Quick Read
Helping someone we love feels like an expression of love. But I’ve been learning that help can sometimes produce the opposite of what I intend.
When I repeatedly step in to solve another adult’s problems, I may relieve today’s difficulty while making it easier for the underlying pattern to continue tomorrow.
That has forced me to ask a harder question:
Does my help increase someone’s ability to carry their responsibilities—or gradually carry those responsibilities for them?
The distinction becomes especially difficult when children are involved. I love spending time with my grandchildren because I’m Papa. That is a relationship I freely choose.
But automatically stepping in whenever parenting responsibilities are left undone is something different. I can remain deeply involved with my grandchildren without quietly becoming responsible for raising them.
I’ve also begun seeing resentment differently. Sometimes resentment is telling me that I’m giving more than I can freely give, saying yes when I really mean no, or expecting someone to recognize a boundary I never clearly established.
Instead of asking, “How do I make someone else change?” I’m learning to ask:
“How do I stop participating in what isn’t working?”
Before helping, I can ask:
Whose responsibility is this?
Is this a genuine need or a recurring pattern?
Will my help increase capability—or replace responsibility?
Can I give this freely without resentment or keeping score?
Perhaps love isn’t always carrying someone else’s burden.
Sometimes love helps them carry it.
And sometimes love steps back—not because it has stopped caring, but because continuing to carry the burden has become part of the reason it is never picked up.
When Help Stops Helping
Loving Assistance Without Enabling
One of the more difficult questions I face at this stage of my life is surprisingly simple:
When is helping an expression of love—and when does my help prevent someone I love from facing the responsibilities that might help him grow?
This isn’t theoretical for me.
One of my adult children lives with me while raising two young children during a difficult family transition. I love my son, and I adore my grandchildren. I want him to succeed, and I want the children to experience stability, attention, and love.
So I help.
I watch the children when he works. I take them places, buy meals, clean shared spaces, and try to keep our household functioning.
Much of that I genuinely enjoy.
But somewhere along the way, helping became tangled with something else.
His possessions began filling more of the house. Projects accumulated faster than they were completed. Gaming sometimes displaced responsibilities. I increasingly found myself stepping in—cleaning, organizing, watching the children, or taking care of things that weren’t really mine to manage.
And resentment began growing alongside the love.
That was the signal that something needed to change.
Two Truths Can Exist Together
It would be easy to tell myself a simple story:
He’s irresponsible. I’m being used. He needs to grow up.
Sometimes that’s exactly how it feels.
But reality is more complicated.
My son is trying to earn a living while raising two young children during a difficult period. That is genuinely hard.
At the same time, difficulty does not eliminate responsibility.
Both things can be true:
My son may be struggling, and he may also be avoiding responsibilities that belong to him.
And the same is true of me:
I may be helping because I love him, while some of that help unintentionally sustains the patterns frustrating me.
Understanding someone’s struggle doesn’t require taking responsibility for it.
The System We Create Together
I began noticing a cycle.
Something doesn’t get done. The children need attention, the kitchen needs cleaning, or possessions begin taking over common areas.
I step in.
The immediate problem disappears.
But because I solved it, there is less pressure on my son to solve it himself.
Eventually I become resentful and complain. He feels criticized and becomes defensive. I see even less progress and compensate even more.
Round and round we go.
Family-systems thinking recognizes versions of this dynamic: when one person increasingly overfunctions, another can increasingly underfunction. My stepping in may solve the immediate problem while unintentionally helping preserve the larger pattern.
The uncomfortable realization is that I don’t have to cause someone else’s behavior to participate in maintaining the system around it.
Sometimes my attempt to solve today’s problem helps preserve tomorrow’s problem.
Helping or Enabling?
The difference isn’t necessarily the action itself.
Watching my grandchildren can be loving assistance. The same action can become enabling if my availability becomes an assumed replacement for their father’s responsibility.
Cleaning the kitchen can simply be part of sharing a home. Repeatedly cleaning up another adult’s mess because I know he won’t do it is something different.
Psychologists make a similar distinction between supporting someone and repeatedly rescuing them from responsibilities or consequences they are capable of handling themselves.
The useful question isn’t:
Was my action kind?
It is:
What does this pattern produce over time?
Does my help make the other person more capable and responsible?
Or does it make remaining unchanged easier?
That distinction matters.
The Children Change the Equation
This would be easier if only two adults were involved.
My grandchildren live inside the consequences.
