Would you like to know how to help us shy child participate in school? We've
got some ideas for you today.
When you want to help your child participate in
something, whether it's school or some extracurricular activities or even
things that the family is doing, I think it's important first, to do a little
diagnostic work, okay? Because there's a lot of reasons why children might not be
participating fully. In school for example, we know that vision problems or
hearing problems or other kinds of social issues can get in the way of a
child's participating. So you want to make sure that you do a nice screening
and figure out exactly what's going on with your child. If they haven't been
screened for vision and hearing, make sure that that happens,
so that ,you can rule those things out. another great thing would be to form an
Alliance with that teacher. Get more information and see if you can figure
out just what's going on. Now, shyness specifically is a form of anxiety. There
are two elements to anxiety. And these two elements are the brain element and
the mind element. Your brain isn't your mind any more than your little finger is
your mind. It's part of your body. It's an organ in your head and it operates
according to physiological principles. We know for example, that the
fight-or-flight response in your brain is at the basis of anxiety. And this is a
part of your brain that's in charge of monitoring for threats.
Anytime it picks up on a threat, it kicks chemicals into your bloodstream that
causes you to go into the fight-or-flight mode. This isn't the
foundation of anxiety. So, there's that brain component and there's things that
we can do to calm down the chemistry, but then there's the mind component. Now your
mind is you, it's the thinker, the agent. It's the person that's inside of that
body. Your mind has both a conscious and the subconscious. Your conscious,
is the part that you're aware of. Consciousness means awareness. Sub-
conscious, sub means below, like, subway, submarine, subconscious below awareness.
You're not aware of what's going on in the sub conscious mind. And this is
typically where anxiety originates. Here's how it works.
There is a common belief in the subconscious mind that supports every
fear or anxiety. And that belief is, I can't handle it. Yeah, that's true for
adults, it's true for kids as well. This belief subconsciously that we can't
handle something, is what triggers the threat mechanism that gets our brain
fired up and then we give in to the fight-or-flight and the chemical party
that happens with that. So, just think about this whole problem as having those
two elements. There's the brain apart that's triggering chemicals into the
bloodstream. There's the mind part, that's actually
triggering the brain to trigger the chemicals into the bloodstream. So we're
going to address both of those as we talk about our kids and how we're going
to help them to participate in something that's causing this fight-or-flight
response for them. Now, let's talk about one of the classics. One of the classic
models for anxiety including shyness, is the approach avoidance model. Now, this is
a conflict that comes up when we want something and so that's the approach
part of it and we don't want it because of our fear or anxiety. That's the
avoidance part of it. The short version is, your child and you for that matter,
have reasons to do something and you have reasons to not do something, that
same thing. This is that approach avoidance conflict that I was talking
about. We need to overcome the avoidance, and support the approach, if there's
something that we want our kids to do. I have to tell you an example of one of my
colleagues who was working with a young man, who's about age 12-13 years old and
he was in the Boy Scout program, trying to earn a merit badge,
that required swimming. And this kid was afraid of the water.
What's his approach-avoidance-conflict? His approach, is that he wants the merit
badge, his avoidance is, he's afraid of the water, so, he's stuck in this place of
anxiety, until he overcomes the avoidance with the approach. Alright? So my
colleague who's a psychologist was working with him and in the office he
was giving him geared up for him prepared for, actually facing this fear
that he has. Now, incidentally let me insert this here, when we avoid something,
it gives us an immediate feeling of relief but in the long run it actually
increases our anxiety about that thing. Why? Because of fuzzy logic, there's a
little piece in our mind that says, "Oh!, that thing really must be dangerous
because look how much better I feel and I avoid it". Do you see how that's fuzzy
logic? But our mind will do that and actually reinforce the fear and the
avoidance response because we feel so much better when we do, in the short run.
In the long run, it increases anxiety. What if we approach that thing? If we
approach that thing, our anxiety increases in the short run and then
decreases in the long run as we find out that we can actually handle it. Remember
the belief at the root of every fear is that "I can't handle it". When we debunk
that myth and we find out we can actually handle it, our fear decreases. So
approaching something that we fear increases our anxiety initially but
decreases it long term because we convinced ourselves that we can handle it.
