When my daughter was younger, she loved people. All people. After a strange encounter with a person we didn't know in Walmart sticking her finger in my daughter's mouth, I began wearing Isabella in the Moby when we shopped. Even though I wore her a lot in that wrap, we still had people come up to us every time to compliment her on how beautiful of a baby she was. I know that parents are biased to their babies, but Isabella was a gorgeous baby.
I had my fears before she was born that, for karma reasons, that we were going to end up with one of those ugly babies that you don't even want to look at because they are so unfortunate looking. You know the ones that I am talking about...
Moving on... when people would come up to us to talk to her and compliment her she would smile and show off for them like crazy. Back then she would let pretty much anyone hold her that we allowed. She had no problem being passed around if we were at events. Shortly after Silas was born that all changed...
I am hoping that someone is going to be able to relate to this. My 2.5 year old has a primal fear now of everyone in the world except for a list of about ten people. She isn't just a little scared of strangers. She has a fear to the point of having a panic attack with the 'no breathing' crying. And it doesn't just have to be people trying to touch her; it can be people who are talking to her from afar, people looking in her direction and talking to someone else, etc.
I understand that she is scared and, on one hand, I want her to be afraid of strangers because I don't want her to just blindly go with anyone. However, it would be less embarrassing sometimes if she wouldn't be SO insanely scared. There are times, especially recently, that she won't even go to either one of my sisters. There is a list of about ten people that she is never afraid of. This is a list of both family and non family members, which is weird because I would expect it to only be family or people that we see all the time.
Now, she is initially like this, but she will eventually settle down. It is getting worse though, so I am trying to take her out more places like those mall play places to get her acclimated to other people, especially other children. I don't know if it is working or not, but she does seem to be happier now when we show up at those places than when we first started going. We don't hang out with a lot of people who have kids of similar ages and we realized when Silas and Addison started getting old enough to play with Isabella that she needed to be taught how to act around other kids. Until then she had been effectively an only child and had no idea how to interact with other kids. We started taking her to mall play places just to have her around kids. She didn't originally love it but now she asks for it. We are making progress.
I am hoping that we can avoid the crazy 'stranger danger' with Silas because he is the total opposite right now. I think that, if given the chance, he would leave with strangers and be completely fine. He can not eat out at restaurants because he is too busy trying to flirt with women at other tables, or trying to wave down people near us, etc. He loves talking to people and when people talk to him. He really is ultimately super happy if there is at least one person talking to him and he will show off completely for anyone.
Has anyone else been through this and have any suggestions on how to move past it?
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