Social Anxiety In Children

Helping Your Child Cope with Social Anxiety

Social anxiety in children is a much more common problem than many think. When children display symptoms of social anxiety, most adults tend to dismiss it as shyness and say that it’s just a part of childhood and will go away when the child matures. Unfortunately, that is not the case for every child because some of them are actually suffering from a child anxiety disorder and need to be treated as soon as possible. Anxiety in children is something to address and the time to start is now.

Now, this is not to say that every shy child in the world has a social anxiety disorder. Many children are just naturally shy, it’s true. So you should be able to distinguish between ordinary shyness and social anxiety in children.

Signs or Symptoms

Some of the tell-tale signs that you might look out for are poor eye contact, frequent crying and tantrums, and lack of interest in going to school and playing with other kids.

When left untreated, social anxiety in children can be a real hindrance to their social growth and they may even take the problem with them all the way into adulthood. This is why it is very important to seek treatment for your child as soon as you find out that he does have the disorder.

Treatment

It’s hard to determine which particular treatment will work best because this will depend on the condition of the child and the assessment of the doctor. However, it is the general opinion that natural remedies are better because they do not cause negative side effects or drug dependency.

According to most child psychiatrists, the best way to deal with social anxiety in children is to simply expose the child to different groups of people. Of course, you won’t want to do this hastily as it can further traumatize the child and make an already bad situation much worse. Instead, do it gradually by setting up ‘play-dates’ for your child with other kids that are their age, for instance. Then you can take them to the park where there are more people, then to larger social gatherings, and so on, until your child eventually becomes comfortable no matter who or how many are around him.

Only if these natural treatments for social anxiety don’t help, then your doctor may recommend medication. As they will advise you have to be very careful as some of these anti-anxiety medications may have side effects or may cause long-term damage to the child’s health.

Your child doesn’t have to live with his problem all throughout his childhood. There are plenty of effective treatments for overcoming social anxiety in children and there is definitely at least one that will be effective for your child.