Parenting with Social Anxiety

How to help yourself and your kids

“I want to wear this to the park,” my four-year-old said excitedly, holding out a red headband with a pirate emblem on it.

I hesitated for a moment as I imagined the looks we might get from other kids and parents before replying, “Sure, sounds good.”

After we completed our preparations for the short outing, I asked if he was ready to put on his headband.

“No,” he said with a touch of sadness. “People at the park might think I’m funny.”

And right there, in our kitchen on a hot summer day, I died just a little inside. My heart broke not only for my little boy’s self-consciousness, his easy willingness at the tender age of four to deny himself a small pleasure because of fear of what others might think. My heart also broke because my first thought when he asked if he could wear the headband to the park was, “Oh, people might think we’re funny.”

I know this probably seems silly to most people. I mean, what adult cares what a four-year-old wears? But that’s the thing about social anxiety disorder — characterized by pathological shyness and avoidance of social situations in large part due to fear of being judged and evaluated — it makes you do things that don’t make much logical sense. This fear of standing out and perhaps being talked about by faceless others leads people with social anxiety to forego many activities they otherwise might enjoy. I have lived with this fear for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t have a name to put with it until I was clinically diagnosed when I was in my mid-twenties.

As a parent, I’ve learned that it can be particularly challenging to help my children overcome their insecurities and fears. Academic studies suggest that children of parents with social anxiety or panic disorder are more prone to developing anxiety disorders, including social anxiety. While the underpinnings of these linkages remain muddy, the consensus among researchers and mental health practitioners is that both genetics and environment play a role. Thus, it is important for parents suffering with social anxiety to consider how their children might be affected. If you have been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, or if you can relate to the type of anxiety I’ve described here, there are several steps you can take to help your children overcome their potential genetic destiny.

1. Be Aware of How Your Anxiety Can Affect Your Child’s Development

In addition to modeling anxious traits and behaviors that children can learn through observation, parents have substantial control over their children’s environments during their early years. Parents decide when and how their kids interact with the wider world. This can be a problem for children of socially anxious parents, who, because of their own social limitations and fears, often have difficulty introducing their children into organized activities. For example, I had a hard time pushing myself to register my son for preschool, because I knew he would likely resist and taking the necessary steps was difficult for me. Picking up the phone to make that first call was a real obstacle.

So, if you suffer with social anxiety disorder, it’s easy to lock your children, who might already be genetically predisposed to shyness, into the shyness box by constructing limiting and isolating environments. How can you avoid this trap? Start by taking care of yourself. If you haven’t sought help from a psychiatrist or therapist, do it now. If making the phone call to set up an appointment is too daunting, ask your spouse or partner to do it for you. Remember that your anxiety isn’t affecting just you. It is likely having a significant impact on your children as well. Now is the time to act.

2. Know What to Expect When You Seek Help

Your counselor or physician will likely prescribe psychotherapy, potentially in combination with anti-anxiety medication or antidepressants. On the psychotherapy side, one prominent treatment concept is exposure therapy. In the context of social anxiety disorder, exposure can take the form of seemingly routine tasks, such as initiating small talk with a stranger in a grocery store. Alternatively, in attempting to immunize against fear of embarrassment or judgment, some therapists encourage more-contrived exposure scenarios, such as intentionally making a mistake while ordering food at a restaurant. The rationale is that, for the socially anxious person, the potential for embarrassment often underlies fear of interpersonal interactions, so purposely making small mistakes can help you learn that the outcomes are not as catastrophic as imagined.

3. Keep in Mind That Your Therapist Might Not Know Everything

My first therapist encouraged me to practice exposure therapy by introducing myself to at least one stranger per day. He suggested that I walk up to people in a store parking lot and say hello. I could never make myself follow his advice, quickly became discouraged, and viewed it as yet another failure. However, I later learned that my therapist’s plan of action probably wasn’t the best one.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the preferred treatment method for social anxiety disorder. And while exposure can be the behavioral part of CBT, cognitive therapies such as role-playing, simulation, and step-by-step deconstruction of anxiety-inducing situations should come first. Without proper preparation, facing your fears can do more harm than good. Exposure therapy failed to help me because I lacked the necessary tools to navigate such situations.

4. Learn When to Push Your Kids—and When to Pull Back

When children are confronted with new and difficult experiences, it is difficult for any parent to decide when to push and when to pull back. For example, if your child consistently refuses to participate in group activities, like sports or music lessons, it’s difficult to decide if you should force them to try or pull back, wait, and allow them to move at their own pace. Such decisions become more complicated for socially anxious parents because our default is to avoid. For our own reasons, we’re happy to avoid having to do all the things that are necessary to get our children started in activities and to avoid potential embarrassment that might result when a child refuses to participate.

Here is where your experience with treating your anxiety can start to inform your parenting. Just like you might not be prepared for exposure therapy if you haven’t developed the necessary coping strategies, your kids might not be ready to tackle new situations right away.

For example, my son wanted to try tennis lessons. He was particularly attracted to the knocking-over-cones portion of the proceedings. But once he got onto the court with the rest of the kids, he froze up and refused to participate. Gentle coaxing from me and the instructor failed to get him moving, so we left the court and watched from the sidelines. I decided pushing my son wasn’t the right thing to do in this particular situation. What happened next confirmed that I had made the right call.

5. Recognize How Your Experiences Can Help Your Children

Whether you realize it or not, if you have lived with social anxiety disorder for most of your life, you’ve likely developed a toolbox of coping strategies. Perhaps some strategies are more positive than others, but your treatment should help highlight and enhance the best ones. Next, you can pass along to your children some strategies you’ve learned and developed.

The moment we left that first tennis lesson, my son wanted to do the entire warmup routine he had observed the other kids doing. Just the two of us, by ourselves, in the safety of the parking lot. This unexpected twist was an a-ha moment for me. I remembered from my childhood (and my adulthood) that a key component of my fear of new situations and activities is the fear of not knowing what to do and, in turn, fear of doing the wrong thing. I had probably never thought of it in those terms before, but this experience with my son made it very clear.

What I have always done to combat this fear of the unknown is learn as much as I can about a new situation before I make that first leap. Now I’m using this strategy to help my son tackle his fears.

6. Remember the Importance of Getting Familiar with New Situations

I try to help my son become familiar with new activities before we jump into them, though I quickly realized that creating general familiarity wasn’t sufficient. For example, just verbally explaining to him some things he might do at a tennis lesson wasn’t enough. Instead, we practiced the warmup moves we observed so he would be less anxious about not knowing what to do. This type of preparation, practice, and step-by-step deconstruction of intimidating tasks might not be a cure-all — every situation is different — but it’s a good place to start. Learning to combat this fear of the new and unfamiliar, which is a core phobia underlying many stressors that socially anxious people experience, will go a long way toward helping you and your child begin to tackle anxieties.