Dealing With Extreme Shyness
1st April 2006
Shyness stems from different root causes. One of it is usually the anxiety of having to meet people. The other could be that the child was so focused developing one area that the social area was neglected. Both require different strategies as solutions. The biggest pain this has is the social stigma associated with shyness. Most other children stay away from shy children at best, and bully them at worst. It’s an important issue to address, and a set of skills should be taught to cope with and deal with shyness.
In the case where shyness is due to anxiety, social interactions need to be anchored to positive feelings. For instance, a number of social psychologists have been able to demonstrate that vicarious learning actually takes place - children model how we do certain things. So, why not model for them the way to make friends and interact with others. It may be strange or odd to do this, but it is certainly an effective way to teach your child. However, you’ll probably get stumped when you realize that you yourself have difficulty doing it, especially for complete strangers. Guess we know who the model was, now, huh.
Shyness is likely also due to the excessive internal dialog that takes place within an individual. I’m suggesting that each individual should learn to stop that internal dialog. how? Simple! I’ve had fairly good success introducing another fairly shy person to interact with shy children. When the interaction takes place, and there is a matching of concerns, internal dialog ceases to continue. In fact, attention is now focused on the individual who had just initiated interaction with the child.
Confidence also can be boosted by getting your child to extend doing one thing simple and then stretching. So, a simple thing to do would be to, say, answer the phone. This is a simple skill to execute. The next stretch could be to place an order over the counter for lunch. The next one could be to ask for directions from a complete stranger. All these are useful skills to develop, until your child has no difficulty interacting. Why? Because it’s ‘normal’.
I know a number of children who develop into ‘geeks’ or ‘nerds’. Some geeks are well socialized (they mix well - usually with other geeks) and have little trouble adapting to a new social environment. They have a sense of humor, know how to start a conversation and listen to others. However, there are others who don’t know this - they listen to other people robotically, and hardly display any emotion other than that blank stare. Outwardly,they display no emotion. Internally, they are frozen!
For these children, it is important to emphasize that it is necessary to communicate with other people at different levels. They may not have the most fun conversations, but it would be important to develop those conversational skills and learn to express their emotions so that others can tell how they are feeling. I mean, when you crack a joke, you expect your listener to laugh, not greet you with a blank stare! These are all points of awareness that should be brought up to someone with such a mental map. Hopefully, with more exposure, they will learn to be more socially groomed.