"I'm just helping"

Of course you are. Nobody thinks of the takeover as taking. It feels like help, and often it started as help, and the line between them is hard to see from the inside. So here's the line, as I'd draw it. Help is what keeps the child's hand on the job. The takeover is what moves it off.

If Ava's strap is stuck and you hold the shoe still so she can push, that's help. Her hand is still doing the strap. If you take the shoe and do the strap, that's the takeover, however kindly. If Leo can't find the reading book and you say "look in the pile by the bed", that's help. If you go and get it, that isn't. If Maya doesn't know what to put for the doctor's name and you tell her the name, that's help. If you take the pen, the form's yours. The question in every case is the same. Whose hand is on it when the job gets done.

Researchers who study parenting have a term, autonomy support, for the cluster of things parents do that keep the child's own hand on their own life, offering choices, taking the child's view, explaining rather than commanding, and letting them try. Its opposite in their vocabulary is psychological control, which is getting compliance through guilt, withdrawal, and pressure. Emma Bradshaw, Mireille Joussemet, Richard Ryan and colleagues pooled two hundred and thirty-eight studies with over a hundred and twenty-six thousand children and young people, across regions and ages, and found that autonomy support went with better wellbeing and psychological control went with worse, and that the two were separate, so that a parent could be high or low on each. The correlations were moderate, around a third, which in this kind of research is a real and not a large effect. It's a summary of mostly cross-sectional studies and it measures something broader than shoes. But the direction is consistent and it held across cultures.

I'm not going to tell you that doing up a strap is psychological control. It isn't. What I'd take from the research is narrower, which is that the child's own hand on the job is a thing that matters in itself, over and above whether the job gets done, and that help which keeps it there is a different act from help which takes it off.

So the practical term is the least help. When the child is stuck, the question isn't "how do I get this done" but "what's the smallest thing I can do that leaves them doing it". Hold the shoe. Point at the pile. Say the name. Then take your hand away. It's slower than the takeover and it's the only kind of help that runs out.