Rescue Less, Support More: How to Step Back and Build Strong Learners

We continue our conversation about The Learning Pit and focus on learning the difference between Rescuing and Supporting kids as they learn. The urge to rescue kids in challenging learning situations is powerful—especially when tears rise, the clock is ticking, and we know the shortcut. But quick rescues come with a hidden cost: they replace real learning with dependence. This conversation gets practical about how to step back without stepping away, so children build the thinking skills to climb out of the learning pit on their own.

This week, we unpack why rescuing feels so tempting. Then we trade those habits for a supportive mindset. You’ll learn clear language swaps, reflective questions that guide next steps, and ways to name the specific challenge a child’s brain is working through. We emphasize productive failure—letting a wrong attempt land—so reflection has something real to work with. And when emotions spike, we reset with short, timed breaks that preserve calm and attention before returning to the task.

If you’re ready to replace quick fixes with lasting growth, hit play, take the prompts for a spin tonight, and tell us what changes. Subscribe for more practical strategies, share this with a parent or colleague who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway so we can keep building better learners together.

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Tuesday Talks is hosted by Dr. Tiffany. She has been a Speech/Language Pathologist for 20 years. She's also a speaker and educational consultant. Dr. Tiffany hosts webinars and in-person workshops for teachers and parents.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why We Rescue Kids
• 2:12 What Rescuing Looks Like
• 4:23 What Real Support Looks Like
• 6:30 Productive Failure And Next Steps
• 9:00 Gut Checks For Adults
• 11:05 Avoiding Learned Helplessness
• 13:05 Breaks, Regulation, And Reflection
• 15:40 Life Beyond Academics
• 18:00 Special Education Without Rescue

