Camp and Kids: Building Confidence and Socializing
For children, summertime often means experiencing summer camps! Depending on your child’s personality and personal experiences so far in their lives, they may react to socializing in a camp either positively or negatively. Whether your child is an extroverted social butterfly, an anxious home-body, or someone who does not mind either, building social skills and confidence applies to all children.
Child therapy can be useful to prepare your child for socializing and dealing with post-camp emotions; especially if you are wondering how the COVID-19 lockdown may have impacted your child's ability to form new relationships.
Two General Child Behaviours that Indicate Difficulty Socializing
Camp can be a very fun and exciting time for kids to create new connections and learn to grow. However, if your child exhibits any of these behaviours, they may benefit from child counselling so they can approach new relationships with ease and maintain healthy relationships after they are formed; in camp or anywhere.
The child that acts out their emotions.
We all want our children to thrive socially. It may be a relief to know your child thrives when talking to others and loves to befriend other children. However, if your child is very outgoing and outspoken, there may be a possibility that they deal with their emotions by acting them out with others.
This can be a good thing; that your child shares, expresses, and wants help dealing with their emotions from others rather than keeping them locked up inside. Though, when coupled with anger, irritability, and a tendency to be easily annoyed, expression can turn into acting out— an unconscious tendency to engage in impulsive behaviours to deal with negative emotions. For instance yelling, hitting, bullying, and more.
The child that never shares their emotions and prefers to be alone.
There is nothing wrong with preferring alone time, needing more alone time than others, or the tendency to think through things before expressing them to others. In fact, many successful leaders and artists have these behavioural tendencies which can be beneficial in various areas of life.
On the other hand, it is important to note differences between healthy alone time and purposeful isolation that negatively impacts one's mental health. If your child expresses dissatisfaction, fear, or even anger at the thought of socializing, they may be dealing with anxiety or low self-esteem that deters them from forming normal relationships.
Self-insertion and over-monitoring is not the Solution
It is difficult to leave socializing in the hands of our young ones. You may ask questions and get vague answers. You may try to help initiate healthy socializing, but nothing seems to change their behaviour.
It is important that children receive a healthy balance between being taken care of while having the freedom to experience things for the first time on their own. A child cannot learn and grow to be a healthy adult with long-lasting relationships without their own trial and error. Yet, some children may need help to even get to the point of being able to engage in healthy trial and error.
Children hide things and lie to their parents all the time. Attempting to monitor their every move and control their interactions may only teach them to become more skilled at hiding and lying.
A healthy alternative is getting a third party, such as a child therapist, who is unrelated to the child and trained to recognize the fine line between normal and abnormal behaviours. If your child needs help socializing or dealing with the aftermath of socializing, child therapy may be right for you.
Consider Therapy
At Healing Voices Psychotherapy, we offer child therapy. Our skilled RP Ishara Ramroop is well-versed in working with children and helping them come out of their shell.
To learn more you can visit our child therapy page and to book your free 15 minute consultation with Ishara click here.
