A parent describes her 3.5-year-old as fun, loud, and opinionated at home, but “painfully shy in every other social setting,” even with relatives and peers she knows well. She’s greeted with enthusiasm but won’t join in. Instead, she asks her parent to play with her. This issue is especially noticeable at gymnastics, where she’ll happily do an activity, then suddenly refuse to continue. No amount of encouragement will get her to budge. “It’s like once she clams up, she can’t get out of it.” With preschool just around the corner, this parent wonders how she can help her daughter feel more comfortable around other children. Janet offers an alternative perspective on this child’s behavior and explains how it will further this mom’s goal to help her daughter “feel confident and happy and proud of who she is.”
Transcript of “Painfully Shy in Public, Spirited at Home (What’s Up with That?)”
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Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
Today I’m going to be responding to a parent who’s concerned that her daughter seems to be painfully shy when she’s around other children. Even in her gymnastics class, which she says that she loves, but she’s not very willing to participate. At the same time, this child seems very strong and opinionated at home with her parents. So it’s confusing, right?
Well, this is actually much more common than it might sound. What I’ve learned is that the behavior isn’t indicating what we might think it is, that this child is fearful or painfully shy. I’m going to explain all this and why a child who seems to be a strong-willed person when she’s with her family at home can behave differently in social situations. I’ll also explain how to help them to evolve in those situations, how to help them to get more comfortable and feel more at ease and more able to participate.
I’m excited to get into this and I’ll start with this parent’s note to me:
Hello,
I wanted to thank you for all your help along my parenting journey. My three-and-a-half-year-old daughter is so fun, loud, busy, smart, and opinionated at home. But no one other than me, her dad, and her grandparents would ever know it because she’s painfully shy in every other social setting, even with her cousins or my friend’s children that she has played with many times before. The other kids are excited to see her because they know her and they often seem confused why she’s shy toward them or not answering them.
People always comment in front of her how shy she is. And I hate it, probably because I was a shy kid myself and I didn’t like people calling me shy all the time. I feel so bad for my daughter and I want to help her to be more outgoing or to interact with other kids, but I don’t want to intervene too much either. When we are with other kids, she will mostly play by herself, just sit with me, or quietly ask me to play with her instead of playing with them.
Another example where she is shy is at gymnastics, which we go to every week. She’s always excited to go and tells me she wants to go and goes right into the gym when class starts. She does her stretches with the class. Then she will do the first rotation, say, bars, for example, just fine. But then when she has to transition to the next event, say, beam, she all of a sudden will clam up and won’t move. Sometimes it will be two different coaches at the different events, but she knows both coaches pretty well, as we’ve been doing gymnastics for quite some time now.
The coaches will say, “It’s your turn!” and may offer to hold her hand or help her, etc. But she will just sit there and not say or do anything, almost like she’s frozen or scared, even. Sometimes she might shake her head no. So they will just have another kid go before her and then ask her a few times again if she wants to go. She will sometimes just sit there until the class is over at that point. It’s like once she clams up, she can’t get out of it.
I won’t make a huge deal about it, but I might ask her if she likes gymnastics or if she would rather not do it anymore. She always says she loves it and wants to continue to go.
My question is, how do I handle this? I sometimes let her sit there or sometimes I will try to go in and help her myself, as it is a preschool class where parents watch and are welcome to come in if the child needs us.
She’s going to preschool soon, and I’m nervous she will do this there too and I won’t be there to help her. In general, I would love pointers on how to handle my very shy girl. Most of all, I want her to feel confident and happy and proud of who she is.
As I said, this dichotomy is much more common than we might think. And I wonder if many of you out there have experienced this with your child who seems so—well, I use the term “strong-willed” and to me, that’s a positive thing to say about a child. I know some people have a negative connotation around it, but to me, this is alpha behavior. It is sometimes kind of intense, but it’s these big, bright lights that are very powerful. And they have all the downsides that go with those upsides: they can be a bit opinionated, they can be bossy, they can be loud, they can be big. And like I said, I see that as a positive.
One of the many, many things I’ve learned since I’ve been able to have this incredible experience—I consider it an incredible experience and the only way I could possibly have learned all the things that I’ve learned about children and be able to really see beyond their behavior and understand them and what they need. The way that I’ve done this is by being able to facilitate parent-toddler classes for years and years and years. In those classes, I get to see the children every week. I get to see their dynamic with other kids, with their parents. We get to see how the parents making slight adjustments can make a difference in their child’s comfort in the surroundings and help their child start to open up and participate more.
