Episode 86: Teaching our Kids to Ask for Help with Nyasha Chikowore
/Asking for help can be so hard, for grown-ups and kids alike! Knowing when and how to ask for help and where to find support is an important skill that is developed with time and practice, that most of us are still learning. How wonderful would it be if our kids could learn this while they are young and the stakes are low? So, for this episode, I wanted to give you a resource on how to help children learn the important skill of figuring out when they need support and ask for it. Nyasha Chikowore is a clinical psychologist and a licensed clinical professional counselor who provides classroom and school-wide prevention activities related to mental health, with an emphasis on destigmatizing asking for any type of help. She is currently working on her doctorate in clinical psychology.
Here is a summary of what we talked about:
What parents and kids should know about asking for help
Tips on determining who is a safe person to ask for help, when we need it, and when we should reach out
Empowering kids vs rescuing them (this is SO good for our anxious kiddos!!)
Tips in getting support for depression and anxiety
To get more resources on this topic, check out linktr.ee/nyashamc and follow Nyasha on Instagram @nyashamc.
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen here with another episode of the balanced parent podcast and I'm really excited for this topic today. We're gonna be talking about a really important topic that I hope will support you in making good decisions for yourself. So we're gonna be talking about how to ask for help, how to help our children learn the important skill of tuning in and figuring out when they need support and asking for it, but also how do you embody that skill ourselves?
So, to help me with this conversation, I'm bringing in a clinical psychologist. She's just wrapping up her doctorate and she's the author of a beautiful children's book, Gary Asks For Help. Nyasha Chikowore, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm really excited to talk about this with you. Will you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?
Nyasha: Sure. Well, I describe myself as a third culture kid because I've lived around the world. I was born in Japan, lived in the States for a little while, lived in Zimbabwe, which is where my family is from, lived in Switzerland for high school, part of middle school and found myself back in the States. And you know, went through undergrad studying as a print journalism major, turn into a therapy major as a master student.
Yeah, ended up becoming a licensed therapist in working in Baltimore City Schools with pre K through 12th grade. And now I'm getting this doctorate. So that's kind of the short of it all. My trajectory to writing this book.
Laura: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about Gary and how he asks for help.
Nyasha: Sure. So books called Gerry asked for help. It came out April 2019. So it's coming on to two years of Gerry's birthday and it's published by imagination press, which is a children's book imprint of the American Psychological Association. And basically I wrote this book when I was still doing therapy with adolescents and children.
And I looked at it as a way to address the apprehension of coming to therapy that I noticed more so from parents than children. So through the book we follow Gerry, the giraffe who turned six and he decides he should be tall enough now to reach the good leaves on like a shoe trees realizes that his clumsiness paired with his lack of height didn't really help him. And uh, he gets frustrated and his friends and community teach him asking for help is his best bet. And then that is the best bet and he ends up reaching beliefs that he was coveting at the beginning of the book.
Laura: Beautiful. So this message of asking for help, what is it that you really want parents and kids to know about asking for help?
Nyasha: Yeah. So the book actually has a note to parents and caregivers to foster that conversation. So it's really discussing the ins and outs of asking for help one. How do you do it to who do you ask for help? Three, Who do you not ask for help? Because that's also an important conversation and just how do you foster that confidence in knowing like I can do this but this I need help with or you know what is appropriate?
Laura: Yeah.
Nyasha: So those kind of things.
Laura: Do you have tips for like a parent who's trying to help a child tune in and figure out like who is a safe person to ask for help when we do we need it, when should we reach out? Do you have any, like, just kind of off the cuff things that parents can take home right now?
Nyasha: Well, I think one of the complaints some parents have is that, you know, if I teach my kid to ask for help, they're gonna ask me for help 24/7, I mean that is the easier way out, like, oh, you know, make up your bed, I don't know how to, you know, like show me how to do it, but I think for parents, it's, you know, it's important to foster that like we'll try it out yourself or show me what you can do and then I'll fill in the blanks, you know, and kind of fostering that confidence and not necessarily fostering the trickery piece of it that can happen. Yeah, being able to get around that and say, hey, I know you're capable of doing this. I've seen you do this before and try a little bit and then I'll help with the rest like that kind of conversation.
