I have a child with social anxiety.
A good friend of mine made the observation years ago when he was about 5 years old.
I knew my child had anxiety and showed signs from an even earlier age of having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, like his older sister. I knew he got overwhelmed in group situations and thought he would outgrow this as he got older.
When he turned 6, I witnessed his social anxiety becoming worse rather than improving like I had expected.
My oldest child did not have anxiety around people at a young age but had no real interest in his same age peers until he turned 6. At 6, he became social, interested in playing with other kids and leaving my side to do so.
I figured my youngest would be ready for more interactions with his peers by age 6 or so.
Instead, his anxiety grew.
We sought a variety of help for him in a variety of sources.
His OCD became more pronounced as well and we realized he was not just copying his older sister’s behavior and that he truly did suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and needed treatment for that. We also got him enrolled in pediatric Occupational Therapy to help his sensory integration issues along with his anxiety.
Despite all of these efforts with continued therapy with the OCD specialist as well as attending OT weekly along with diet changes and a host of other alternative modalities, his social anxiety still created big challenges for an almost 8 year old child who really wanted more friends but struggled with interacting with new kids.
I am always looking to other unschoolers for ideas an inspirations. I have been on this home/unschooling journey for many years but always seek ideas, support and inspiration from others along the journey. It is a continual process of figuring out what works best for my children.
I saw unschooling parents of teens posting about looking for other teens to play Minecraft online.
Light bulb!
My son enjoyed Minecraft and my oldest was able to set him up with a private server where only people you invite can join you online for groupMinecraft play. After talking to my son about it, I posted a message to the unschooling list, one where I had recently met many people after attending 2 different unschooling events.
The first person to respond was someone I had roomed with at The Unschooling Summit in NY state in April of 2016. We had not met before the summit but both of us were looking to share room costs to attend the summit. I traveled from NC and she from Ohio and We met in NY state at the summit and enjoyed each other’s company. We talked about our children. I never realized her oldest daughter and my youngest son would someday become best friends.
My son and her daughter began playing on the private Minecraft server together just after Christmas in December of 2016- January 2017. They played for hours at a time nearly every day and got along wonderfully!
After a week or so, they had their first fight, disagreement, argument. I can not recall the first one, but over time, these disagreements became the biggest learning opportunity for my son. We had discussions and helped him with navigating “social skills” with interacting with his friend. We listened to his feelings and frustrations. We guided him in hearing her feelings and frustrations. We facilitated conflict resolution and negotiations, something that became even more important when other people joined on the private server.
My son turned 8 in early January of 2017 and for the first time in his life, he had a really good friend who was a lot like him and who he could spend countless hours of time with, online and with skype and FaceTime.
Both of these children are very intense and feel deeply. There were many conservations that began with…
“She is not my friend anymore!”
Or…
“I don’t think she will ever want to be my friend again!”
I texted with the mom, my friend, and we shared information about our children and how we were guiding them and assisting them in navigating this online friendship. Over time, I began to see how much this online friendship and online game play was really helping my son learn social skills and learn what it means to be a friend and to have a best friend.
I recall asking my son last winter, when the friendship was new, “would it be fun to meet her in person?”
His reply at that time was,
“What would we do?”
Having an online gaming friendship, I suppose he could not imagine what they would do in person with each other since all they had ever done was online gaming.
Now, here we are over a year later, and this friendship has grown so much. She even attended his 9th birthday party via skype on the iPad.
My son has also been attending a twice monthly local game day at a local game store. I have seen his ability to interact with other children at the game day improve and his confidence grow. I attribute most of his improvements to his online friendship. A few local friends also have joined in on the online gaming with his long distance friend. And navigating online interaction with a small group has helped him dealing with conflict with a group of people, and juggling different personalities and different ideas and interests.
