Wave Your Hand: Why Asking for Help Is the Bravest Back-to-School Move You’ll Make

By Cara Thorpe, Founder, Yellow Parachute — September 6, 2026

Last week I sat with a mom who had the same two-sentence email open in three separate drafts — a simple scheduling question for her son’s math teacher — and she still hadn’t hit send. When I asked what was stopping her, she said, “I don’t want to seem like that parent.” Twenty minutes later, in the same conversation, her son admitted he’d been sitting through the first full week of that same class with a question about the syllabus he’d never asked, for almost the identical reason: “I don’t want to seem like I don’t get it.”

Same fear. Two different people, one on each side of the parent-student divide. And underneath both of them, one very old, very American idea: that needing help is something to hide, not something to say out loud.

I want to push back on that idea today, and I’m bringing reinforcements — because it turns out one of the country’s most well-known researchers on grit just wrote a whole essay disagreeing with it too.

The essay that gave me this whole post

If you haven’t read Angela Duckworth’s guest essay in The New York Times, it opens with a scene I haven’t been able to shake. She’s snorkeling off Miami with her 86-year-old mother when a current sweeps them both behind their boat. Her mother goes under, inhales water, loses consciousness. Duckworth tries to pull her to safety alone — “the ocean swallowed my efforts whole,” she writes — until she finally does the one thing her instincts were fighting: she uses one hand to hold her mother’s head above water and waves her other hand in the air, shouting for help.

“What saved my mother’s life that day, and mine, too, was not fighting the current on my own,” she writes. “It was calling for help.”

Duckworth — who literally wrote the book on grit — goes on to make the case that every high performer she’s studied, without exception, credits a host of supporters for their success. Not despite asking for help. Because of it. She traces the myth back to an 1859 self-help book that told a young America “help from without is often enfeebling” — and she’s spent her career since then watching that idea quietly work against the very people it claims to protect.

Here’s the metaphor I took from her essay, and the one we’re using all month: you don’t have to out-swim the current. You just have to wave your hand.

Why waving your hand feels so much harder than it should

For a lot of the families I work with, “just ask” is the advice that lands hardest and helps least — because the hard part was never knowing you could ask. It’s the half-second of dread right before you do it. If you’re familiar with rejection sensitive dysphoria you already know that for a lot of ADHD brains, waving your hand doesn’t feel like reaching for a lifeguard. It feels like handing someone a reason to think less of you. One ADDitude reader put it exactly right: “If I notice my RSD is preventing me from asking for support, that often indicates that I’m not getting what I need from that relationship to feel safe” (ADDitude, “ADHD Self-Advocacy: How to Ask for Help”).

That line is the whole hinge of this post. If asking feels unsafe, the fix usually isn’t a script for the ask — it’s the relationship underneath it. Which is why the most useful back-to-school move isn’t the big, scary ask at all. It’s everything you do before you ever need to make one.

For parents: three ways to model the wave

  1. Send the “no big deal” email first. Before you ever need something from a teacher, send something that needs nothing back.  It could be a one-line hello, an “excited for the year,” or a quick thanks for the syllabus that seems thoughtfully put together. You’re not asking for anything. You’re just making sure the first email your child’s teacher gets from you isn’t a complaint.

  2. Let your kid watch you do it. Ask the teacher a small logistics question in front of your child. Ask a coworker for help with something in front of them. Kids learn what’s shameful mostly by watching what the adults around them hide — so let them see you do the thing you want them to be able to do.

  3. Catch yourself reframing “needing help” as a red flag, and say the reframe out loud. Brené Brown puts it about as plainly as it can be put: “Asking for help is a power move. It’s a sign of strength to ask and a sign of strength to fight-off judgment when other people raise their hands” (Brené Brown, Dare to Lead). Say that sentence, or your own version of it, the next time your kid apologizes for needing something. “Sometimes our first and greatest dare is asking for support,” she writes elsewhere (Daring Greatly) — and daring greatly is a lot easier to attempt when you’ve watched someone you trust do it first.

