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Raising Good Humans
Understanding Orchids and Dandelions: A Deeper Dive into Human Temperament with Dr. Thomas Boyce
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- [00:01]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
The following podcast is a Dear Media production.
- [00:10]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
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.
- [02:49]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
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.
- [08:44]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And can you just give like one or two examples of the, the minor stressors that you're talking about?
- [08:51]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, of course. So they, they were things like putting out a, a series of four or five digits and asking the child to repeat those digits. And these, by the way, were. When we first started out were 5, 6 year olds, kids in that age range. And another one was putting a drop of lemon juice on the tongue that was more tactile. It was a, you know, this sour substance on their tongue. Another was simply being interviewed about their family by someone that they had not met before. Things, things of that sort, things that were not going to make them run out of the room, but were evocative.
- [09:38]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Okay, and so that's where you first saw these differences.
- [09:42]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
That's right. We also used like video clips from movies that were mildly evocative of negative emotion.
- [09:54]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And then when, when you started to make these observations, what, what did you find?
- [10:00]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
We found that, that there was this huge spectrum of reactivity to these stimuli. And, you know, they varied all over the map. There were some kids who hardly were perturbed at all biologically by the things that we were asking them to do. And there were other kids who were just, you know, tremendously responsive biologically.
- [10:26]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And then did it present as sort of a spectrum of. So what I think what I'm hearing is it was kind of a spectrum of reactivity. It wasn't like categories of reactivity.
- [10:38]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
It wasn't. Although we, we then began to discover that in terms of the relationship to, to illness and behavioral problems and disorders of one kind or another, that there were more, it was more categorical that the spectrum suddenly got divided into the kids who were really responsive and the kids who were less responsive. So we, you know, we began doing things like dividing the spectrum into the top 20th percentile versus the bottom 80 percentiles. And we found that there were categorically different responses by kids at one end of the spectrum versus the other end of the spectrum.
- [11:25]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And then when you looked at these differences, how much of them were attributable to the original noise? Or rather, I guess it's like you mentioned socioeconomic status. So when you looked at them, was the first question, like, if we take out poverty, if we take out certain. Certain predictable challenges and then still see differences in reactivity, we're onto something here.
- [11:53]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, many of these studies were done in the San Francisco and Berkeley public schools and preschools. And to some degree, there's a. There's a. I mean, it's not completely this way, but it's. But there is some diversity within classroom or within school in things like socioeconomic status and race and so on. And there were just. When we looked at this spectrum of reactivity, there just weren't a lot of differences by social class, by race, by gender. You know, we expected that there might be differences by gender in how, for sure, boys would respond versus girls respond, and we didn't find that. So these seem to be characteristics that were somewhat independent of the usual suspects in terms of differences in illness and injury and behavioral disorders.
- [13:00]
Unknown
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- [16:14]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
We have these categories that help understand these kids who 20% of them presented with higher reactivity.
- [16:25]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah. And and so then we had, we had this standardized measure that we could then take back into the epidemiologic setting of naturally occurring adversities and stressors in the lives of kids and families. And part of, part of what we found we expected and actually got funding on the basis of the hypothesis. Part of it was completely bewildering at first. So we found that the kids who were in the bottom 80% of the of the spectrum of reactivity that those kids of course like all kids encountered various forms of adversity. They had parents who got divorced. They had grandparents that died. They, they were Sometimes bullied in school. You know, they. They had the things happening to them that. That happened to kids, alas. And we found that with those kids that there was just a very slight increase in the rate of illness and injury and behavioral disorders compared to the kids who had fewer of those kinds of stressors in their lives. So it was a pretty flat. It wasn't that there was a complete absence of an association, but it was pretty minimal. And in contrast to that, the kids who were at the high end of the spectrum when they were exposed to these naturally occurring stressors and adversities, they just, they had a huge increase, like logarithmic increase in the rates of ill health and disorders of health. And that's what we had expected. We expected that if we could measure reactivity, that we might take some of the noise out of the system by showing that some of this had to do with the internal biological responses of these kids. Expected. But what was really not expected and what we really scratched our heads over initially was that these high reactivity kids in the lab who had very low stress, predictable, highly nurturant environments at school or at home, that they didn't have just normative levels of morbidity, they had these extraordinarily low levels of morbidity. So we had this group of kids that we'd identified using laboratory measures that had either the worst or the best of the outcomes, depending upon the character of the life circumstances in which they were being raised.
- [19:29]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
It's so incredible. And so that's where you came up with the orchid metaphor.