We can see these different personality types, too. And again, this one is a theme, this child who the parents feel like is so strong at home, and yet when they’re with even their cousins, it’s a different story. Parents worry about them. But I’ve learned not to worry, because what this is is something that can happen in so many different ways to children. It’s children getting stuck in a power position. I mean, it’s not a super comfortable position, but it’s also not sad and painful and fearful. It’s really just kind of a stuck place that kids go to.
You’ve heard me talk about this a lot. It can happen where children get stuck in certain behaviors because they notice those behaviors have power with us. There are a million examples of this, and so many of them have come up on the podcast. Sometimes it’s that we wanted to really stress this message to our child about bodily autonomy, that you need to give your consent before anyone touches you. And kids will get stuck in exploring that power with us, like when we need them to leave a situation or we’re trying to pick them up or stop them from hitting us or anything, they’ll say, “Don’t touch me! You’re touching me! I don’t want you to touch me!”
I remember one time in class, there was this wonderful family and I loved this little girl. She was a power girl, she was a power player. And the mom was very committed to this idea of her child being gender neutral, she wanted to give her child that kind of upbringing. And somehow children, they know. They’re so in tune with us that they figure out what has power with us, and then they get stuck exploring that. So in this one case, this little girl, I felt so bad for the mother because she became the biggest girly princess you could imagine. She became obsessed. Would she have explored that anyway? She probably would have, but it became a thing because the mother was so pained about it.
I tried to help the mother understand that this is just a phase, it will pass. And the more you can welcome it, trust her, and let her explore and not feel threatened by this in any way, the sooner it will pass. And sure enough, it did. This can happen with children saying certain words that we are offended by, and then they get stuck going to those words again and again and again. A lot of us have experienced that issue. It’s really a whole gamut of things.
So what I’ve seen happen is these are powerful children and they do often take a bit longer to want to suss a situation out. This little girl wants to come in like a queen, already knowing everything that’s going on, doing it all perfectly. This is the kind of child that fits this model. They don’t want to be the vulnerable one making the wrong move. So they’re waiting, they’re holding on, they’re watching.
And then they feel people trying—especially the most important person, the parent—trying to help them, encourage them to join in and do the things that we want them to do. Our child feels the power in that, and that makes them feel even more stuck in this role of being the one holding it all together and letting other people be so excited to see them. And yet they’re staying internalized about that. They’re not going to give it up, they’re not going to give in to being goofy and enthusiastic too.
So it is not comfortable, like I said, and they are kind of missing out. But on the other hand, they’re also doing this really intelligent thing, which is observing. They’re getting to be the ones to notice what’s going on and what other children are doing and finding that place where they could fit in.
I’m saying all this to encourage this parent and any parent who’s worried about their child’s social skills, their assertiveness with other kids, their outgoingness. I mean, this girl may never be outgoing with other children in that way, and that’s okay. But that strong girl in her is going to come out with the people that she’s comfortable with and she just needs a chance to find her way.
But instead, there’s certain things kind of holding her back. And the main one is the view we have of this child. As parents, we always go to that fear place or that worry place. I mean, I totally relate to that. My children are adults and I still go there. I’ve learned that that’s not the truth very often, but it still comes up for me.
So if we could start to see this differently, start to see this as what I’m convinced it really is, which is a girl just taking her sweet time to do it her way. And that is not painful or shy in a negative, uncomfortable way at all. I mean, I don’t even think it is shy, honestly. It’s just being reserved in that situation because I’m not going to let go of this power that I have. And I’m also going to do it my way. That opinionated girl, she’s having an opinion about whether she wants to do that next gymnastics thing or not. No, I don’t want to do that right now.
And then she feels everybody trying to get her to get her to do it, get her to do it, and that makes it even harder for her to give in. So even if she might have been ready to try it, now she’s less ready to, because the coaches want her to, her mom wants her to, her mom’s coming in and trying to help her, hold her hand. All of that just makes it worse for her. It makes it harder for her to take those risks of trying something that she might not do perfectly or as well as she thinks she should.
