If someone is anxious, it doesn’t mean they absolutely hate social situations and meeting new people. It rather puts them in a state where they can’t build themselves up to talk to people or aren’t able to make more efforts to do so, even when they want to. They still have the desire to make friends, open up and be sociable, but the fear inside of them grows stronger than that desire.

 

The Two Aspects

People often mistake anxiety as shyness or self-consciousness. However, these are two completely different aspects. Anxiety refers to a kind of fear or nervousness while social anxiety refers to the fear of social situations that generally involves meeting or talking to new people. Unlike shyness, it requires professional attention and in today’s generation, more than 70% of the world population have been anxious at some point of their life, especially in their teenage years. When talking about kids and teens, if you’ve noticed your kids wanting to be alone most of the time hesitating to meet new people and surprisingly distressing if they are asked to do so, it is more likely that they are becoming anxious when it comes to socializing.

 

A Loss of Connection

Generally, lack of communication between parents and their children becomes the main reason for kids to become anxious from a very small age. For instance, there is always a possibility that your child is being bullied by the other kids at school or oppressed in their mind because of social media. Either way, they might be struggling to speak up about this subject because of the uncomfortable environment unintentionally created in the relationship at home.

You never know what’s going on in your child’s head until you take a healthy step to do something about it. Normally, in our society, when a kid is showing signs of anxiety, the parents naturally assume that they’re either shy, overreacting, being rebellious or consider it to be just a phase and that they’ll grow out of it. In some cases, it might be true, no doubt. But more often, these assumptions lead your kids to thinking that you don’t understand what they’re going through, making you the last option for them to reach out for help.

 

A Gradual Build-Up

Not taking this aspect seriously is one of the most common misconceptions of the people in the society. Especially for a kid, uncontrolled anxiety can later lead to gradual weakening of their mental health, as they grow old. Panic attack, OCD, phobias, panic disorder, and social anxiety disorder are other most common outcomes of growing anxiety. Adding to that, social anxiety disorder can be considered as a severe mental illness in some cases that remains for the rest of one's life. Although, social anxiety, specifically, is not something to be taken this easily and your kids have not become socially anxious just yet, but as parents, ignoring the fact that they are slowly becoming anxious during normal day-to-day life is not the way to go.

 

Expert Advice

As a whole, anxiety is not something anyone can take control of, neither is it something they can just ignore. Once it starts, it remains there throughout their life. As parents, you can play your part in generalizing and understanding their perspective in things, and communication with them in a language that they understand.