Helping isn’t always helping. A video circulating on LinkedIn (and other social media) demonstrates the point. Indeed, it has been praised as a heartwarming moment between a father and his daughter. And sure, it looks like that on the surface. However, if you watch it through the eyes of reason, it tells a very different story. Allow me to set the stage.
A little girl is trying to learn how to hula-hoop. She is struggling. The hoop keeps falling. She gets frustrated, picks it up, and tries again. However, she does not quit. She does not ask for help. She is doing exactly what learning looks like, and she is having a blast.
In the background, her father sneaks up behind her, grabs the hoop, and spins it himself while she wiggles her hips. She thinks she is doing it. The class erupts in celebration. The video closes with the message about helping others shine.
Now, that sounds nice, but there is a big problem. She did not do it. He did. And now she believes she can. That might be great for the moment, but then what?
That is not a success story. That is actually the setup for a very specific kind of frustration and failure. In many ways, her father just did one of the worst things a father can do.
The father’s decision was driven entirely by his own discomfort, not hers. He could not bear to watch her struggle. That is his problem, not hers. But let us examine the potential downstream for a moment.
That emotional response created a bias, a belief that struggle equals failure and that a good parent eliminates it. That bias led him to believe that what he did was supportive. And that belief drove the behavior of grabbing the hoop. And now, because of that video and the social proof attached to it, this bias has spread into the minds of millions. This is exactly how the 3B Behavior Modification Model works in practice. Emotion shapes bias. Bias shapes belief. Belief drives behavior. However, the father never examined the bias underneath his impulse. He just acted on it. And his daughter paid the price.
What the father actually did was remove the adversity that was doing the work. According to the Adversity Nexus Theory, adversity is not the enemy of growth. It is the engine of it. Any frustration the little girl felt was not a problem to be solved. It was the mechanism through which she was developing persistence, body awareness, coordination, and the neural pathways required to actually spin a hoop. The struggle had a purpose. The moment her father bypassed it, he did not accelerate her development. He interrupted it. He may have even stopped it.
Now consider what happens the next day when she picks up a hula-hoop, and it falls immediately. She has no explanation for that. She succeeded yesterday. She felt it. The class cheered. But today, the mechanics are the same as they always were because she never corrected them. Her waist never touched the hoop. She never learned the rhythm. She is not starting from progress. She is starting from a false memory of progress, which is actually far more disorienting than starting from zero.
There is a term for this. It’s called “Learned Helplessness.” However, it’s worse in this case. That is learned helplessness with an extra layer of confusion built in.
What makes this harder to correct is the cultural belief surrounding it. As previously mentioned, the video was celebrated. Millions of people watched a father undermine his daughter’s learning process and called it beautiful. Interestingly, that is actually Epistemic Rigidity in its most common form: a belief so emotionally reinforced and socially validated that questioning it feels wrong.
The idea that a good parent removes struggle has been repeated so many times across so many platforms and in so many heartwarming videos that it has become defended territory. Challenge it, and people will push back, not because the evidence supports the belief, but because the belief feels true and the emotion behind it is warm. But warmth is not the same as wisdom. Do we want to be “right,” or “accurate?”
The girl in that video had not given up. She had not asked for help. She was in the middle of the exact process that produces genuine competence. Her father decided, on her behalf, that she had struggled long enough. But I would argue that was not his call to make. And the framing of his intervention as proof that “anything is possible with his support” gets it exactly backward. What the video actually proved is that anything appears possible when someone else is doing it for you. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously when he is not there.
The harder and more loving thing would have been to watch, to wait, and to trust the process. Doing so would have empowered her for life. Stepping in might well have made her want to quit. Learning a task takes time. Frustration is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something real is happening. The brain requires such a challenge. The job of a good mentor, parent, or leader is not to eliminate that discomfort. It is to ensure the person on the other end of the struggle has what they need to work through it themselves.
Structured challenge is a requirement for growth. The hoop falls. Pick it up. Try again. That is the lesson. Nobody can teach it by taking the hoop.
Final Thoughts
Indeed, the video at the center of this discussion has been viewed millions of times and celebrated across every major platform. Most people who watched it smiled and moved on. That reaction is worth examining just as much as the act itself. Understand that we are conditioned to see the removal of struggle as kindness, and that conditioning runs deep. Too deep. Helping sometimes requires struggle.
That said, while he may be confused, I am not suggesting that the father is a villain. Instead, he is a father who loves his daughter and cannot stand to watch her frustrated for another 30 seconds. That impulse is human, and I do not fault a father who wants the best for his children. But good intentions do not change outcomes, and the outcome here is a little girl who believed she did something she did not. Is that heroism? If not, then what should we call that? Illusory agency? Enablement of false attribution?
Now, some might argue that she was just a little girl, and I am taking this way too seriously. I would counter the idea that imprinting is real, and this will inform her life in other areas. Things that “sound about right” are sometimes really wrong. Watch it again with that in mind, and see if it still feels like the victory that so many see. Determine for yourself if his act truly helped her grow. Ultimately, I think the lesson here is that leadership sometimes means bearing the burden of the struggle itself, but trusting the outcome more than the emotional pull to undermine it.
As a father, I can promise you that my desire resides in her long-term empowerment. If outcomes matter, then my personal and temporary discomfort with her learning process must be tempered. She must learn how to master her situation. Without her true understanding and mastery, she has false empowerment. The clue here is that this is true in any situation.
Here’s another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tji8roGXsw
