Is Being At Ease Socially Born or Bred?

Parents have so many decisions to make, every single day, that may (or may not) affect how their child develops – and that’s just the conscious stuff.

The fact is, young children learn by mimicking those around them – and that is, for the most part, in the early years, you, as their parents.

Everything you do and say, whether you intend it or not, is altering your child’s perception and understanding of the world.

In this article, I want to talk about helping your child become at ease in social events, and I write this not as a parent (because I’m not one, and probably never will be at this stage), but as an adult who can look back and see what might have contributed to my own social unease.

And I think there are a number of factors that contributed to this.

Nature vs. Nurture

This is still a hotly debated topic – how much of who we are is predetermined by genetics and how much is due to the environment in which we grow up?

It seems there is no hard-and-fast answer to this, but since it’s unlikely it’s either 100% nature or 100% nurture, then it’s almost certain that it’s somewhere in the middle, but where, exactly, is unclear, and it will obviously vary from person to person.

Suffice it to say that there may be elements I was born with (and all children are born with) that might have determined or, at least, predisposed me to introvert or extravert tendencies, which encompasses whether you are able to be comfortable or not in social gatherings.

Family Size

I come from a very small family – I am an only child, an only grandchild, and an only nephew.

My mother had one sister – divorced but with a partner, and no children – while my father was effectively an only child too (although he had apparently had a brother who died during childhood that he never ever mentioned to me).

My grandparents had few siblings between them too.

I was surrounded, as a child, by people I was told to call “auntie”, but as I discovered later on in life, most of those ladies were not actually blood relatives at all.

And all of this means I was not used, as a child, to being surrounded by lots of people.

Family Events

Following on from the above, there were few formal family gatherings.

My maternal grandparents used to visit two or three times a week, for dinner and to play cards or dominos afterward, but I didn’t see other members of my family that often.

There was a larger (and I use the word loosely here) gathering at Christmas, but by most people’s standards, it was still a small affair.

Again, then, I grew up rarely having to deal with people outside my immediate, small circle.

My Parents’ Activities

Neither my mum nor my dad were huge social animals – they went out for dinner occasionally, either with my grandparents or with one or two of their friends – but that was about it.

I was brought up in an era when parents didn’t insist on dragging their children with them wherever they went, as is often the case these days, because it simply wasn’t done back then.

Although I did spend time at an aunt’s house occasionally, I cannot recall ever being left at home with a babysitter – my parents more or less gave up whatever social life they had once had (which mainly consisted of going to either a snooker club or a golf club).

So perhaps this taught me that staying at home most of the time was how people lived – and it’s certainly how I’ve lived since 2005 when I moved to the USA. My late wife and I, for the first two years, went out about every three months for a shopping run, and from 2007 onwards, we simply didn’t leave our property at all, buying everything online.

Family Friends

I only really recall my parents having two friends they ever went out with – one was a couple my father had known (and I’m not sure how they’d met), and I think one of them was one of my godparents, and the other couple were actually customers of my father’s business (and, again, I’m not sure how they met either).

Beyond that, they never really talked about any of the friends they may or may not have had prior to my arrival on the scene, and I do not remember going out or meeting anybody other than the two couples I mentioned.

So, this is another factor in my not being used to being with people outside my immediate family.

Social Events

As I mentioned above, my parents rarely attended these, other than the occasional dinners with friends and family.

But parties – they were pretty much non-existent. And in fact, my father not only didn’t enjoy going out that much (he hated vacations with a vengeance) but also had few interests other than his business.

The only type of event they ever seemed to attend was the annual Ladies’ Night – because my father was a freemason.

So, once a year, they would get all dressed up – it was a black tie affair – and go to the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool for the dinner dance (which went on until shortly after the early morning breakfast was served around 2:00am – yes, it was a long event).

When I was about 11 or 12, I attended one of these dinners too, having got special permission to leave school for the night, because my father was the Worshipful Master that year, that being the person who is in charge of that particular masonic lodge.

It was, for a youngish child, a boring affair, with mediocre food and equally boring company – all superficial pleasantries and no real interactions.

This is then, another reason why I rarely encountered new people.

My Friends

During my first five or six years, I had few friends.

My parents or, more likely, my father, who was a bit on the snobbish side, had decided to send me to a private school from the age of three and a half or so.

Most of the children who lived in our neighbourhood went to the nearest state school, of course, because that was the norm, and it wasn’t a rich area, so sending your child to a school that cost money (I’ve no idea how much but I’m assuming it wasn’t cheap) was rare.

