Shyness

Shyness

The tendency to avoid or be timid or subdued with unfamiliar children or adults.

Shyness first appears around the first birthday, when the capacity to experience fear to discrepant events matures. During the first year or two children raised under most family circumstances who are extremely shy behave this way because of a temperamental bias to react with withdrawal to unfamiliar events. When the unfamiliar event is meeting a stranger, the child is called shy. However, as children grow, other reasons for shyness emerge and many five and six-year-old children can show shyness without any special temperamental predisposition. Some children are shy because they feel that they are physically unattractive, others are shy because they have failed to attain proper achievement levels in school, and other children are shy because of shame over aspects of their family, including poverty or mental illness.

Kenneth Rubin of the University of Maryland studies shyness in children and notes that some children appear shy because they prefer to play alone but these children are not anxious over interacting with other children. They merely prefer what Rubin calls autonomous play. Other children play alone because they are anxious. Rubin calls these children reticent, and their apparent shyness is due to apprehension and uncertainty over interacting with other children. The vast majority of children who are extremely shy in the first five or six years of life will conquer their shyness and by the time they are adolescents will not be particularly shy. A small proportion, perhaps no more than 10%, of children who are extremely shy in the preschool years will retain this quality and have an introverted personality style during adolescence.

Psychological research that follows large numbers of children from very early childhood to adulthood has found that a tendency to be shy with others is one of the most stable traits that is preserved from the first three of four years of life through young adulthood. Shyness is much more stable from age three through age twenty, than aggressive behavior, tantrums, a concern with neatness, and a large number of other traits.