Chat Rooms: Hope for the Shy Child? (College English Essay)

October 9, 2006
“Chat Rooms: Hope for the Shy Child?”

Shy children can overcome their shyness by being exposed to other children in a chat room. For someone who is shy from the moment they are born, daily interactions with strangers can be a source of anxiety, sometimes extreme and debilitating. They can be at a disadvantage as a child in school. Shy children are more likely to be teased. This can lead to problems later on with the shy child’s behavior.

In this study, the dependent variable will be the child’s reaction to being exposed to other children in a chat room. Hopefully the reaction will be positive and shyness will decrease. The independent variable is the application of a controlled chat room. One that is safe and monitored and free from any sexual predators or other potentially damaging individuals.

Children need to be exposed in a non-threatening setting, to children their own age. Chat rooms, under adult guidance, offer just that. The child does not have to be face to face with someone they will see on a daily basis. Many times a shy child is afraid of rejection from their peers. Shy children sometimes feel as though they are inferior to their peers and have nothing in common with them. If a child is given the opportunity to get comfortable talking to other children in a non-direct setting, they will find out that they aren’t so different and will find they have a lot in common with other children. After mastering their social skills in a chat room, they can feel freer to talk to children at school with confidence.

My subject sample will be 60 children ages 10 – 15. These children have already been exposed to computers and are able to operate a chat program. Their school counselors will recruit them. The school counselors are able to identify children who are considered to be “shy” and will already have weekly meetings with the counselor. Permission is given by the parents for their child to participate in this study.

There will be 10 children chosen from each of the 6 ages. 5 of them will be allowed to have 2 - 30 minute chat sessions per week. This is the experimental group. The other 5 will not be given the opportunity to use chat sessions and will simply continue their counseling sessions as usual.

The 30 children selected at random to use chat sessions as part of their counseling will use computers set up at the school. The children will not know why they are allowed to chat and what is being done in the study, just that they are allowed to chat online with other kids. The children will go in the next day for their regular counseling session with the school counselor and, hopefully, they will talk about their experience. The school counselor will compare those children with those from the non-chat group and grade their progress on set criteria, including:
• The number of times that week the child felt “more anxious than normal” around kids at school.
• The number of times that week the child approached a new child and initiated a conversation.
• The number of times that week the child felt they were being bullied.

After 12 weeks the evaluations taken by the guidance counselors will be assessed. It should show that the control group showed none, or very little, improvement in their social anxieties. However, the experimental group will find that the number of “more anxious than normal” incidents decreased, the child was able to approach kids they felt intimidated by more easily, and the number of bullying incidents decreased as the child became more secure in who they are.

The parents of the children will be aware of every detail of this experiment. The children will not be put in an emotionally damaging environment. The experiment could be done using a set bully in the chat room to measure how well the children respond to the bully, but the purpose of the experiment is purely to help a child overcome shyness, not to fight a bully. The guidance counselors on computers in a separate room will monitor the chat rooms and anything inappropriate will be stopped.

The only problems I could foresee would be a child’s inexperience with computers and/or a chat program. Also, parents may feel reserved about their child using a chat room to socialize with other children. But hopefully, they will find that this is a new approach to an age-old problem plaguing millions of kids.