Across the board, what kids need most when it comes to their social learning is confidence in themselves and their process. And how do we nurture that? By us having confidence in them and their process, which means trusting. Trusting, allowing it to unfold, not trying to accommodate or coax her out or make it work for her. Honor her strong position as the observer that’s going to stand back and hold her own until she’s ready. That’s a very strong position and point of view to take, and that’s where this girl is.
I’ve seen this a hundred times with kids in my class. Oftentimes they are girls, but not always. I don’t know why that is! But in class, these alpha children will often be right by their parent, maybe they’re even trying to pull their parent to come play with them. And I discourage that; I try to encourage the parent to hold their ground, and that’s what I’m going to encourage this parent to do. I’m about to get to the steps that will help her. But mainly I want to help her understand what’s actually going on here. Because that’s everything, right? The way we see, the way we understand what’s going on with our child, that decides all of our reactions and behaviors and especially decides the most important thing, which is the feelings that we’re emitting that our child is picking up on.
If we’re feeling worried that our child may be scared or painfully shy, our child is feeling that concern coming from us and that’s keeping them stuck. I love how this parent remembers being called shy and how she didn’t like that. So she can start right now by not even thinking of this as shyness, because again, I don’t think it is. I’m convinced it’s a powerful observer that’s going to take her sweet time until she’s ready and not going to let anyone rush her. And the more you try to rush her, the more she’s going to hold on to her position. That is the epitome of strong, right?
This parent says, “The coaches will say, ‘It’s your turn!’ and may offer to hold her hand or help her, etc.” Again, I feel like that’s making it harder for this little girl, not helping her. Then this parent says, “But she will just sit there and not say or do anything, almost like she’s frozen or scared, even.” “Frozen”? Yes, because people are trying to take something from me that I need to hold onto. “Scared, even”? I sincerely doubt it, because there’s nothing this child is saying or doing that’s sounding like she’s afraid to be there. She wants to go, she’s excited to go, she can’t wait to do it when it’s on her terms. But all of a sudden it’s like, I don’t want to make that transition or I’m not sure about it or I’m not sure if I can do that next thing as well or I’m not as used to it or Let me see if everybody’s going to try to draw me out again like they’ve been doing. She’s feeling her mom’s trepidation, maybe. Nope, I’m holding on. Sorry, this is what I’m doing. It’s interesting, right? I love kids, they’re so great, but they can confound us! We take things at face value, and on the outside it does seem like she could be scared or shy or painfully frozen.
This parent says, “It’s like once she clams up, she can’t get out of it.” Yes, it’s a stuck place. How do you break out and take a chance and be vulnerable when this has become your position? It’s very hard. It’s harder for us as adults to say, Okay, I’ll do it when we’re holding onto that opinion. Harder for us to say, Maybe you’re right when we’re holding onto our opinion about something. So imagine how much harder it is for a child, who’s so new to this. All these feelings that are coming up for her in this gymnastics situation, where these expectations are all on her and she doesn’t necessarily want to go along with them. She’s got strong opinions.
And the parent says that she always asks her if she likes it and she always says she loves it and wants to keep going. I mean, there’s so much richness going on for her here. She’s getting to observe all these things. She’s getting all these people falling all over themselves trying to get her to do things. She has all this power, which is a double-edged sword for her. It’s not really that fun, but it’s still a fascinating experience. Certainly a compelling one. It’s definitely not painful.
Let’s talk about what else this parent can do, besides seeing this differently, which is again, the key. And hopefully a relief to this parent or any parent going through something like this, that actually this isn’t something to worry about. It’s just this interesting thing that your child’s gotten caught up in. But she will find her way out if we can actually do things that encourage that, which is the opposite of trying to encourage her to get more involved or be more participatory or whatever it is. Instead, we want to just take all the pressure off that’s coming from us. Which means all the help, all the concern, clear the air of all of that.
We can easily do this once we believe and trust in her. It’s really not that hard. It’s like a letting go, a relief. That’s how she’ll get out of this power loop. She will find her way, she will find her time. It may not be in this series of gymnastics classes or the next one, but it might be in the next social opportunity she has after that.
