| Shyness refers to wariness and anxiety in the face of social novelty and perceived social-evaluation and is characterized by an approach-avoidance conflict in such situations.Shyness in early childhood is related to the shortage of social skills.Everlasting shyness may lead to young children's adjustment difficulties when starting kindergarten or school,as well as social anxiety disorder and some other kinds of problems in childhood.Family circumstance has significant influence on shyness of young children,which includes of parents' personality and temperament,parenting style and family atmosphere.In order to understand the children's shyness behavior and psychological characteristics,the development of shyness,parents' attitude and coping strategies and effect more deeply from the standpoints of parents,Study 1 collected the data of 30 shy children's parent(s)through interview.Data was analyzed by conducting a qualitative analyze and results are as follows:1.Shy children are commonly introverted,timid and have high self-esteem and some other personalities or temperament.When exposed to the context of shyness,in addition to bowing and hiding behind the adults,shy children have situational difference.The difference is typically reflected like they are more relaxed in the environment which is assessed as safe and relax.However,they tend to be shy when meeting unfamiliar social objects in unfamiliar environment.2.Factors influencing the children's shyness consists of positive factors and negative factors.Positive factors are those which can improve the shyness,such as contacting more open environment and expanding children's experience and canceling factors that may have adverse effect.Negative factors include family members'personality,parenting style,adverse interaction conditions,special events and bad family atmosphere interaction.In the aspect of parenting style,grandparenting brings about the most negative effect.3.The parents' attitude towards the shyness of the children is mainly expressed as three components,which are fear and dissatisfaction,cognition and thinking,introspection and self accusation.At the same time,the attitude of parents also changes with the development of children's shyness.The most typical example is that the attitude varies from initial radical way to a more peaceful one.But most parents are still eager to look forward to relieve or solve the problem of their children's shyness.4.The strategies used by parents in the face of young children's shyness include three kinds of components,which are the immediate strategy,the delay strategy and other strategies.Immediate strategy includes direct preaching,alternative social and other strategies.Delay strategy includes post lecture,actively seeking ways to change the social environment of children.Not taking any strategy refers to no intervene.By evaluating the effect,changing the social environment of children is more effective.And among direct preaching,commanding and demanding,social substitute and not taking any strategy have the worst effect.Based on the conclusion of study 1,it is found that according to the parents,in addition to the personality factors,adverse cognitive shy children's adverse cognition to social purposes,the process and the result can lead to the fact that shy children don't want to and are not good at interact with people.At the same time,there is strong desire to improve the situation among parents.However,the effect of parents'strategy is quite limited.Hence,by reviewing previous research on intervention studies for children with anxiety disorder and social withdrawal children,study 2 designed and conducted an intervention program combining with social information processing theory--Mimosa Program,for shy children based on the conclusion in study 1 and previous conclusion and experience from intervention studies for children with anxiety disorder and social withdraw.The goal of this program is to improve social competence and skills of shy children based on social information processing theory through teaching,modeling,cooperative games and some other kinds of ways.In study 2,25 shy children were recruited to participant in this research,which were randomly divided into either intervention group or control group.Through assessing level of shyness,social competence and reticence-wariness of shy children who participant in the research,it is found that:1.Compared with the control group,the intervention group was significantly improved in the level of reticence-wariness was significantly decreased after the intervention training.2.As for the intervention group,there was a significant improvement in the level of social competence compared with the baseline before the intervention,and the level of reticence-wariness was significantly decreased compared with the baseline level.3.The post-test results of intervention group indicated that compared with youngest children,oldest children's social competence improved more and reticence-wariness decreased more.But no significant different has been found between youngest group and less younger group.4.Results of teachers' evaluating of the children's level of shyness show that compared with control group,level of shyness of children from post-test scores of intervention group were also significantly lower than that of pretest.However,no significant difference was found in control group.According to the above results,based on social information processing theory,Mimosa Program with the aim of improving the social competence of shy children has a good effect.And it is more suitable for the oldest children in a kindergarten,which enhanced the use of social information processing theory theoretically and practically. |
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