Laura: Yeah, I really like this idea. I've been having this conversation in a couple different places. This idea of empowering kids versus rescuing them, how parents can go about figuring out, like, am I rescuing my kid or am I supporting them and empowering them? I think that those are really important questions to be considering.
Nyasha: Right? And I think that's a great word that I was looking for empowering.
Laura: There's times when we don't know how to do something, when we do actually need help and there's a distance, a gap between what we can do on our own and getting the thing done, and that space is filled with support, but there is a tendency, you know, to prevent our kids from feeling struggle or pain or suffering because we love them, right?
Nyasha: And there's also the opposite end where, you know how to do it, so go ahead and do it, kind of retreating in that end, because I've witnessed that as well, parents being frustrated trying hard enough or you should know how to do this, you know, even like helping homework with homework, I think that that's where that shows up a lot, where it becomes, you know, a little punitive rather than empowering, you were taught this at school, why aren't you getting it? You know.
Laura: I think it helps. No one ever, I see what you're saying to this idea that I think it's important for parents to remember for all of us to remember that there's a difference between knowing how to do something or that we should do something and then being able to do it and there's a difference between being able to do it in some context and being able to do it in others, you know, we might need different supports in different places, you know?
So being able to you know, not to mess with a friend's work is maybe perhaps easier in your own house when you're comfortable and you can go get space versus at school when it's more difficult because there's not your own space to retreat to so that you can get regulated. You know, there's there's a difference between being able to do something in one location and context than in the other context. Doesn't matter so much.
Okay. And so then when we think about, you know, i it's interesting, So, you're in the therapy field. I'm formerly in the therapy field and now I see families who are kind of most of them are pre going to therapy. So most of them are trying to figure out is this something that I can handle on my own? Or is this something that I need to seek out support? And and what's interesting to me is that there is quite a lot of reluctance still, despite the fact that stigma against going for, you know, mental health support is reducing is going down.
There's still a lot of reluctance on the part of parents in getting their kids support, going like going in and seeing a therapist and I was curious if you had any messages that might be helpful for parents who are kind of trying to figure out like does my you know, my kid has something like what I think might be anxiety or my you know, is struggling in these areas? Perhaps they've got some depression going on, but I don't really know and I don't think it's bad enough yet to go see a therapist. Do you have anything for those, those families?
Nyasha: Yeah, I think one of the messages, not just for parents, but what everyone is not looking at therapy, like it's like the last resort we all have, well we're supposed to all have doctors that we go to for a check up. I look at therapy or at least I would like people to look at mental health in that way of, you know, let's go for a checkup because often you hear like, it's not bad enough.
Kind of like what you said, like, are we at the point where we need help or we at the point that we need to talk to a stranger about our problems, but looking more as a check in like, okay, let's go as a family to see if we're working well together because something we're not seeing, just like you'd go for, you know, physical because you're not expecting the doctor to pick anything up for two point something out. That's not good.
I mean we're hoping okay, he's gonna check me out and I'm going to have a good bill of health and then I'll do it again next year. Like, I would love for people to look at mental health, and seeking mental health as more of a check in and am I good? Like, is there anything that I'm saying that you're noticing or anything in our dynamics that you're noticing or even, you know, things have been going well, but little timothy has mentioned X, Y, Z and let's talk about that and unpack that and maybe it's just the one session thing and you're not coming back for multiple sessions. You know.
Laura: I love this idea of giving permission for it to just be one or two sessions. I think sometimes people think they're going to get in and it's going to be this long slog and it does not have to be that way, right? I always liken this to like taking care of your car, right? So there's things you do to take care of your car, regular maintenance oil changes without anything wrong rotating the tires.
Like now these are the things that you just a responsible car owner does, you know, and then lift the check engine light comes on, you go get that checked out, you know, all of those things and so figuring out like, okay.
So when do you need to check on our relationship, this happens, you know, when I was practicing couples therapist, it happened all the time where I would get a beautiful, wonderful, lovely couple in who came to see me three years too late, you know, and it was just so much damage had been done like you know and that's like when the car is like smoking on the side of the road and you can't drive it another inch like don't wait that long. The check engine light's been on for a couple of years now. Let's go get it in you know.
