Wednesday 29 April 2020

Worried about raising a socially awkward kid


I'm expecting and I have a brand new anxiety to bother with since all the old anxieties weren't enough.My husband and I have both been weirdoes all our lives. We've never belonged with anyone but each other, not even our families all that much. He had some trauma as a teenager which took a lot of time to get over, and I had mental illnesses all through my teens and early twenties.So we didn't really learn to socialize and even when we do, we aren't very good at it. We have some friends. I am very good at being social in a superficial way, so I have a lot of acquaintances but few friends.Neither of us are anxious about being social, we rather like people and social situations. We just aren't very good at it. We work hard at this stuff and we even took up therapy, but really, it doesn't feel like a skill that can be taught. It's just something we can get better at with practice, but we don't really have many people to practice with, and the current situation doesn't help. Also my mental health issues means it takes me a lot of time to finish my work, and it's difficult to make time to socialize in general. I also cut out a lot of the toxic people in my life, so my social circle has become much smaller.Anyway we're expecting and we are very happy. We are very confident for the most part. We have a lot of help from our families and both our moms have great skills with raising kids as they are educators, so most things don't bother us.The thing that is currently on my mind is that our lack of social life might end up affecting our kids. We aren't great at making people like us and hang out with us repeatedly. We also don't have great social skills despite our efforts, and worry we'll be terrible at helping our kids in social situations. We don't want people to treat our kids differently because of us, and we don't want our kids copying our bad social behaviors.We are willing to put in effort if we need to to become better, but we don't know what to do or where to go to learn to be better or to even learn what we're doing wrong. I see a therapist for mental health issues and she isn't sure how to help me. We read books, and it helps some, but how much can a book tell you how to talk to people?Is this a big deal as a parent? My parents and his are incredibly social and everyone loves them, so that seems like "ideal parent qualities" to both of us.It's also not a hereditary issue like ASD we have, so I'm not worried about passing it on. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2KMTYRi

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