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How to Help a Child with Social Anxiety

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Social anxiety is usually described as Social Anxiety Disorder characterized by a lack of maintaining social relationships (i.e., meeting with new people or initiating a conversation in social environments). The person with social anxiety fears being judged or embarrassed in front of people.

Such people are ordinarily afraid to be negatively judged by other people, which eventually affects their ability to positively interact with people and perform daily life functions like shopping, going with friends and family, and participating in social events in a usual manner.

It is pretty normal to become occasionally anxious in social situations. Although the typical, expected, and ordinary social situations always provoke anxiety and fear in persons with social anxiety, individuals with Social Anxiety know that their fear is unreasonable and undefined.

Teenagers with social anxiety usually experience physical anxiety symptoms, including palpitations in the heart, nausea, vomiting, or shortness of breath when encountering social situations that demand the need to meet with new people. Daily households, curricular, co-curricular activities, and friendships can be poorly affected if your child is experiencing difficulties in various aspects of his or her life.

How to Help a Child with Social Anxiety?

Fortunately, many ways can help teenagers to overcome their social anxiety. Effectively overcoming social anxiety does not result overnight. The primary and first step is to be willing to do something regarding the problem and not just simply accept it as a truth. When your teen is ready to do something to overcome his anxiety try the following tips to help your child defeat social anxiety disorder.

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Expose Your Child to Social Situations

Even though it may be appealing to be overprotective and over-sensitive about your child, it is an essential element to give them a self-confidence-building experience to face the situation that brings them feelings of anxiety.

Slowly exposing your child to social experiences will help them build a positive image and help them stop shaking from anxiety. It will further result in building the social skills to strengthen social relationships

It will innately engage some pushing ahead of his comfort zone, but that must, of course, be approached in a considered way. A therapist can direct this, and your participation as a parent is an essential element.

Practice Breathing Exercises

A stressful situation may have a harmful effect on breathing patterns, resulting in different types of breathing problems. Under a complete stress situation, the individual may feel dizziness, shallow breathing, and a feeling of suffocation, faintness, and perplexity or heart palpitations.

Teach your child different types of breathing exercises to improve their breathing patterns. Simple breathing exercises are effective against social anxiety and must be practiced regularly.

Whereas sitting up straight, have your child get a deep breath from the nose and grip it for four seconds. After that, they should gradually release the respiration throughout the mouth whereas mentally counting to ten. Do the pattern a minimum of three times again.

When anxiety is not triggered, putting it into practice helps reinforce the learned procedure.

Listen and Offer Advice

Your child is comfortable sharing their feelings, listening carefully, and providing them with appropriate advice. Let them know that feeling nervous sometimes is normal and happens with every other teenager.

Jog the memory of how he has dealt well in the past with complicated situations, and let him recognize that you have assurance in his ability to deal with them.

Face Your Fear on Heads

Avoiding difficult situations is not the best solution to overcome social anxiety for those below 18 years with social anxiety. If they do not do this, there’s a danger of becoming adults with social anxiety.

Desensitization is the practical and tactical cognitive therapy that gives visible results. By revealing anxiety-triggering situations or objects and allowing them to work over the panic, the child will face their suspicions. Continue practice, endurance and repetitions are significant.

Fight Negative Self Talks

It is essential to help your child to check their inner self-image. The more they talk negatively about their performance in social situations, the truth it will be. There is an enormous effect on the words we speak. And for teenagers experiencing social anxiety, it can be natural to recollect past situations employing a negative lens.

Be your child’s main cheerleader. They may not be competent to defend against the urge to beat them up over something they did not moderately exercise. But you can champ them and assist them in building up an alternate self-image through constructive reinforcement.

Final Verdict

A crude social anxiety disorder in adolescence may lead to increased danger of additional mental health problems later on in life, such as eating disorders, substance abuse, stress, depression, and even thoughts of suicide. So, it’s pretty important to help your child overcome this serious anxiety problem. We hope the above points will help you fight SAD.

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