My eldest girl is 5 and in Year 1 at a large school. She usually seems cheerful but recently has scared me by saying that she could not find anyone to play with. She had wanted to play with a set of three or four girls but they had told her that she couldn’t play with them, and then she couldn’t find anyone else to play with. It upset her very much. Also, although I have invited friends round to play, invitations back have been thin on the ground. I notice when I take her in to school that, while all the other girls immediately gravitate towards one another and start chatting, she tends to want to stand on her own without speaking, or to stick with me. I do find her behaviour sometimes very worrying. I’ve always been rather shy myself and therefore feel that I’ve passed on some sort of curse to her and am the last person that can help her — like the blind leading the blind! I must say that having suffered socially in the past, I do understand her predicament. I also do have some difficulty making friends with mothers at the school: I feel that I don’t fit in with the in-crowd who are the mothers of the girls that my daughter would dearly love to be friends with. What should I do?

Sheena

I often write about how our behavioural responses have a hugely significant impact on our children’s behaviour: sometimes the most subtle combination of behaviours from us can lead to the most powerful reinforcement of our children’s most undesirable behaviours.

Although this is a simple notion, we all inadvertently fall into the trap of becoming more attentive to our children when they are behaving in a way we don’t like than when they are being lovely. Our busy lives mean that our children are often left to their own devices. Sometimes it is only when they cause trouble and interrupt our flow do they get to really hear and see us: naturally they will play up again and again if this is the only way that they can draw us towards them.

What interests me about your letter, Sheena, is that it reflects a deeper level of unconscious reinforcement that comes from your own deep-seated emotional and social issues and past experiences. These emotions are known as projections, feelings from within us that are linked to our own pasts which we then project on to our child. In effect our child becomes a receptacle for our own issues. Our interpretation of their behaviour becomes magnified and overblown and suddenly we are anxious and unsure as to how to parent them.

You do this because you are human: we all do it. Witnessing the development of our children stirs up a multitude of emotions within us, triggering memories and feelings, some good, others bad, that merge and muddle into powerful and sometimes paralysing moments. In our children we see ourselves. Sheena, I suspect that through your shy little girl, who is enduring one of life’s tough learning curves — making friends and being liked — you can see yourself, standing on the edges of the playground and feeling lonely and left out. Reliving such emotional memories can be just as painful as enduring the original experience that sparked them.

The additional layer for you is that you continue to live with these difficult feelings as you watch the more confident parents socialise happily while you once again feel alone and apart from the group. The problem is that because your perception of your daughter’s shyness is giving rise to such a huge emotional response, on a behavioural level you are reinforcing your daughter’s contact-avoidant behaviour.

You’re giving it much anxious attention, and on an emotional level you are projecting intense emotions that belong to you, an adult, into this small person who didn’t consciously trigger them in you and who has no ability to filter them out.

Should you fear that you are a social failure, or not good enough, or even worthless; should you look at yourself in the mirror and not like who you see; should you label yourself in a negative way, be apologetic or have little sense of self-esteem — or even just the bog-standard guilt that most parents carry around with them — then the moment that your child does something that keys into those fears you will go into meltdown.

Children are supposed to make mistakes and have challenging moments. If your child’s experiences compound your negative beliefs about yourself, which are in turn linked to your own childhood or difficulties in your life and relationships, then your child is going to find herself provoking a huge response in you that is completely disproportionate to her behaviour.

So we need to acknowledge that our responses to our children are made up of everything that makes us who we are and can reflect our emotional baggage and issues. This baggage comes from our pasts, our parents’ pasts and so on, trickling down generation by generation.

Therefore, Sheena, my advice is simple. Manage your own anxieties enough to push your child forward but to not hang around her nervously in the playground. Be her role model. Let her see you socialise with other parents as often as possible: become a class rep, organise coffee mornings. Don’t let your own anxious behaviour, that stems from your emotional past, provoke similar behaviour in your daughter. If you do, you will have bequeathed to her the problem that you are so desperately afraid of.

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Looking for advice? E-mail drtanyabyron@thetimes.co.uk or write to her at: times2, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. Include your name, age, address and telephone number. Dr Byron cannot enter into personal correspondence