So there's this dilemma that we have, we feel better when we avoid something,
at first, but that increases our fear. We feel worse when we approach something at
first, but we feel better in the long run. Helping our kids to understand that
sometimes as part of the battle, but we also need to address the approach
avoidance. Let's go back to our friend who wanted to swim to get his merit badge,
okay? but he's afraid of the water. My colleague eventually got him to the
point where he came to the pool, with his psychologist. They're standing there on
the side of the pool he says you don't have to get in. I just want you to be
there and start facing you know, the environment and get used to it. Well,
unbeknownst to this kid, the psychologist had a Ziploc bag in his pocket, that
inside of the bag, was a $50 bill and a rock. And he had
zipped it sealed so that it was ready. You can see what's coming, can't you? As
they're standing there on the side of the pool, my colleague takes the bag,
flips it out into the water. About five feet of water. It sinks right to the
bottom. There's a rock in there. And this kid is watching like, "what? this is...yeah,
that 50 dollar bill, it's yours, if you want to go, get it." What did he do? He
just increased the approach, pulled-- by fifty bucks. He had worked this out with
the kids parents beforehand. Now, he's still avoiding the water because he
fears it, but there's a stronger pull to go there because of the fifty bucks.
Well, what happened? he went after him. He already wanted to, that just overcame the
hump, the approach avoidance barrier, if you want to call it that. And he was able
to get in the water. Retrieve the fifty dollars, which was a great
experience for the kid. But what did he learn in the process? That he can handle
it. So, I'll give you four steps that you can
apply to address the approach avoidance thing with your child. Step number one,
give them a challenge. Give them a challenge that they can handle. You know
they can handle it. They're not quite sure yet if they can. We're going to
address that belief head on. Give them a challenge that they can handle. Step
number two, you have to take yourself out of the rescue loop. You know what I'm
talking about, don't you? Because when you ask your child to do
something that's hard for them, what's your natural tendency is burnt. Oh you
want to take care of them, you want to help them, you want to protect them. From
the fear that they're going to be experiencing. Take yourself out of the
rescue loop. Step number three, let the consequences happen that come with their
choice. Okay? They're going to choose to either approach
it or avoid it. You let the consequences happen. Do not steal this learning
opportunity from your children. And then step four, you affirm their courage by
giving them the same task again. Whether they blow it or not, you're going to give
them another shot at it. I had a family who was working with their young son on
speaking, okay and this is a special form of shyness that we call selective mutism.
And this child would talk to his friends and his brothers and sisters but
never said a word at school or in public anywhere.
So, to get them to participate in this, let's just take a look at these four
steps the way that this family applied them. The task, the challenge that they
gave this child was to order his own ice cream. They were going out to an ice
cream shop everybody gets to order their own they get to have and enjoy whatever
they order. Now normally this kid would defer. No, he's not going to talk to
anybody and mom would rescue him by ordering for him, right? So, we set this
behavioral experiment up for the ice cream shop. They went in, the kid knows, he
gets to have whatever he orders. They go through each of the kids and mom and dad
now order what they want. It's his turn. What does he do? He clams up, looks at mom,
right? because he's shy. He's nervous, right? Mom was awesome. One step to take
yourself out of the rescuing loop. She did beautifully, as she just
waited and patiently and didn't remind him. Don't remind, we call it reminding,
they call it nagging, right? I'm not going do that. So she just patiently waited for
him to do whatever he was going to do. Approach, avoid, it's up to you. Now he's
going to feel better initially by avoiding it because that gives him some relief
but in the long term, it's not going to help, is it? He didn't order. Mom paid for the
things that were ordered. Everyone enjoyed what they had ordered, this
little boy, got none. Which is sad, right? Now use empathy with that. Connect with
them. "Oh buddy, you've decided that that's you wish you would have ordered it." You
know, you're going to connect with him in an emphatic way not in an i-told-you-so way
let's not go there. But then what step two, so we're
going to let the consequence fall. That's step three. Step four, is to affirm his
courage by giving him the same task again. Not right now, but maybe tomorrow
or the next day. We're going to try this again. Now you get to have anything that
you order. Do you see? Setting up the same thing, he gets to learn from his
experience and overcome that fear so that he can not let the shyness rule his
life anymore. So I'm curious, how did you like today's
video? I'd really like to hear from you. Put some comments down below or click a
thumbs up if you liked it. We'll be back with more content tomorrow. If you have
ideas about what you want us to cover, send me a message.