Shyness In Children: How Parents Can Help

Shyness is not a diagnostic category or a pathology in itself, but rather a personality trait that can become a problem when it is so great that it makes it difficult to have a good relationship with other people.

Throughout childhood it is common for a child to be shy at some point, since there are many changes that occur during those years, both external – school, friends, family … – and internal, the result of their own evolution. The exposure to new situations and relationships in certain children can be a trigger insecurities manifested by shyness.

In this article we will decipher the keys to this problem and the myths that revolve around it, with the desire to help both prevent and solve shyness and its possible causes.

The three basic signs of shyness

Approaching a shy child is the opposite of what this child usually does with other children or adults. These are the most common symptoms of shyness in childhood:

1. You tend to isolate yourself

• The difficulty in approaching, relating and interacting with others. This can be observed both at school and in the park or at home.
• At school, the child is usually alone in the playground or playing with one or very few children, or not intervening in class and blushing when asked something.
• In the park, he tends to stick to his parents and they have to push him to go play. At home, he does not usually tell what has happened to him during the day and prefers to entertain himself in his own world, or take refuge in front of the television, especially when there are numerous family gatherings.

2. Shows insecurity

• He wants contact with his teammates, but at the same time he fears it because he does not know if he will know how to play like the others. He also doubts whether he will be able to respond well to the teacher. This means that just by thinking that these situations await him, he sees them rather as a danger, so he tends to avoid them and withdraw into himself.
• In the case of very severe shyness, this can even lead to a school phobia, since school is the place where all their fears are concentrated. Based on this difficulty in bonding with others and the degree of their fears,

3. You experience suffering

• The more intense the two previous signs, the more suffering there will be, since shyness makes it difficult to express feelings, so that the child will rarely tell the parents how bad it is.
• At most he will say that the other children are brutes or fools, or that the teacher has a mania for him and leaves him aside, without acknowledging that his shyness has marginalized him and makes him suffer.

Shyness is a silent suffering

In other words, what gives the definitive clue to the degree of shyness and concern that it generates in parents is the degree to which it manifests itself.

For example, if a more or less open child, who has got on well, begins a stage of greater shyness, but without withdrawing too much in himself, it is feasible to think that it is a transitory situation as a result of external changes. So you have to talk to him and support him, but without turning this stage into a problem.

On the contrary, if it is a rather withdrawn child with difficulty making friends and, in addition, we observe that it is increasingly difficult for him to go to school or he isolates himself more in the park, that his character changes, showing angry and irascible, while at home he distances himself from contact with us or his siblings, then it is possible that there is a high degree of suffering that the child cannot express through other channels. In this case, it will be necessary to worry seriously and, if necessary, seek professional help.

Where does shyness come from

The origin of shyness lies in different factors that can be basically summarized into two types:

• Family influence. The personality of a child develops through interaction with parents, both emotionally and in modeling. If a child has emotional deficiencies, an unstable family environment, is overprotected by parents or they have not been able to impose coherent rules and limits, it is very likely that he is an insecure child with little confidence in himself. This will prevent him from calmly approaching the social situations that he encounters since he was a child, he will be afraid of failing or not doing it well. If, in addition, the parents have barely any friends and participate little in social life, the child will have few social experiences and will tend to see the world outside the family as a rather hostile environment, since they will not have found a model of skills in their parents adequate social.
• Life experiences. If the above situation occurs, the child will easily feel insecure, thus interacting awkwardly in his encounters with other children and adults. If that clumsiness causes teasing or laughter and a certain isolation, the child’s self-esteem will lower and a feeling of inferiority will be created in him, which in turn will make him withdraw from others, isolate himself and become increasingly shy.

We can see, therefore, that a shy child is the result of the combination of elements from the family environment and the result of their own bad experiences. The consequence of all this is that the shy child ends up having very few social skills, which feeds back his shyness.

Clarifying myths and concepts

Precisely because shyness is such a diffuse and difficult to define entity, many myths circulate about it and many concepts are used as synonyms that, in practice, only end up confusing and hardly provide solutions. Let’s look at some of these dark spots below in order to shed light that allows us to better understand the phenomenon of shyness.

