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allmusic writes: Actually, with all due respect Northstarmom, most researchers or psychologists who specialize in or study shyness, would disagree with you about pushing kids out of their comfort zone. Jerome Kagan, for example, would recommend creating safe social situations, not ones that caused a child great anxiety. Jerome Kagan, for example, would recommend creating safe social situations, not ones that caused a child great anxiety.
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This is just made up. In fact most research shows that the best way to make sure an anxious or shy child stays that way is to rush in and "protect" them from any distress. And Kagan doesn't say "create safe social situations", Kagan says let the kids figure out how to handle the real world.</p>
<p>As an article in Psychology Today says
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In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.</p>
<p>As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They're easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.</p>
<p>While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn't turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the overexcitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their childrendirectly observed by conducting interviews in the homebrought out the worst in them.</p>
<p>A small percentage of children seem almost invulnerable to anxiety from the start. But the overwhelming majority of kids are somewhere in between. For them, overparenting can program the nervous system to create lifelong vulnerability to anxiety and depression.</p>
<p>There is in these studies a lesson for all parents. Those who allow their kids to find a way to deal with life's day-to-day stresses by themselves are helping them develop resilience and coping strategies.
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Sure doesn't sound like "create safe social situations" to me ...</p>