Transcript

Why We Rescue Kids

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Tuesday Talks, your educational podcast helping parents become strong advocates for their kids and teachers to make big impacts in the classroom. Here we go. Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back for another Tuesday Talks. Thanks for joining me. If you listened to our Learning Pit episode last week, you already know that the struggle is part of learning. But today we're going to talk about the harder part. What do we do as adults when kids struggle? So if that is something that intrigues you, please be sure to share this episode with another parent, kid friend, colleague friend who you think could benefit from this because we're going to talk about really the differences between rescuing and supporting. And so I want to start off with talking about why we rescue kids as adults. Like we see kids and it is uncomfortable to watch them struggle. I'm sure you would agree with that. It is uncomfortable to see kids struggle, especially when you feel like you know the way to help them not struggle. You know how to help them solve this, deal with this problem, handle this situation. It makes you uncomfortable. Also, sometimes there's a time pressure. We got to get this done. Like we got to either get out of the house, we have to go to bed, we have to move on to the next content area if you're a teacher. And so that time pressure prompts us to want to step in and rescue kids from that learning pit. And maybe your kids cry, your students get super frustrated, and you just don't want them to even escalate to that point. And so you step in to rescue them then. Or sometimes just tied to our own school trauma. I shared in the last episode the complete anxiety that filled my entire body as an elementary school student when it was math time and the teacher split up the class into two lines, and it was rapid-fire math facts at the front of the line, and your team got a point for whoever answered the question the fastest. That was so traumatizing to me as a kid because math was not one of the areas that I excelled at. I had to work really, really hard and math just to be average. And so I might be inclined to rescue my own kid from a math struggle based on my own trauma from school. And maybe you have school trauma that prompts you to want to rescue too, because you don't want your kids to experience that. But rescuing, you know, it comes from a place of love. We love our kids. We don't want to watch them struggle. We don't want them to run out of time, turn something in. We don't want them to get frustrated, upset. We don't want them to experience maybe anxious feelings that we had as a kid in similar situations. But love alone does not teach skills. Letting kids find their way out of a learning pit that teaches skills and that takes time. I want to talk about what rescuing looks like. So if you have any of those senses of discomfort or not wanting to let your kids feel frustrated, looking at what rescuing looks like, it is giving the answers, right? Oh, this is the answer to that. Instead of giving strategies, asking those questions. How can you get them to the point of learning how to figure out the answer on their own? Or maybe you're doing your homework, their homework together, but really you're doing it for them, right? Maybe you say, let's sit down, let's do it together. And you find yourself doing more of the work than they are. That's not doing it together. That's really doing it for them. Maybe you're overprompting. Oh, go back, look at this. Oh, wait, before you do that, think about this. Oh, wait, overprompting. Or maybe you remove the challenging too quickly. Oh, this is too hard for you. Let's do this one instead. It's easier, right? Rescuing feels productive, but it really short circuits the learning. And so, in understanding what supporting looks like, because remember, we're talking about the difference between rescuing and supporting. Supporting looks like sitting with the discomfort, the discomfort of watching your kids struggle, naming the struggle. You're not stuck. This specifically is what your brain is trying to process right now. This specifically is what you're trying to figure out right now, instead of just saying you're struggling or allowing the kid to tell you that they're struggling. Supporting looks like coaching thinking instead of outcomes. Asking those reflective questions to see how they would think their way through this struggle, this learning pit, instead of focusing on the outcome that you need to get all of this homework done tonight. You need to get all of this work completed in this class period. And allowing that productive failure. Instead of course correcting, as soon as you see them going in the wrong direction, let them experience the failure of getting it wrong, spelling the word wrong, I don't know, doing the math problem incorrectly. Help them let them experience that so that then you can go back and ask those reflective questions. And that is the productive failure that you're allowing when you are supporting your kids in that learning pit. So think about it like this: instead of saying, let me fix it, or I'll show you how to do it, maybe think, let's figure out your next step. What is your next step gonna be? Why is that your next step? Right? That takes longer. When you're in a time crunch, what I just shared, that language swap, that takes longer. But supporting kids in the pit long enough to grow is going to help them build up those thinking skills, build up those learning skills. They are gonna be able to go back and ask themselves those types of questions that you asked them while they were in the pit so that they can get themselves out of the next pit that they will inevitably find themselves in. So we want to support kids in the pit long enough to help them grow, but not so long that they drown, right? I talked last week about allowing my kid to just take a break. You know what? You're super frustrated right now. Your brain is not receiving any valuable information other than this panic that you feel about whatever you're working on. Take a break, set a timer, come back in five minutes, come back in 10 minutes, move on so you can come back to it with a clear mind and be ready to answer these reflect reflection questions that I'm asking you instead of getting frustrated with me because you're like, oh, why can't you just tell me the answer? Oh, I already thought about that. Your kids have probably said the same thing to you as well. It's a a gut check that we have to do as adults. And I had to do it myself when I'm guiding my kid and helping him reflect on what he's working on or working through in that learning pit. So ask yourself, am I helping them think or am I helping them finish? Chew on that for a minute. Am I helping them think or am I helping them finish? If the answer is I'm helping them finish, then you are rescuing them from the learning pit instead of supporting them getting out of the learning pit. You want to help them think. You want to ask them those reflective questions. What did your teacher talk about? What do your notes say? What did you do the last time you came across this type of problem or homework assignment? Ask them those questions so that they can go back and think through whatever it is that they're working on in that learning pit, and inch by inch, they will start to climb their way out of it instead of you standing at the bottom of the pit giving them a shove up just by helping them finish. And now they're out of the learning pit. But what did they learn? They learned helplessness. That is a real thing. If you haven't heard of that term before, they learned helplessness, they learn adult dependence. When I'm stuck, I'll ask an adult and they'll tell me the answer or ask, you know, give me enough information to help me get to the answer quickly. Because a lot of times as parents, we aren't just coming over and saying, oh, the answer's this. Oh, this is what you need to do. No, I think sometimes that our what we think of as support is really rescuing because we're not taking the time to let them reflect or think their way through a situation. And so another gut check could be asking yourself, would they be able to do this tomorrow without me? As a teacher, as a parent, if your kid or your student was in the same predicament tomorrow, would they be able to get through this without me? And if the answer is no, that means you have rescued them instead of supported them. And again, it goes all back to that adult dependence. We don't want to teach kids that they need to seek out an adult every time they feel stuck. That is the most handicapping thing that we can do for our kids and for our students. They need to learn how to think their way through the pit. And the only way they can do that is that when they're in the pit, let them sit in the pit and