Nyasha: Yeah I just look at it as prevention to we take vitamins. We work out even if we don't want to like those are all things that can prevent you know issues down the line. I would hope that people see therapy as that versus more like we go there because we have an issue you know I understand how it's difficult to re imagine that as well.
Laura: It is happening. I think it's changing. I think I do think it's coming along. Another thing I talk about with a lot of my family is that I asked them to imagine so many of my parents I work with are only just discovering now that they've maybe had some anxiety their whole life now that they've maybe had ADHD. Their whole life. And that went kind of unnoticed flew under the radar and now they're as an adult they're figuring out how to handle those things. There may be going to therapy themselves.
And I asked them to think about like what could your life have been like if you'd had these skills 30 years ago if you had learned how to do a little bit of cognitive behavioral therapy with yourself, a little bit of thought work a little bit of processing, you know, as a teenager, what, you know, what a gift that would have been.
And parents usually, I feel like after they think about that, like, oh yeah, as an anxious person and anxiety has been my lifelong friend and I think back about two perhaps like when I was like six or 7 and I was having tummy aches every day and if I had someone who knew that I would like that, that was going on for me, you know, and connected the dots and had me in just the trajectory of my life could have been radically different, you know?
Nyasha: Yeah, that's definitely something I think about and I actually care games who has an amazing Instagram following and shows his videos with his daughter and his wife all the time where they have these vulnerable conversations. He's been a social worker. Yeah. But something he said was around that message, like, imagine if I had had this book or, you know, any kind of message of, you know, asking for help for being vulnerable at such a young age.
And I think that's my hope because even when I think of my upbringing, which I talk about living in different places for context, like I was a new kid a lot and, you know, it would have been different if I'd gotten that message of it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to acknowledge like this is uncomfortable and I'm scared and I'm anxious, but I didn't get that message and no fault of my parents, parents always do the best they can, but you don't as a parent.
I know that it's hard to imagine yourself at that age again, imagine that experience, you know, like I think of it as like when you walk into your childhood home and you realize how small things are compared to when you were younger and it seems so much bigger. It's, it's hard to, you know, have that perspective.
But my hope is that with having parents read books like this or have these conversations, they're able to put themselves back in their child's world of imagining, wow, that has to be scary to do that for the first time when if it's tying your shoe or meeting new people, like we forget as adults how intimidating those experiences are.
Laura: Yeah. Or even just how new they are. They don't even necessarily have to be big or scary. I really like the picture of a child who's at a fair and has a balloon in their hand and it slips through their fingers and they watch it float away and have their first real big experience of grief and loss. It's huge to them and it's so easy to say, oh, we'll just get you another balloon. It's no big deal, There will be hundreds of balloons in your life and one day your pet will die and your grandpa will die like that.
You have so many bigger experiences with loss and grief, but for that child, that three year old who's sitting there watching their balloon, their beloved balloon float away. That's the biggest loss they've ever experienced. That's a big deal to a kiddo. That perspective is so important as parents. Okay, so, another thing that I really love about your book and about children's books and books in general is that if we are open to it as we're reading them to our kids that they have really powerful lessons for us in them to can we talk a little bit about what you hope parents learn, not just what parents learn about their kids asking for help, but what maybe parents learn about asking for help themselves.
Nyasha: Yeah, I mean, like I was telling you earlier, like, I think it's a message for people 0 to 100 even, you know, for me, I've had moments where I'm like, I really don't want to ask anyone for help. I think I'll just figure it out myself.
Laura: why is it so hard to ask for help?
Nyasha: I mean, I think there's a lot of different layers to it. I think part of it is just feeling a sense of weakness, like I should be able to, you know, in therapy, we talk about shooting and not.
Laura: Dreaded should.
Nyasha: But there is that message that we get like you should be able to do this and your X, Y. Z. Age and this is something that you should be able to handle. And even when we talk about feelings and emotions, you know, what are you crying about? Like what what are you anxious about? Like what is making you sad? And there's just this air of you need to get it together that I think we have especially in Western culture, I think there is this you know, it's an individualistic society where it's like you pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you know, you hear people saying I'm self made.