- [19:34]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, I was down at Stanford one year and giving a talk about this work, and this old Swedish guy with a gnarly cane came tottering up the aisle after the talk and shook his cane at me and said, you're talking about mask barn. And I, I said, I'm talking about what we, we Swedes know about this. We have a word called mas crossbarn, which means dandelion child. And what they mean by this is a child that, like the dandelion wildflower, can thrive in almost any circumstance. You know, dandelions thrive at 10,000ft and at sea level. They grow in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow in fertile fields. They just thrive. They can thrive anywhere. And so I thought that was a lovely metaphor for these kids in the lower reactivity sector. And so then we coined the neologism, or kitabarn, which is Swedish for orchid child. And, and it's, it's a, It's a metaphor that sometimes is misleading, but has. Has worked People get it.
- [21:03]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Yes. Oh, I've not heard of a more res. It resonates so much with people that I actually think it's very relieving and helpful and also hopeful because of the extraordinary robustness of a well grown orchid and also because, I mean, I myself have unsuccessfully tried to raise many orchid flowers. So I also know what it looks like when they don't have the right environment, which I could not provide. But then I became. I've always thought this was so interesting and I want to keep going because you've done so much extraordinary work. But I just want to say that no matter what you could read about this work, then I had babies and I had such. I had an orchid and a dandelion. Like, if you could really fit people into categories in that way, I was like, oh my God, this is extraordinary. And what I also found interesting is that I didn't really understand orchids other than academic, like with an academic understanding. And I, I watched myself kind of feel both disbelief at like the incredible sensitivity of a human because I didn't experience that in the world, and also the magical power of attunement and observation that I witnessed. Like, I was just like, wow. And so I, of course became even more and more interested. But what I'm curious about of, I mean, I'm curious about a million things is when at what point were you like, wait a second, let's look at the old school research on temperament and figure out how. Because it feels like you basically expanded and corroborated some theories that had no basis in any biological research.
- [23:05]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, yeah, Very, very much so. I mean, an example of that is, you know, our colleague Jerry Kagan up at Harvard.
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Unknown
Yeah.
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Dr. Thomas Boyce
Who very early on was tuned into temperamental differences in kids responsivity to certain kinds of environments. And he was very interested in the shy, withdrawn child. And he had, you know, early in, in that work had noted that these very shy kids had accelerations of heart rate that were very prompt and very exaggerated. And, you know, I had the great good fortune of being in a research network with Jerry in the last years of his life. And so in many ways what we were doing was just a further exploration of what he had observed. Because the other thing about our high reactivity kids was that they had many of the characteristics that he talked about as the shy, withdrawn kid.
- [24:15]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
How do you distinguish between orchid kids who are introverted or like it's a personality or who have a shyness about them and their reactivity, or is it all kind of different? Ways of explaining something quite similar.
- [24:35]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
I think it's all different ways of expressing something that is a. A core human difference. And I like you. You know, my wife and I had two kids, one of which was an orchid and one was a dandelion. And the, the categorization can be misleading because, you know, saying that a kid is an orchid doesn't explain everything about that child, doesn't even fully describe that child. But it's a useful way of thinking about the differences that kids bring into the world to. To a certain extent in their sensitivity to the environments that are presented to them.
- [25:20]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And exactly that. Like, oh, you come into this world with this way of responding to the environment, but that's not exclusively who you are or what you're destiny is. But it does help kind of understand that you can't just say to every person like, this is. Or I. For me, I guess it helps with empathy. It helps me understand like, oh, I don't feel the wind the same way this other person does. We're in the same weather and we're having a totally different experience.
- [25:53]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, as I say in the book, no two children are raised in the same family. You know, they. There are things like birth order and gender that really change the way kids experience the same two parents or their grandparents. So the categorization is both helpful and misleading in certain ways as well, because it doesn't. It's not as if you're. You found something that is the fate of the, of the, of the child. And in many ways, the extraordinary good news, I think, in, in the work that I've tried to lay out in the book is that kids who we often worry about because of their sensitivities to environments are often the kids who just blossom and thrive in ways that. That are totally unexpected.
- [26:58]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
The question about that is like, is that because they had a sensitive, caregiving environment or what are the. What, what are the environments that these kids. Where you find that these kids actually surprise us?
- [27:14]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, well, we, you know, we tried. We have tried to look at that as systematically as we could to take kids who we know in the lab look like orchid children and who at the same time are doing very well, are, you know, are thriving in their environments. And there's. There's a set of characteristics that. That seem to be common to the families of. Of those children who have this combination of orchid biology and very good health and emotional outcomes. And, you know, they are. They are things like kind of the depth of the caring, compassionate, loving environment. Within the family, there are things like family routines, how the degree to which the family follows kind of regular, typical patterns of behavior that we know are reassuring to kids who are have more of an orchid tendency. So there are a variety of things like that that we know are related to outcomes.
- [28:29]
Unknown
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- [29:55]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
It was very cool.