I don’t want them deprived of attention simply because I’m trying to teach their father responsibility. They didn’t create the situation.
But I’ve realized there are two very different ways I can be involved with them.
There is time I choose to spend with them because I’m Papa—meals, parks, adventures, conversations, and simply being together.
Then there is time when I automatically assume responsibility because something has been left undone.
The first is a relationship.
The second can gradually become a replacement system.
I don’t want to withdraw from my grandchildren to make a point to my son.
I want to remain deeply involved with them without quietly becoming responsible for raising them.
Resentment as Information
I’ve also begun looking differently at my resentment.
Resentment doesn’t automatically mean someone else is wrong. Sometimes it reveals my own expectations, need for control, or desire to be appreciated.
But sometimes it contains useful information.
Perhaps I’ve repeatedly said yes while internally meaning no.
Perhaps I’ve given more than I can give freely.
Perhaps I’m expecting gratitude instead of establishing boundaries.
Perhaps I’ve created an agreement in my own mind that the other person never actually made.
So instead of suppressing resentment or unleashing it, I can translate it into clarity:
What am I willing to give freely?
What am I no longer willing to carry?
What responsibilities belong to the other person?
What conditions do I require in my own home?
Resentment can sometimes be the bill that arrives for an agreement that was never clearly made.
Ego, Soul, and Boundaries
In Ego & Soul: What I Mean by Them, I describe ego as the part of me concerned with practical reality—boundaries, fairness, threats, injuries, and consequences.
My ego keeps excellent records.
It can catalogue every mess, every dollar, every hour of childcare, and every time I felt unappreciated.
Some of that information is useful.
The problem comes when the objective changes from creating a healthier relationship to winning the case against my son.
The perspective I call soul asks a different question:
What arrangement best supports everyone’s long-term growth?
That question doesn’t always produce a yes.
Sometimes love accommodates.
Sometimes love helps.
And sometimes love says:
This belongs to you. I believe you’re capable of carrying it.
Perhaps that is the distinction I’ve been looking for.
The ego asks:
How do I make him change?
The soul asks:
How do I stop participating in what isn’t working?
A Better Test for Helping
Before stepping in, I can ask four questions:
Whose responsibility is this?
Is this a genuine need or the predictable result of a recurring choice?
Will my help increase capability—or replace responsibility?
Can I give this help freely, without resentment or keeping score?
There is another question when children are involved:
If I don’t intervene, is the likely consequence genuinely harmful—or merely uncomfortable?
Protecting someone from harm is very different from protecting an adult from every inconvenience, expense, or consequence.
My working principle has become:
Help with what someone cannot reasonably do alone. Don’t automatically do what they are choosing not to do.
The Love to Step Back
I doubt there is a perfectly clean line between helping and enabling.
Families aren’t laboratory experiments. My son isn’t merely a collection of behaviors. My grandchildren aren’t theoretical considerations. And I’m not a neutral observer.
I’m part of the system too.
There will undoubtedly be times when I help too much and others when I step back too quickly.
Perhaps wisdom isn’t finding the perfect rule.
Perhaps it is noticing what our choices are producing and adjusting accordingly—something I’ve been exploring more broadly in Building Foundational Well-Being.
I’ve spent much of my life asking:
What would a loving father do?
I’m beginning to think there is a better question:
What form of love supports the long-term growth, dignity, and responsibility of everyone involved—including me?
Love sometimes carries another person’s burden.
Love sometimes helps them learn how to carry it.
And sometimes love steps back—not because it has stopped caring, but because continuing to carry the burden has become part of the reason it is never picked up.
References & Further Reading
Cleveland Clinic — Enabling Behavior
Clinical psychologist Adam Borland discusses how repeatedly rescuing someone from the consequences of their choices can turn helping into enabling.
Signs of Enabling Behavior and How to Stop
Simply Psychology — Boundaries With Adult Children
An overview of the distinction between supporting an adult child and doing things for them that they are capable of doing themselves.
Boundaries With Adult Children
The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family — Family Systems
Bowen family-systems theory explores how patterns of overfunctioning and underfunctioning can develop and reinforce one another within families.
Multigenerational Transmission Process
World Health Organization — Gaming Disorder
For readers interested in the distinction between ordinary gaming and clinically significant gaming behavior, WHO describes gaming disorder in terms of impaired control, increasing priority given to gaming, and continued gaming despite significant negative consequences.
Gaming Disorder