I got here by my own merits and you know in reality none of us are self made, none of us got here without the help of thousands of people that maybe we don't think about all the time. But you know we need community. But yeah, but we've just been made to feel like it's hard to ask for that. Even like back in the day when people would borrow sugar and milk like now that would be viewed as why are you at my door? Like what are you asking for? What? Why are you here? And maybe not, but we do have that sense like if I ask for this, I may be appear to be weird or or weak or incapable.
Laura: No, that feels really, I don't know, scary and vulnerable to think that perhaps we can't do it all, or perhaps we need support.
Nyasha: and I think too on the other side of that is just being faced with possible rejection and nobody wants to be rejected in any form or fashion. So there is the possibility that one I opened myself and I'm vulnerable and then two, I get shut down, the person says, nope, can't help you, sorry, and it's like, oh man.
Laura: Yeah, what does that mean about me? You know? Or just like they say, oh yeah, I'll help you, and then they dropped the ball and you don't actually get the support, Like there's we could make so much meaning. We tell ourselves so many stories about what that might mean about us, how they feel about us, our worthiness, all of those things, it's a big deal figuring out that, okay, so this is something that I need support on and then actually taking that next step is also a huge barrier I hear about, you know, figuring out where do I go to get support? What is the level of support I need at this point in time?
And if I decide it's a professional that I want to get support from, not from my partner from a friend, then how do I go about figuring out what professional is right and where to go to get that, do you have any guidance for us because that having been in a major depressive episode in the past myself, that barrier of like even with all my skills. So I was already out of my PhD when this happened, I had all the skills, all the knowledge and it took me a couple of months to get over the barrier of like, okay, I got to figure this out. I got to find someone and get myself an appointment. Any tips for that struggle?
Nyasha: That's hard. I mean I'm still in my program and I know I have, you know, a fellow classmates and colleagues who don't want to go to therapy, there's like, no thanks. So we like to speak to your point, you could have those tools and it's still a hard move to make. I've always been pro like therapy, I jumped at the chance to go. But I think the most useful tools for me have been psychology today because they have a therapy finder.
Open Path Collective has also been useful they actually offer I think $60 sessions, but it probably depends on your location. Um They have like a directory of therapists who offer a sliding scale. Yeah, there's different websites popping up that, you know, appeal to your ethnic identity or racial identity if that's something you're looking for. And I know everyone loves therapy for black girls. I think there's a therapy for Brown Girls. So yeah, there's there's different, you know, I love google.
Laura: Yes, google one tip to as as you're looking for someone, you know if there's a specific thing struggling with, like for example, you're struggling with postpartum depression or your child is struggling with anxiety and you're looking for a provider. Finding someone who specializes in those things isn't available to you, looking through their profiles and if they are very, if they're a generalist that can be wonderful. But if you really have a significant problem that you really want to focus on finding an expert in that person who specialize in that field to specialize, this can be helpful to you.
Nyasha: And a lot of those sites have, you know, the filtering has yeah, and look for job, therapist works with depression or issues. So, so yeah, there's there's help out there. I mean, it becomes more complicated when you think about insurance and co-pays and out of pocket, that's a whole another story.
Laura: It is. And then there's this piece of goodness of fit to finding someone who's a good fit and you know, I know, you know this research but goodness of fit is one of the biggest predictors of success and therapy of good outcomes in therapy. And so I always just want to encourage people as you're looking for a therapist, it is okay to have a session or two and be like, this is not working. Can you refer me to someone else who might be a better fit for me or to go find someone like a good therapist is not going to take that personally or you know, is it is going to help you find the person you need. Don't you agree?
Nyasha: Yeah, I always say that to clients and you know, in articles and podcasts like you may not like that person I've definitely been to some therapists from like, you can't help me and that's okay. I mean, I'm sure I've had one or two clients ghost me as well and I'm just like, I mean it's the name of the game we expected and it should be expected. Like people aren't going to come consistently all the time because life still happens outside of therapy.
