For a growing child, shyness can be a handicap as it would mean he has trouble making friends and is often excluded from events and parties. So, what can parents do to help their child overcome shyness?

According to an article titled How to Help Your Shy Child by Jacqueline Burt Wang published in parents.com, some ways through which parents can help their shy child to become independent and more socially savvy is by having her practise certain skills such as:

• Letting her answer the phone.
  
• Making her order a meal in the restaurant.
  
• Letting her hand over the money to the cashier at a grocery store or any similar place.
  
• Encouraging her to call a friend.
  
• Teaching her to say please and thank you to strangers who are safe to talk to.
  

The child can also be made to observe parents in situations where they are interacting with their friends. This encourages the child to try the same with her friends.

Indiaparenting.com suggests other ways like having more get-togethers at home, not labelling the child as shy and letting her speak at public platforms, provided she is ready for it.

Shy children also have some common traits that parents need to recognise, says WebMD in one of its articles. “Once you recognise these natural behaviours, you can work with them instead of against them,” says Bernardo Carducci, PhD, director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast.

For more advice on how to help a shy child, please flip through the pages of this ClipBook, which contains the best curated links on the subject from across the web!