• Introversion or shyness? The difference between one and the other would be a function of the degree of suffering. For example, an introverted child is usually a rather lonely child and, therefore, the fact of not approaching others is a voluntary act that does not cause any anxiety. The shy, on the other hand, would like to get closer and cannot.
• Shame or shyness? In this case, the difference is usually in the number of situations that cause one thing or another. A shy child is usually shy in any situation that involves social interaction, while shame tends to appear in certain circumstances, such as speaking in public or asking for something in a store. In all other situations, the shameful child acts normally.
• “He’ll get over it, I was shy at his age too.” This argument from many parents may be true but not convincing. That is, for the simple fact that they were shy as children and have overcome it, they often overlook the memory of their own discomfort as children and deny the current suffering of their children. If shyness has become chronic during childhood, although it has apparently been overcome, there is always a trace of insecurity.
• “Rewarding and reinforcing successes is the best therapy. ” Nobody is bitter about a sweet, and less a shy child, who logically likes it and is an injection of self-esteem any compliment for something they have done well. But you have to be very cautious when carrying out this reinforcement, since praising a behavior in public, making the child the center of attention of everyone else, could have the opposite effect and further promote shyness.
• “You have to force him, otherwise he will never get over it.” This kind of “wild therapy” usually has the same effect as the previous one. There is nothing worse than pretending that a shy child faces his fears by immersing him fully in an activity that parents believe will be beneficial to him, whatever it may be: party with friends, after-school activity, sport, etc. It is easy then for your fears to block you and further exaggerate your lack of social skills. It is true that a certain consistency is required to overcome shyness, but perseverance does not mean immersion. It is preferable to choose together with the child those activities in which he feels more secure and to encourage him to carry them out firmly but without forcing him.

Tips for parents of a shy child

As the term itself suggests, self-esteem has a lot to do with the image that someone has of himself and, from what we have exposed, in the background of a shy child there is often a child who has a bad image of himself , that is seen without strength, doomed to failure, afraid to interact, etc.

If we want to avoid shyness, we have to encourage our children to have a good image of themselves, that they know that they can trust their abilities and that, although they will often make mistakes, they discover that mistakes offer a good path to learning.

Some tips to boost self-esteem in children are:

• Make them understand that they are important to us by listening to what they tell us and taking an interest in their things: their relationships with their friends, the progress of their activities, etc.
• Always provide the necessary support for their initiatives and respect their interests.
• Being by your side in bad times, whether due to school issues, problems with friends, etc.
• Limiting our criticism to specific situations, not generalizing with labels such as “you are bad” or “you are not doing anything right” to reproach them for a bad action, such as, for example, that they have broken something or have not done their homework.
• Give him all your emotional support so that he can regain or gain confidence in himself – the primary objective. This requires putting aside overprotective attitudes and encouraging him, on the contrary, to interact with other children and to do activities that make him feel more secure. You have to reinforce your progress, no matter how small, lovingly and telling you that you are progressing.
• Teach him social skills through example. Show him how to go shopping in a store, invite other families over to see how adults relate to each other, encourage friends to come to play and even stay the night (or on the contrary, let him be who is visiting), teach him to greet, speak and address other people who are not family.
• Do not use expressions such as “he is very shy” when talking about him, since these types of labels reinforce his shyness more. If he hears this type of language, the child may end up thinking that this is his way of being and that as such it is unalterable.
• Boost your self-esteem. A shy child feels that he is useless, that he is very clumsy, that he cannot contribute anything to others. You have to try to turn this image of yourself around and stop criticizing the negative to focus on praising your qualities – I’m sure you have them – showing you that we are all wrong but that if instead of being sad we fight to correct the mistakes we feel much better, and encourage him in his initiatives so that he sees that he also has valuable ideas.

It is not easy to overcome shyness, but with these tips, dedication and leaving a certain time that things improve and the child will feel much better.

Lourdes Mantilla is a clinical psychologist.