7 Parenting Tips To Help Children Manage Social Anxiety

Vijendra Sinh
4 min readNov 26, 2019

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Social anxiety is one of the most prevalent stress in today’s smart kids. It is one of the major reasons children are afraid to make mistakes or fail. They are scared to be embarrassed in front of people and remain fearful.

What Is Social Anxiety?

It is the fear of social circumstances that involve communication with different people. It is the anxiety of being negatively judged and evaluated by alike people.

A pervasive disorder that causes agitation in all areas of a person’s life is social anxiety. Stressful life experiences and environmental influences trigger it.

So how will you (parents) help your children to emerge from such trauma? Don’t worry, below parenting tips will assist you.

Tips to Help Children Manage Social Anxiety

1. Talk and connect with your kids:

Sit with your kid, and listen to their pressing worries. Talk about social communication, people’s reactions, how to avoid it, what are the things to neglect, etc.

Connect with children and tackle the situation in a playful manner. Playfulness makes your kid relaxed and open to share things.

Show the acceptance of a child’s feelings and emotions provide them confidence. They feel empathize and safe.

2. Teach basic social skills to kids:

Few skills ought to be taught to children, which include- polite response to chit chats, avoiding unnecessary involvement in debate or fights, spending sufficient hours on social media platforms (disallowing excessive time), and much more.

Educate teens that it is not necessary to give a reply to every comment or each post and not to take self-blame of others’ shared posts. Few things are simply neglected.

3. Do not create social anxiety by letting kids know about cyber crooks:

It is a parent’s responsibility to build a bridge of trust so that adolescents can express their emotions to you. It is essential to aware kids regarding cybercrime, crooks, and other darker sides of the internet, but it doesn’t mean that they remain terrified and stop trusting and talking with anyone.

Also, educate teens — how to remain safe on online platforms and ways to come out from traps or mistakes. Ensure that parents are always by the child’s side to protect them.

4. Child monitoring is essential:

If your children are exposed to the digital world, make sure you supervise their online activities.

you can keep a close watch on a child’s digital tasks to help them from various causes like:

Inappropriate content

Unwanted applications

Excessive screen time

In an emergency

In locating teen’s whereabouts, etc

Do not allow kids to spend more time on social media portals, which can cause social anxiety and spoil their personal life.

5. Prepare kids with effective strategies to deal with the feelings of social awkwardness:

One of the most helpful parenting tips to social anxiety is to accept things. Assure your child that it is fine to feel socially awkward sometimes. Ask them to deal with such situations tactfully. Respond to questions smartly and interact with people confidently.

Try out various options like if feeling uncomfortable and bored at the party, hang out with school friends, and have some refreshments.

6. Child should not be pushed to perform:

Social anxiety is associated with perfectionism. Fear of not achieving goal, fear of shame and disgust in front of others, fear of failure, etc. thoughts provokes in child’s mind.

Help children to focus on process instead of goals. Engage them in interesting activities like playing real sports, hearing them playing the piano, etc.

Teach kids to compare their performance with themselves and not with others. Provide techniques to improve them and learn from the previous day’s mistakes.

7. Learn when to step in and step back:

This parenting tip works depending on child’s maturity level. If your kid is smart enough to understand when to step in and when to step back, it will be easy for them to handle social anxiety.

Say, for instance, if any of your child’s friends trying to abuse him on social media portal, then act on such posts calmly and respond smartly. This is a tricky technique that needs intervention, according to the situation.

So let your kid learn such skills that make them strong enough to manage any situation like social anxiety.

In wrapping up, we assure your child’s digital security with parental control application. As children are more conscious of virtual life, they are more likely to engage in depression, and hence, it is necessary to keep them safe.

Download one of the most trustworthy Parental Control App - Bit Guardian Parental Control for a healthy online life of teens.

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Vijendra Sinh

A parental control app is a special software designed for parents to control how kids use their devices. https://blog.bit-guardian.com