It is not so simple.


For starters, giving unwanted or unasked for help tends to create the opposite effect: that the person will reject your advice to prove you wrong. So any time you help someone who didn't ask, you risk making them worse, not better.

Sure enough, some personalities take this worse than others. And sure enough, it depends on what the help is about - the activity or state may be so destructive or self-destructive that the risk of rejection is well worth it.

But every time you have to weigh in the possibility that your help will lead to a contrarian reaction; and what would happen if the person took that reaction. And many times this will make you not intervene.


Another issue, which is small with adults, is very big with children. Adults are free to reject your unwanted help. And you have no right of appeal. They can tell you to f. off and make it effective.

(Which is the big reason why the main exception to this: declare them "mentally ill" and lock them up, is so important, and so threatening to freedom)

Children, in contrast, are not free to reject your unwanted help. You can impose your help on them; and you have many avenues of appeal - to parents, to schools, to external institutions, eventually to the state itself.

This means that you should be much more restrained in offering unwanted help to children; and part of that restraint is assuring them that although you are available in case the unwanted becomes wanted, that you will not impose it over them in the ways you know and they know you can.


And I have found that if you listen to their opinion; and if you offer your help without imposing it or threatening to, but simply as an opinion from someone who loves them dearly; that they are more likely to consider your viewpoint fairly, to start wanting the help if it really is needed, and to increase, rather than decrease, their trust in your good faith -- even to eventually ask you for help for things you didn't know they struggled with.

None of that would happen if I imposed unwanted help. Even if it seemed "necessary" to do so.