The Introvert Diaries #3

In which we go back to school and tend to orchids

Check out previous diary entries if you haven’t already. In entry #1, we look at what introversion is (and isn’t) and how it might be encoded in the brain. In entry #2, we tackle the extrovert ideal and all that it entails.

Back to school 🎒

Here, in entry #3, we go back to school. There is a story about a boy, barely three years old, who had to leave his picture books behind to go to kindergarten. All of a sudden the boy found himself in a relatively large class of rambunctious children. What madness was this? The boy also happened to be very stubborn at times. For the first six months in kindergarten, he refused to sit down and participate in any activity. After those six months, his parents moved (for unrelated reasons). New town, smaller class, no problem.

That boy, you’ll have figured out, was me. Still is me sometimes. I’ve never struggled with school stuff, yet the school environment as such always felt oppressive. Loud, little room for thinking. A good way to describe it, which I came across by coincidence, is in this old article by Jill Burruss and Lisa Kaenizg at the College of William and Mary:

… it is not surprising that school is not a positive experience for many gifted introverts. It can be loud, crowded, superficial, boring, overstimulating, and focused on action, not reflection. Think about the school environment for a moment. Where can a student be alone or at least with only a few others sometime during the regular day? Why is the request to work alone commonly denied? How much of a day do you believe is dedicated to private reflection or enforced quiet?

None of this is to bash school (I have other gripes with the educational system, but that’s for another day). Being among people your own age and being in a group teach us the ins and outs of social behavior. Humans, even the most introverted among us, are social creatures. School is one of the ways in which we learn to navigate that.

Yet, there is this trend in many schools toward collaborative learning, more group work, and a project management style approach. These things, of course, have their value, but this Atlantic article (rightly) points out that:

… overemphasizing them can undermine the learning of students who are inward-thinking and easily drained by constant interactions with others.

Tending orchids 🀣

These observations lead me to the idea of orchid children. This idea is not without its critics and it’s often presented too simplistically. To be, or not to be, an orchid, tulip, or dandelion is - to some extent - context-dependent. But I’m a sucker for a good metaphor, so here we go.

The idea is this: some children are very resilient. Whatever life throws at them, they’ll find a way to thrive. They are like dandelions. Other children are much more sensitive to their environment. They wither under the influence of the outside world unless they are raised in a supportive, nurturing environment. Then, they flourish. Orchids. The third group of kids will be somewhere in between. Tulips.

Our schools are made for dandelions. Most of our lives are geared toward dandelions. That’s understandable, no one has the time and resources to tend a large field of orchids.

Fancy metaphor, and it seems to have a little bit of scientific backing. In this article (to be fair, it’s by the originator of the term ‘orchid children’), we learn that:

…orchid children comprised about one in five of the hundreds we tested in our lab, with the others – the ‘dandelion children’ in our shorthand – showing little biologic reactivity to stressors and few perturbations in health under a wide range of supportive and challenging conditions. For instance, the dandelion kids would show little change in their heart rate or skin temperature if we gave them some memory challenges to complete, whereas the orchid children’s hearts would begin racing at the first sign of being asked to perform.

If you’re panicking now (‘Oh no, my child is an orchid’), don’t. In a stroke of marketing genius, the person who literally wrote the book on this turned the word ‘orchid’ into a mnemonic to remember how to help an orchid thrive.

O: let them be their own person and let them pursue their own passions.

R: routines help. This gives the orchid kids a structure to fall back on when the world becomes too much.

C: compassion. They likely already feel like outsiders. Let them know it’s okay to be how they are.

H: celebrate human differences.

I: let them use their imagination. Orchid children tend to excel in this, but that will only become apparent once they feel safe enough to express themselves.

D: teach them how to handle danger. Life, for everyone, has its harder moments. Orchid children might need more guidance on how to deal with these.

A beautiful garden has all kinds of flowers, from the rambunctious dandelions over the chattering tulips to the fragile but beautiful orchid.

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