And if this still seems to be going on by the time she’s about to start preschool, I would let the staff know: It takes her a while, but it’s okay. Don’t try to get her playing. Don’t try to get her joining in. She will do it in her time. Just leave the space open for her. Maybe once in a while they could offer: “Oh, would you like to join?” And if she says no: “Okay.” Really letting go of it. Accepting where she’s at instead of trying to accommodate it and make it work for her somehow.
Letting go and accepting are how this girl is going to “feel confident and happy and proud of who she is.” I think she already is very confident, but she’ll be more able to take risks when we take this cloud of worry away. Again, that cloud is mostly coming from us. We can’t control what the grandparents think or what those cousins think. I mean, they don’t seem worried about it anyway, they’re just happy to see her. We don’t want her to sense our discomfort. The best way to ensure that is we decide to trust her and therefore we’re not uncomfortable about it. We just know it’s going to take a little more time for her to let down her guard and be vulnerable enough to take risks.
Let’s talk about the way this can look once you’ve started to see it that way. First, the cousins. So here come the cousins. Instead of suggesting she play with them or do anything with them, you’re just going to let her know she’s going to see her cousins. Oh, they’re all so excited to see you!, etc. Now there they all are, and you’re not going to do anything to try to make this happen. If she wants to kind of reject the cousins or not join in with them, great.
At the same time, though, don’t accommodate. Don’t be feeling like you need to find something for her to do or play with her yourself or get something going with her as if she’s missing out on something. She’s not missing out on anything by navigating this situation with her cousins.
The instinct this parent had was to say, “I don’t want to intervene too much.” Yes, don’t intervene at all. There’s no need to intervene in a situation like this. Nobody’s getting hurt, right? She’s just taking her sweet time. If she wants to follow you and the other adults around or sit with you, sure, but you’re not going to try to entertain her or occupy her.
Nor are you going to join in what the peers are doing as a way to try to get her to join in too, because you’ve let go of this and you know that kind of pressure would actually work the opposite of how we often think it will. It’s not going to help her to join in if we show her how to do it. No. Instead, that’s just going to show her your discomfort: I’m uncomfortable. This has a lot of power with me. I really want you to be able to do this. Yet that pressure is exactly what’s keeping her stuck!
So, do the opposite. Let go. “Oh, you don’t want to play with them? Okay.” If she quietly asks you to play, say, “Ah, not right now, but you’re welcome to hang with me.” Do everything that you would normally do, talk to the adults. Do the same at gymnastics or in any other situation with her. Find your spot where the parents are sitting. Be a secure base.
And even if other parents are getting up to help their children, I wouldn’t do that. I know a lot of that happens on playgrounds, and maybe in gymnastics class too. But I recommend you don’t do that, because it’s giving children a message that we’re concerned and we don’t think that they’re really capable of doing it themselves. That may not be how we feel inside, but that’s how it’s going to come across.
These are developmentally-appropriate situations in that they’re geared for a child this age. We’re not expecting her to go to a cocktail party with adults and socialize. This is meant for her, it’s all set up around her. So trust your child to be able to participate as they wish to and are ready to, in their way. As long as it’s not hurting anyone, obviously. Sit down. Stay put. Don’t be drawn in. Even if your child wants to have you hold their hand and help them do it, just calmly say, “Oh, you know what? I’m going to stay right here. Yes, I see you want me to come, but this is where I’m comfortable. This is where I’m going to stay. And you could sit here with me as long as you want.”
I used to tell the parents in my class, when you have older kids, you’ll be excited to have your child come sit with you or sit on your lap. Those years don’t last forever, so welcome that. Your child wants to sit on your lap or sit right next to you when they’re in a social situation? Enjoy that!
And that’s how you’ll free them up. Letting go, for the win for both of you. Letting go eases your mind and helps you relax, and it helps free your child up from these stuck places. Trusting, letting go. That’s exactly how we do what this parent wants, which is helping her child “to feel confident and happy and proud of who she is.” Because we’re proud of who she is. Whether she’s sitting with us or she’s out there participating, it’s up to her. We just like being with her. That’s a brilliant message to give your child, and it works, but not on our time, on theirs.
We put so much pressure on ourselves as parents. I think because of the worrying that we do about our child, about every little thing, and then we’ve got to fix it, we’ve got to fix it. None of that is our job. And when we’re only doing our job, which is just being there and supporting them from our parent place, we free them up to do their job, which is navigating all these situations in their way and on their time.
We can do this.
