The Daily Telegraph - Features
We don’t need to pathologise shyness in kids – we need to celebrate it
As someone who once ran a marathon in my bra and pants, and regularly posts pictures of my wobbly bits on social media, it might surprise you to learn that as a child, I was shy. Painfully, breathstoppingly, cheek-blushingly shy. As a little girl, I would dread play dates, and feel sick to my stomach at the prospect of a classmate’s birthday party. What if I arrived too early, or too late, or I wore the wrong thing and passed the parcel the wrong way? Now I can stand on a stage in front of a thousand people without giving it much thought at all – good Lord, I even “enjoy” it – but as a 10-year-old, I would rather crawl into a corner and die than take part in the school play. Similarly, if we ran into one of my mum’s friends on a trip to the supermarket, or the bank (those were the days when there were banks to make trips to), I would hide behind her legs, the idea of having to smile at a fully grown adult I barely knew filling me with abject horror. “Say hello, Bryony, SAY HELLO!” my mother would
At some point in my late teens, it dawned on me that almost everyone felt shy as a child
declare, while trying to prise me off her. But it was no good. My shyness rendered me mute, and my mother agonised over whether or not I would ever be socialised.
Oh, how we laugh about this now.
I’m not sure when, exactly, I went from incapable of speech to incapable of shutting-up, but I think it happened at some point in my late teens or 20s, when it suddenly dawned on me that almost everyone felt shy as a child. And that, actually, most people felt shy as adults, it’s just that they had learnt to hide it better. I was reminded of this last week, when I read that the thing parents are most worried about is their child being shy. According to research carried out on behalf of Stokke, a third of parents of under-threes were concerned that their little ones were too timid. Meanwhile, 31 per cent of mums and dads believe that confidence is the most important characteristic for their children to develop.
I understand these concerns – we are, after all, only as happy as our most miserable child – but I also think it is quite stunningly deranged to expect our children to
come out fully formed humans who are naturally sure of themselves. When you are only 2ft 10in, it’s probably quite normal to find the big wide world a little bit intimidating. It’s just evolution, surely, to be a bit reserved every time you encounter new people, and different situations. There’s an assumption that we “learn” to be afraid as we get older, but actually I think the opposite is true. For me, the world seems far less frightening at 42 than it did at 12. The thing I have had to learn is not fear, but confidence. And confidence, I have realised, is a trick. Very few people have it naturally. Most of us have to work at it. Take, for example, Agatha Christie, a woman you would imagine to have been naturally buoyed by success and talent. And yet she was almost crippled by her lack of confidence. She described herself as experiencing “miserable, horrible, inevitable shyness”. I always remind myself of this when I am hit with that need to hide: if even Agatha Christie felt shy, then almost everyone must be.
I don’t think we need to pathologise shyness. In fact, we probably need to celebrate it. Because the more we tell a child that the way they are feeling is wrong, the more wrong they feel themselves. So if you have a shy child, let them know it’s OK. In doing so, you’re giving them the greatest gift of all: the confidence to be themselves.
It’s no surprise that eating disorders rose in lockdown
It is heartbreaking to hear there was a sharp rise in teenage girls developing eating disorders during Covid. Heartbreaking, and yet perhaps not surprising. For while it is true that eating disorders in young people have been on the rise for many years, analysis by Manchester, Keele and Exeter universities has found they “increased substantially” between 2020 and 2022. It was expected that there would be 2,700 diagnoses of eating disorders among 13 to 16-year-olds in that period, but at 3,862 the figure was 42 per cent higher than forecast.
The analysis also found that the increases were greatest in wealthier areas, though as the brilliant eating disorders campaigner Hope Virgo points out, that doesn’t mean that poorer girls are less likely to suffer from anorexia or bulimia – just that they are less likely to have access to decent GP services.
One of the most interesting things about this research is that it is the first time I have seen eating disorders reported with a modicum of understanding. So often, we assume that anorexia and bulimia are all about wanting to lose weight, and look thinner. But, in fact, they are all about control. These diseases are rooted deep inside us. On the surface, they may be about changing numbers on a scale, but in reality, they are about wresting back a feeling of power over our lives. It makes sense, then, that they should have increased so much during those seemingly endless lockdowns, when control felt in short supply – especially for teenagers about to sit their GCSEs or A-levels, who suddenly found that the most important thing in their lives had been thrown into complete chaos.