This meant, of course, that most of the children I went to school with didn’t live nearby – they would have been driven to and from that school each day from all over town, and I know there was nobody who lived close to me.

There were obviously children in our road, but my parents dissuaded me from playing with them, because, I think, they thought they were “beneath me”.

I had one good friend at my school – my best friend, in fact, and the only one I remember – but he lived a few miles away and we rarely saw each other outside of school.

So, the net effect was that I had few interactions with children of my own age.

Boarding School

And now we come to what I think is the big one – when I was seven, I was sent away to boarding school.

To be fair, the school was selected because it wasn’t too far away – about 20 – 25 miles, probably – but that was clearly far enough to mean I couldn’t go home each day.

When I first went there, there were three terms – Lent, Summer, and Michaelmas – and the holidays in between those three terms (or semesters, for my American readers) were, respectively, one month, two months, and one month.

We also had a set number of exeats (i.e. Sundays we could leave school) each term – two “short” exeats, where we had to be back in school by about 5:30 pm so we were in time to attend the evening chapel service, and two “long” ones, where I think we had to be back by 8:00pm.

There was no half-term in those days, but you were allowed to combine your two long exeats so that you could go home on a Saturday and return the following Sunday evening.

Once I moved from junior school to senior school, at the age of about 12, these exeats were a lot more flexible.

All of this meant that you were at school for about two thirds of the year, and at home for just one third of it.

You were therefore living in a highly artificial and regulated environment. Everything was governed by bells – bells to get up, bells for breakfast, bells for assembly, bells for lessons, bells for lunch, bells for afternoon lessons, bells for dinner, bells for bedtime, and so on.

There were relatively few occasions when you were not in lessons or the dining hall or assembly or your dormitory, so the available time to socialize, especially in junior school, was limited – and even then it was with a limited number of other pupils from your year.

Again, senior school was a lot more flexible, but it was still subject to most of the same restrictions.

But there is one more crucial aspect to being at boarding school – it was a single-gender school.

Yes, from being sent there at seven to leaving at 17, I encountered only one or two girls (and that was only because, in my final year or two, they started allowing girls into their day house – i.e. they went home each night).

So, for about ten years, we were living in an all-male environment – very few of the teachers were female either, particularly in senior school.

And that is not normal – in fact, I think it’s developmentally harmful.

As an addendum, some time after I left in 1976, they converted at least one of the houses in senior school to be an all-girls house, so there have been girl boarders there for several years now.

Conclusion

So, why tell you all of this personal stuff?

Well, I do think that much of this has had a bearing on the fact that I have never been at ease socially, either in terms of meeting new people (especially girls) or in terms of larger gatherings.

And I’m sure my parents did a lot of what they did with good intentions. They probably thought that stopping me playing with neighbourhood children would keep me out of trouble, or that sending me to boarding school would give me a “better” education, however you choose to define that.

The other factors I’ve discussed were probably not done consciously at all – but that doesn’t mean they didn’t play their part in who I grew up to be.

So, here is the point of all this – as a parent, it’s your responsibility to consider every possible aspect of your child’s current and future physical and emotional / mental well-being.

I would consider that I was not (and probably still am not) well-adjusted to living in the real world, after I left school, and I do think it’s largely to do with everything I’ve discussed above.

My parents likely thought they were, for the most part, good parents, as the majority do, and in many ways, they were.

With the possible exception of much of what my father did and said (because he taught me all about the sort of person I did not want to become), they probably didn’t actively discuss much of all this, other than the decisions regarding which schools I would attend.

But I’m pretty confident they never thought about how their lifestyle and the way they brought me up might affect me as an adult.

Like I said in the introduction, I have never been a parent, so take what I say with a pinch of salt, but it’s my opinion that a parent’s primary responsibilities are:

1. To protect their child and keep them safe (which includes feeding and clothing them, of course).
2. To provide guidance (e.g. morals) until they are old enough to decide these matters for themselves.
3. To prepare them for adult life, once they leave home.

And it’s this last point that is the subject of this article – you need to do whatever you can to ensure they are as well-adjusted to society and its demands (e.g. knowing how to interact with others, including strangers, acquaintances, romantic partnerships, work colleagues).

So, if there is one take-away from all of these personal ramblings, it’s this: consider the implications of what you do and say, regardless of whether your child is the intended recipient of those actions or words – because you have no idea what they will take to heart and that may affect them later, perhaps for a lifetime.