Social Withdrawal in Childhood

By Kenneth H. Rubin, Robert J. Coplan, Julie C. Bowker. Annual Review of Psychology, 2009

1,493 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Socially withdrawn children frequently refrain from social activities in the presence of peers. The lack of social interaction in childhood may result from a variety of causes, including social fear and anxiety or a preference for solitude. From early childhood through to adolescence, socially withdrawn children are concurrently and predictively at risk for a wide range of negative adjustment outcomes, including socio-emotional difficulties (e.g., anxiety, low self-esteem, depressive symptoms, and internalizing problems), peer difficulties (e.g., rejection, victimization, poor friendship quality), and school difficulties (e.g., poor-quality teacher-child relationships, academic difficulties, school avoidance). The goals of the current review are to (a) provide some definitional, theoretical, and methodological clarity to the complex array of terms and constructs previously employed in the study of social withdrawal; (b) examine the predictors, correlates, and consequences of child and early-adolescent social withdrawal; and (c) present a developmental framework describing pathways to and from social withdrawal in childhood.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06cd3034ff995870321fac4a520f9fc98c4a315c

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Citations in the corpus

Patterns of Change in Children's Loneliness: Trajectories from Third Through Fifth Grades (2011, background): “not report gender differences associated with mean levels of passive social withdrawal, but the findings of multiple studies have indicated that withdrawal behaviors are more detrimental to the peer functioning of boys as opposed to girls and these gender differences extend from early childhood to a”
Shyness and Unsociability and Their Relations With Adjustment in Chinese and Canadian Children (2015, background): “Taken together, these findings suggest that despite the risks associated with a “lack of peer interaction” (Rubin et al., 2009), unsociable children in North America do not appear to suffer from substantive socioemotional difficulties.”