Laura: And I think to just advocating for yourself, this is your therapy, it's your life, it's their job, you know, like it's so it's okay to be upfront and honest that, you know, I think I need a different fit, you know, this is we're not working on, you know, and and sometimes that conversation can be productive in and of itself and you can actually stay working with someone. It's actually quite good sometimes for the therapeutic alliance to have a client who will push back a little bit and challenge you. It can be very security building too.
If we think about it from an attachment perspective, I don't know, having someone who, you know, who can kind of meet your challenge, your resistance and adjust and be sensitively attuned and responsive to your needs. Like that's a healing opportunity in and of itself. I love going to therapy when I needed it the most, when I was in the deepest part of my depression.
I couldn't do it. And so that's something that was so interesting for me when I was in the checkup zone, like I've been feeling a little dull lately, like why don't I go check in with my therapist? Like that was so easy, when I was really needed it when I was in the car stalled on the side of the road phase. So hard.
So everybody listening, if you're in that kind of like, huh? You know, I'm not feeling my best, maybe I should go get checked out. Like go do it right then because you never know when the car is going to stall on the side of the road and then it's harder. Okay, any last little I don't know, tips, expertise, things that you want parents listening to know about asking for help, getting the support that they need.
Nyasha: Yeah, I guess I keep having that conversation. I think something which I'm sure you talk about all the time that we take for granted is how intelligent our kids are even at, you know, the age of two, we like
Laura: These are so wise.
Nyasha: so intuitive and they have a sense of awareness that I think we take for granted and I think that conversation could be life changing, you know, for a child to know, here's where I can go for help and here's how I can ask for help and just like, I guess I imagine a world where like all these kids read giraffe asked for help and then they're all like able to go to therapy and be functioning well adjusted adults and be able to help others and teach others. It's okay to be vulnerable and ask for help. I don't know like I'm thinking of it of a as you know, just spreading that that awareness that that we're talking about that asking for help is okay and fostering community is awesome and I think we're realizing that more now than ever.
Laura: Oh, I love that message and it's so powerful too to remember that kids learn best through modeling through what they see. So it's it's not just these direct conversations that we're having with kids and you know, I most of my listeners have the same goal as you to raise a generation of children who are going to just, I mean just take on this world and make such beautiful changes, but we got a model, you know, that that behavior in all areas that we want to see and this is part of it too.
So if we want our kids to be able to check in and ask for help and get the support they need. We've got to be doing that with ourselves, right? Thank you so much for this conversation. Why don't you tell us where we can find draft asks for help and where folks can go to follow you on social media. Drop all of those handles for us.
Nyasha: Sure. So like I said, it's published by Magination Press. So it's imagination without the eye because the imagination and.
Laura: I want to just tell all of our listeners. So this publisher is part of the American Psychological Association. And so books from this publisher has lots of extra support in them. Great, you know, notes to parents and educators, suggestions for conversations and um, they're lovely kind of wrap around books.
So they're not just a book that leaves you kind of high and dry. They're all written by experts in their fields, their beautiful guests here. And so just that publisher is a great place to go for evidence based books that are grounded in good theory and the latest research.
Nyasha: Thank you for saying that I love Magination Press. And that's one of the reasons that they stood out to me because they're part of our field. They love therapy and therapists. So that's how I got there. But yeah, imaginations, they are under apaa.org and publications. But you could also go to maginationpressfamily.org.
And you can find YouTube's there where we're actually the authors are actually reading the books out loud and you could play that in the background. It's available on amazon. It's also available on audible if you're, you know, in the car or just at home wanting to play it. It was narrated by a little, the car. I don't know how old he is now. I think he was five, maybe when he read it. The carry Green who was the son of Lionel Green who was Leo Rush W W. E. If you're a wrestling fan. So it's a really fun book and yeah, and you can follow me on, I think I'm NyashaMC, N Y A S H A M C on Instagram and on Twitter and you'll find little tidbits about my book writing process with Gary and how I got to be.
Laura: Awesome. Well thank you so much and I look forward. I hope we get to see more books out of you.
Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.
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All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this.