struggle. They come to you to ask for help, asking specifically what they need help for. We talked about this last week and gave some examples. Specifically, what do you need help with? And then asking them reflective questions instead of simply just giving them the answer. And that way you might be able to answer that question. Would they be able to do this with me, without me tomorrow, with more assurance that yes, they could, or at least they should. If it's a new concept that they're learning, maybe tomorrow they can't answer it without you, maybe prompting them with some of those reflective questions. But they should be able to. You haven't just given them the answer because you want them to feel that success of finishing, or you need them to finish because it's time to move on to something else. And another gut check question for adults could be Am I calming them down or am I calming me down? When you see your kid frustrated and in tears, instinctively, as the adult, you want to help them. You want to relieve that frustration. Or maybe your kid is just not trying and you're watching them show a lack of effort, and it's very frustrating to you. You're like, oh my gosh, listen, just focus. Focus on what you're doing. Don't get distracted by this. Pay attention to this, and you are feeling frustrated. And so then it's easier in that moment just to either give them the answer or firmly walk them through the steps so that they arrive at the answer so that you can calm yourself down versus really focusing on helping them think their way through it and making sure they stay calm. That is going to be the support that you can give that is very different from the rescuing. Kids don't need us to remove the pit, the learning pit for them. They need us to teach them how to move through it. And the only way that you can do that is to ask those reflective questions after you've watched them struggle in the pit. After you see them in that pit, struggling with how to figure out whatever the outcome is they're trying to reach, whether it's an answer to a problem, whether it's uh working through a rationale they have to explain for some language arts assignment, whatever the case may be. The learning pit applies across all content areas and it applies to all areas of their life too. In last week's episode, I talked about kids when they were younger learning how to crawl or walk. We didn't walk over to them and move their knees for them to help them learn how to crawl. We also didn't move their little feet for them to help them learn how to walk. We let them have productive struggle. We let them lay on their tummy, maybe cry, scoot along the floor to get to whatever they're trying to get to. We let them wobble and fall and stand back up again. We didn't jump in to rescue them because we knew that that was not going to help them learn how to crawl or to walk. The same thing applies here, not only academically, but also in practical life application. If we constantly jump in to rescue them, then they will never learn how to think their way through a problem. They will never learn how to reflect on what they already know from the last time they experienced a similar situation to help get them out of that pit and experiencing that confidence boost of I got myself through this. Think about your own life. If you got yourself through a hard time by yourself versus somebody handholding you through it, you felt more accomplished, even as an adult. I did that. Maybe you reached out for some resources, self-help books, whatever therapy to help you, but you worked your way through it. And so then we want to do the same thing for our kids. We don't want to just hand hold every time they feel stuck. We want to reframe that. You're not stuck, you're thinking. Give them an example of something in the past that they thought their way through, something challenging that they overcame to remind them that they can do this. They can do this. This is just a new concept that maybe they're working on, but they've shown in the past that they've been able to think their way through something. They've been able to figure their way out of a challenging situation. They've been able to unconfuse themselves, work through their frustration and their tears to get to the other side of it. Remind them of that. You know, remember who you are. Remember what you're capable of because you've done this before, whether it is something that is identical to what they're working on right now, or something that's tangential, like very near to what they have been working on, what they're working on right now. We are there to support and guide, not rescue, because support builds learners and rescue builds dependence. We do not want our kids to be dependent on us as their parent or their teacher for every little struggle that they have, little or big, to be honest. We don't want them to depend on us and look for us as their first move. Should they ultimately reach out to an adult? Sure. But we don't want them to reach out to the adult as their first move. We want them to know how to think through things. And if your kids receive special education services, this is even important there. The learning pit, all learners experience it, whether they have an IEP or they don't. And that learned helplessness, that adult dependence, IEP goals that don't fade out the prompting, that is rescue and not support. We don't want to put an IEP in place to make the path of learning smooth for them. That's not the point of the IEP. The point of the IEP is to give them support, very strategic support, strategies, and a differentiated approach to learning that over time can hopefully be faded out so that they can demonstrate the knowledge that they do have because they are just learning differently. They are just learning differently. But we don't want to rescue our kids who are receiving special education services either. So don't think that just because they're receiving specialized services, that now it's okay to rescue them because, well, their brain is it functions differently. Maybe they have challenges with processing, executive functioning, whatever the case may be, we still don't want to rescue them because life is going to call on them to be able to think their way through situations, through problems. And we're not always going to be there to handhold as the adult if we don't teach them now how to work themselves through or out of and be comfortable with that amount of confusion that they might be experiencing. So continue to think about that. Share this idea, this concept with colleagues or friends. Are you supporting your students or your kids in this learning pit? Or are you rescuing them out of it? Are you really focusing on just giving them answers just to get it done? Or are you supporting them with questions to help them think through how they can get themselves out of this learning pit themselves? As I mentioned at the top of the episode, if you didn't catch last week's episode on the learning pit or the episode before that, where my son talked about how he doesn't want me to rescue him from the learning pit, go back and check out those episodes. Very eye-opening. Ask your kids too, check in with them. When something's hard for you, do you want me to just tell you the answer or do you want me to help you? And whether they say, I want you to just tell me the answer, just get it over with, ask them why. Ask them to reflect on how that helps them learn. Or is that just helping them get to the end result, which is just to be done. Get some input from your kids, DM me, comment, let me know how you have showed up for your kids, whether it be to rescue or support. Be honest. I've hey, I'll tell you right out of the gate. This is something new for me that I learned over the past couple of years. And I found myself admitting that I was rescuing my kid a lot more than I was supporting, but I thought I was supporting them. So think through some of these gut check questions that I talked about today. Think through some of what I shared about what struggle really means, what support looks like, what rescuing actually looks like, and check in with me and let me know how that has helped your learner, maybe helped you avoid some moments of frustration yourself because we are all in this together, whether you're a teacher or a parent, we're all in this together. And sometimes we just have to be really honest with ourselves and maybe honest with a shared, you know, colleague or a trusted friend so that we can get some good feedback. Open yourselves up to that. That is gonna help you grow, and then in turn, you're gonna be able to help your students or your kids grow as well. So definitely let me know how this episode has impacted you and be sure to join me again next week for another great Tuesday talks. I'll see you then. Bye. Be sure to share this episode and join me next week for a brand new Tuesday talk.