Now we are going to meet up with his online friend in person at an Unschooling event. He is now very excited about meeting his new friend in person and attending this conference with a friend. We attended our first family unschooling conference in September of 2016 but it was a struggle for my youngest to interact with the other kids his age. His OCD was flaring severely at the time and so he was in a very difficult place for the conference. Now, he is in a better place. We have done a lot to help his OCD as well including him starting on medication, same medication that greatly helped his sister and doing work with the therapist who specialized in OCD therapy. With the improvements in his OCD, I have also seen improvements in his social anxiety. And having this online friendship has given him a safe opportunity to practice the social skills needed to build and maintain a friendship.
He spends many hours with her online and over Skype and so when he doesn’t use his headphones, it is like his online friends are right here in our home as we here them interact. Yesterday, we had to go on errands, take his sister to theater and go to the store. He took his “old iPhone” that only has internet with WiFi- or connecting to my hotspot. He chatted with his friend over the iPhone while we shopped at Aldi. He had on earbuds, that kept falling out of his small ears, he forgot to bring his awesome gaming headphones he had gotten for Christmas.
Here we are walking around Aldi, me shopping and getting items I needed quickly while my daughter was in theater and here is my 9 year old son with earbuds carrying his iPhone and having a sophisticated conversation with his friend as we walked all around the store. I chuckled to myself as I saw people look at him, looking like a small business man on his phone in a public place. I imagined what people were thinking and thought of saying something once or twice but instead choose not to and quietly enjoyed the experience by myself. I reminded him a few times to lower his voice, with headphones or earbuds, he usually doesn’t realize how loud he talks and he has a very loud voice. When we fist entered the store, I worried about what other people would think and would his talking be disruptive. But I only worried that for a second, realizing it doesn’t matter what other people think. ,People, Adults, talk all the time on their phones while shopping and in public places, so why couldn’t my son do the same. We had to be out of the house for several hours to run errands and take his sister to an event, why couldn’t’ he interact with his friend while we did these things. I smiled to myself remembering how much this 9 year old used to struggle with social situations, and how he used to tell me with strong emotions how he just wanted some friends.
He has come such a long way in a year and I know both his OCD therapist, and OT along with medication and the other modalities and choices we have made (including Tae Kwon Do, which I will save for another post) to improve his health have played a part.
Yet, i give much credit to his growth in social skills to this online friendship and the opportunity it provided us to guide him and help him learn the skills he needed to build a lasting friendship.
I took my son to a homeschool group hike meet up last week. This is something we have done in the past but a big group of mostly people he has never met was never a good fit for him. My son loves hikes and I learned years ago when we did go to a homeschool park day meet up, that the best thing for him was to first go for a quiet hike just me and him or at least swing on the swing first before even attempting to interact with anyone else. As an OT, I knew these sensory and proprioceptive activities were calming and organizing for him.
We Got out of the car to meet the other people and a woman with 2 young girls and a puppy was there. I began talking to her.
Dogs are magic for my two kids with OCD.
Jason immediately bonded with the dog. We walked with the group, my son walking with me, and stopping to interact with the dog. I talked to other moms. Jason didn’t talk to other kids at that point but his usually personal out loud commentators on the speed everyone was walking and how this walk was not really a hike, there were no hills.
After the long beautiful walk around the lake including a short stop by a beach area, we returned to the playground area where we had met. Jason spent time with the dog again and I followed him to explore the climbing structures. They were different ones then we had encountered in other parks and they had a spinning sit, he enjoys spinning. Again, more sensory input to help calm his anxiety.
He was by himself on top of a play structure and I head some of the kids, mostly 9 year old girls say they were going to play a tag game.
“Jason, do you want to join them in the tag game?”
“Sure.”
Wow!
But he stayed up on top of the play structure. I instructed him to come down from the structure and then to join the kids where they were gathering nearby in a small group. I had to tell him to go stand with the other kids. Yet, once I did that, I did not need to guide him anymore!
I was able to engage in lengthy conversations with the other moms and I even had to look around to find him several times! It was a small group of about 6-8 kids mostly 9 age girls, some younger siblings, 1 other 9 year old boy and some girls looked a little older than 9. It was a perfect fit for him! He played for several hours with them. At one point, he ran to me and past me, telling me,
“Mom, I have to go to the bathroom. It’s over there”, he pointed.
And he added, “I am team captain!”
Child-led Learning 