask Dad to help me with the hot glue. But the nose cone is made out of that thick moving box, right? Even if it holds, it’s probably still too heavy to go far. I don’t want it to just plop to the ground the second I launch it.”
I didn’t say anything else, just waited. And 15 seconds later, he perked up. “Oh. Wait. I have that extra thin cardboard left over from the fins. I could cut a new nose cone out of that. Then even with hot glue it wouldn’t weigh too much. That makes sense, right?”
I said “That does sound like it makes sense” and he turned around and ran back to the living room to cut it, no more input needed from me. His rocket got third place at the fair, and he spent 10 minutes after the ceremony explaining his cardboard swap to every parent that stopped by.
I’ve been testing this approach for almost three months now, and it’s worked far more often than it hasn’t. When he came home upset that his best friend hadn’t invited him to a birthday party a few weeks back and asked for advice, I didn’t tell him to text his friend and demand an explanation, like I would’ve before. I asked what he’d thought of doing, what he was worried about, and he ended up deciding to invite his friend out for a bike ride that weekend. They sorted out the miscommunication on their own, mid-race down the hill by the park, and I never would’ve thought of that solution.
The thing that surprised me most is how rarely I actually end up needing to give advice after I ask those simple questions. I don’t do anything fancy, just stick to three I memorized from Ms. Henderson: “What’ve you tried so far?” “What do you worry will go wrong with that?” and “What do you want the end result to be?” That’s it. It takes 30 seconds, and most of the time the kid works it out before I have to add anything.
Of course it doesn’t work every time. Last week he asked for advice on what to write for his personal narrative essay, and after 10 minutes of going through the questions he still threw his pencil down and said “I just want your advice, okay?” I told him that was fine, but added one line I picked up: “I can tell you what I’d do, but I bet your idea is way more interesting than mine.” I gave him my thought, he ended up changing half of it to his own idea about the time we rescued a turtle from the storm drain anyway. And that’s okay. Some days they just want the answer, and that’s not a failure.
I still slip up, too. Last Sunday I jumped in with advice on how to fix his bike chain before he even finished asking the question, and he crossed his arms and said “I just wanted to tell you what I was planning to do, not get your fix.” I apologized, and we went back through it. It’s a habit I’m unlearning, after a lifetime of thinking good parents give their kids all the right answers.
Right now, this is what’s working. It’s small, it doesn’t fix big problems overnight, and I still get it wrong half the time. But I’d rather he leave here knowing how to work through his own problems than always do things the way I would’ve done them. Last night he came to me holding two game cases, birthday money in his other hand, and said “Can I have advice please?” I asked what he’d narrowed down, he said one is good for group play but the other has a longer single player mode, I asked when he thinks he’ll play it most, he said “This week, everyone’s on vacation, so single player.” He grabbed the game, checked out, and that was that. No big speech, no perfect solution, just him figuring it out. And that’s exactly the point.
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