For students: three ways to wave your hand before you need to

  1. Go to office hours for something tiny, early — before you ever need something big. Not because you’re stuck. Just to say hi, ask which edition of the textbook you actually need, or confirm the syllabus policy on late work. ADDitude’s advice to college students with ADHD is blunt about this: “Reach out to your instructors.” One ADDitude piece on testing accommodations puts it even more concretely: “Set up an appointment with each professor during office hours” (ADDitude, “ADHD and Extra Time for Testing”) — advice that holds at every grade level. The first time you talk to a teacher should not be the day you’re already behind.

  2. Say thank you for something specific, in the first two weeks. Not a generic “thanks for a great class” — something you actually noticed: “I liked how you explained that concept two ways,” or “Thanks for posting slides ahead of time, it really helped me follow along.” Specific thanks costs you nothing and does something a generic ask never can: it tells a teacher you’re paying attention, which is exactly the reputation you want banked before the week you’re not at your best.

  3. When you do need to ask, ask the one precise question that gets you what you need. Not “I don’t get any of this,” which gives a teacher nowhere to start — but “Can I get the extended time on Friday’s test that’s in my accommodation plan?” or “Could you point me to the part of the rubric I’m missing?” This is exactly the muscle we built out in our piece Ask for the Launchpad — How to Tell a Teacher or Boss What You Need: specific asks get specific help, and specific help is what actually moves you forward. One ADDitude reader described this as “com[ing] prepared, with a plan” (ADDitude, “ADHD Self-Advocacy: How to Ask for Help”) — that preparation is what turns an ask into an easy yes instead of an awkward guessing game.

Why the hello and the thank-you matter more than the ask itself

Here’s the part I most want to land, for both parents and students: the point of the early hello and the small thank-you isn’t the teacher. It’s you.

When the only time you talk to a teacher, a coach, or a boss is the moment you need something, every interaction you have with them starts to feel like an ask, and every ask starts to feel like proof that you can’t handle things on your own. But when you’ve already said hi, already said thanks, already shown up on a good day for no reason at all — you get to see yourself as someone who has a relationship there, not just a request. That’s a completely different feeling to be standing in when you’re the one who’s struggling. You’re not walking up to a stranger with your hand out. You’re walking up to someone who already knows your name, asking for something you now have real standing to ask for.

That’s not a soft, feel-good detail. It’s the actual mechanism. Duckworth’s mother wasn’t saved by a stranger who happened to notice a wave in open water — the wave worked because there were rescuers close enough, watching, ready to respond. The takeaway: the relationships you build in week one are what make sure someone’s close enough to notice your wave in week eleven.

Encouraging each other, not just yourselves

This works best as a group sport, not a solo one. Parents: text another parent from your kid’s grade this week — not to compare notes on grades, just to say you’re in it together, and that you’d tell each other if either family’s kid needed backup. Students: if you see a friend hesitate before raising a hand or walking up after class, be the one who says “you should ask that” instead of letting the moment pass. The bravest move in a classroom is rarely made alone the first time — it’s made because someone else went first, or stood next to you while you did.

This is exactly the gap Family Sync was built to close in our Orbit & Ember system — the shared layer that helps a household actually see and support each other’s asks, instead of everyone quietly struggling in their own corner of the house. If today’s post is resonating for your whole family and not just one person in it, that’s worth a look.

Wave your hand

I keep coming back to the image from Duckworth’s essay: one hand holding her mother’s head above the surface, the other waving wildly for help, in water that could have swallowed them both. She didn’t wait until she was sure it was bad enough to justify calling out. She called out, and the calling out is what saved them.

Most of the asks this school year won’t be life-or-death. They’ll be an email, an office-hours drop-in, a “hey, can you explain that again.” But the instinct underneath all of them is the same one Duckworth had to fight in open water: the urge to keep swimming alone a little longer, just to prove you can. You don’t have to prove that. You just have to wave your hand — and this month, on both sides of the parent-student line, let’s make sure somebody’s close enough to see it.

Yours with a hand in the air,
Cara

© 2026 Yellow Parachute. Orbit & Ember™. All rights reserved.

Sources cited in this post

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