Transcript
Dr. Thomas Boyce (0:01)
The following podcast is a Dear Media production.
Dr. Aliza Pressman (0:10)
Welcome to Raising good humans. I'm Dr. Aliza Pressman and today's conversation is with Dr. Thomas Boyce. I'm so excited about it. It's quite long because Dr. Boyce is the professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who coined the term and created nearly 40 years of study looking at orchids and dandelions. So essentially, he has helped us all understand, whether, you know, it's him or not, that human beings respond to the environment in totally different ways. And while most kids tend to be like dandelions, fairly resilient, and able to adapt to stress and adversity in their lives, about 20% of kids he calls orchid children are more sensitive and biologically reactive to their circumstances. So it is more challenging for them to deal with stressful situations. But given the right environment, the right interventions, the right support system, orchid children actually show great sensitivity to. To positive environments. So in this conversation, he's really explaining what are orchids? What are dandelions? What are ways to help orchids thrive? What do we take too far? I think that that was a really important part of the conversation is if we've spent all this time sort of understanding temperament and understanding which one of our children has these heightened sensitivities. Have we as a society, have we culturally, have we generally speaking, misunderstood what sensitive caregiving is such that we're actually counterproductive. There's so many cool things we talked about. I hope you enjoy this episode with this incredible man who has contributed so much to this field. His book the Orchid and the Dandelion, why Some Children Struggle and how all can thrive and has changed how people think about human beings. It's. I cannot. I cannot say enough. And I'm so excited to share his work with you. I think I want to start from the idea of just what you are talking about when you reference orchids and dandelions. Just like a zooming out view of temperament and how you got here.
Dr. Thomas Boyce (2:49)
Yeah. So back 40 years ago when I was a fellow at the University of North Carolina, you know, it was what. It was well known that there were these vast individual differences in children's morbidities and in their. Their rates of. Of disease and illness over time. And it was also known that those differences probably had something to do with early experience. What was not as well known was that those exposures and experiences included events in the psychological world, the psychological life of children. And that was a fairly anathematic view in those days that this would, this would have. That. That something about the psychology and the emotional and behavioral experience of the child would somehow get translated into the, the biology that affects illness and, and disorder. And so I, you know, I started studying stress and adversity as one possible account for these huge differences that we saw in, in rates of. Of illness and ill health in kids. And sure enough, there were. There were differences. There were kids who had lots and lots of illness and who came from families that were stressed and disordered and impoverished, marginalized. And the kids who had less in the way of morbidity seemed to come from families and social settings that were far less aversive. And so it really kind of tweaked my interest that, that this might be something that was real. And so that. That's really how my research got got started, was trying to understand differences in rates of illness and how those were related to adversity and stress in the life of. Of children. And, you know, my first several years of doing research was simply documenting those associations. And yeah, you know, it's. They were. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they, but they were outlandish associations in those days. Those, those were not believable relations between stress and. And illness. But more and more the evidence grew and some of the biological mechanisms for that became more apparent, which is, you know, was of great interest to somebody like me as a physician. But what also happened over the years was that it became clear that this was not a, a very tight association. It was a, a relatively modest association. And when you actually plotted, you know, differences in adversity experience and differences in illness rates of one kind or another, that there was a, a lot of noise in the, in the association? So sort of the next step in the development of the research was to say, well, is that, is this just the kind of noisy association that we, that we see often? You know, even. Even the association between socioeconomic status and health is to some degree a noisy association. It's not, it's not always tight and linear and clear. So we began asking in these studies that we were doing of, of children's stress and illness whether the, the looseness and the associations were. Were related to just noise, statistical noise, or was there something. Was there music in it? Was there something in it that. That actually is the thing we ought to be attending to? And in order to study that, we began bringing kids into. Out of. Out of the epidemiology world and into laboratory settings where we, we studied them under conditions of mild stress, not, you know, terrible Things, but, but things that would activate the two principal stress response systems in the brain. The, the locus coeruleus, norepinephrine system, the so called fight or flight system, and the adrenal cortical system, the system that's responsible for the output of cortisol. So we began studying the autonomic nervous system and the adrenocortical system and studying how kids differed in their responses within those two systems to the standardized stressors that we were presenting to them. And they were very standardized. I mean, we had a whole script and we had, you know, it was, it was a, a very controlled kind of setting. And we began to discover that, that there were vast differences in kids in, in how they responded biologically to these psychological stressors, mostly psychological stressors that we were presenting to them.