A question parents ask

Should I let my child struggle before helping?

The short answer

Yes, for a while. Ask what they think before you explain, because a child who has guessed, even wrongly, has somewhere to put the answer when it comes.

The reasoning

Effort is what makes memory. Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, in Make It Stick, pull together the research on this. Retrieving an answer, working for it, and spacing practice out are what make learning last. Learning that feels easy tends to fade.

So if you hand over the answer the moment a child is stuck, you've done the learning for them. In Sui Learning, wrong guesses are the tuition, and a little frustration is the receipt.

You can see the same thing in a recent study with AI. Hamsa Bastani and colleagues gave high school math students a plain chatbot to practice with. When it was taken away for the exam, they scored 17 percent worse. A version built to give hints instead of answers removed most of that harm. Same tool, opposite results. What mattered was whether it did the work or helped them do it.

How long is "a while"? Until the struggle stops being useful. Start with a question: "Why do you think that is?" Then give a hint before you give the answer. A child who is lost, upset or worn out isn't learning from the struggle, so step in then.

Teaching less helps too. A child who has to come and ask values the answer.

The research behind it

Retrieval, effort, and spacing are what make learning last. Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick (2014), as cited in Sui Learning.
Students who let a chatbot do their practice scored 17 percent worse on the exam. Hamsa Bastani and others, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025).
Learning that takes effort lasts longer than learning that feels easy. Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick (2014), as cited in Sui Learning.
Students using a carefully built AI tutor learned more than twice as much as in active-learning classes, in less time. Gregory Kestin and others, Scientific Reports (June 2025).

Try this

Next time your child says "I don't get it," answer with a question: "What have you tried?" Count to ten before you say anything else. Then give a hint, not the answer.

Where this falls short

Struggle isn't a virtue on its own. If it turns to tears, or the child has nothing to build on, help sooner. The memory research is strong. How much struggle suits each child and each subject is a judgment you'll make as you go.

Also asked as

Is it bad to give students the answer?
How does productive struggle help learning?
When should I step in and help my child?

The ideas behind this answer

Trial and error
Let them guess before you tell them. Wrong guesses are the tuition, and a little frustration is the receipt.
Supply and demand: teach less
Teach less, so your words are worth more. Scarcity creates value; effort creates memory.
AI means evolve faster, not give up
AI takes the scripted busywork first and leaves the work of people who know a field deeply, so the answer is to learn faster and deeper, not to stop learning.