- [29:56]
Unknown
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- [31:36]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Like, what do people say that has been challenging? For example, sometimes you hear people, if you reference an orchid child or a highly sensitive child or any comments about a human being's reactivity in the world. Yeah, there are people that might say, well, isn't that just like a kid who has a diagnosis of some kind? I guess. Can you help us understand that, how that works? Like, is there just a more likelihood of a diagnosis? Are they totally unrelated? Is there a difference in how they might respond to an intervention? I think those are, those are big questions. And then separately, what about when people just say, well, you still have to function in this world. How do you balance providing sensitivity and also enough challenges that you can go out into the world robust enough to function outside of this supportive household? And is that because the childhood environment was such that in adulthood these, these humans are thriving?
- [32:37]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Well, let me just comment on, you know, there are things that, that are behaviorally typical of kids in these two categories. And by the way, I want to be clear that orchid child and dandelion child are not diagnoses. These, these are not diagnoses. But they, but they do have these two categories of children, if you will, on the spectrum. They do have certain commonalities with kids who do have some kinds of diagnoses. So for example, an orca child is often shy. We've talked about this with regard to Jerry Kagan's work. They tend to be kids who are shy. They withdraw from novelty. So going to a birthday party with a group of kids that they don't know can feel threatening to this kind of child. They have certain kinds of sensory sensitivities. They may, you know, complain bizarrely so in the eyes of parents sometimes that their, their socks are, are wrinkled inside their shoes and it just drives them batty. And these, these are characteristics that we do see in, in kids with certain diagnoses. So certain neuro atypical kids do have these sort of sensory hypersensitivities where loud noises or strong tastes or tactile experiences just are tremendously aversive to them. And I think one of the most tough things about being the parent of an orchid child is that you're relatively frequently trying to split this difference between Deciding when it's time to let the child withdraw, as they're inclined to do from novel, aversive kinds of situations. And when do you kind of nudge them on into experiences that may be aversive, but once they've experienced it, there's a kind of triumph that they can experience from having done it and conquered the stress of it. So that's a dilemma, I think, for the parents of kids who have this higher sensitivity level is when do you push and when do you let them withdraw? And there's no one. There's no one answer. It's very situational and changes from moment to moment, situation to situation.
- [35:27]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
So if you're struggling with that, if you're thinking, well, I want to set up an environment for this child so that they can thrive, but you're more a stressor feels too big. How do you check in with yourself as a parent to know when it's enough to. When it. When the nudging is actually really important for their development or it's prohibitive?
- [35:53]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, well, I think this is where the empathic involvement of the parent with the child comes into play. And, you know, the, the very empathic, really good, responsive parent will kind of know when it's. It's. It's really too much and also will provide escape routes by allowing the child to back away from something if it really does become too aversive and too threatening. I think that's a very difficult moment in the life of a parent of an orchid child. But there are other ways of nurturing an orchid child that other than just allowing at times allowing the child to withdraw from something that they find is aversive. I think, you know, I think you mentioned earlier just recognizing differences in human sensitivities is a. I mean, that's a family. That's a part of family culture that is really important for these kids. They need to know that differences between kids are normal and in many ways are beneficial and give kind of the, the. The fabric of the family, the culture of the family, the sort of diversity and creativity that you really want it to have.
- [37:27]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And so when people think, oh, well, this is just about kids who are somewhere along the spectrum of if it gets to a point where it's too challenging or prohibitive that it goes from a temperament to a diagnosis, or they're just so. I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is like, can you have a kid who is an. In the 80% of reactivity that dandelions who also has a diagnosis for an Anxiety disorder, or is it more likely they probably temperamentally are an orchid and then also for other reasons, end up in the, you know, struggling with anxiety?
- [38:10]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Well, you know, there. There are certainly kids who have anxiety disorders or mood disorders, problems with depression that exist over the whole spectrum of reactivity. This isn't a, you know, a determinative kind of assessment when we assess reactivity, but I would. I would guess that there are more kids. I know actually that there are more kids at the high end of that spectrum than there are at the lower end of that spectrum with those kinds of. Of problems.
- [38:44]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Okay. And I guess to really understand this is biology. Is this biology by environment, or is this like, you're not turning an orchid into another kind of flower?
- [38:58]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
No. You know, all the evidence that. That we have, Eliza, is. Suggests that there are both genetic differences that. That move a child in one direction or the other, but those work in concert with environmental differences, experiential differences, and that it. It is the synthesis of those two kinds of forces and that move a child into the orchid or the dandelion side of the spectrum.
- [39:31]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And so for people who are thinking about environment, what are. And just to help understand, is there an environment that you've seen in the perinatal environment that's relevant? Is there environment in the caregiving? Is there environment in peers? Like, can you help everybody understand what environment actually means?
- [39:53]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Oh, yeah. So kids experience multiple environments. Right. I mean, you point out one early environment is just the environment into which the kid is immediately born, just the nursery and the hospital, or in other areas of the world into a community or a family. They come home to a family. They come home to a family that is embedded within a culture and a community and a nation. They eventually attend preschool or school where another kind of environment has been built for them. So all of these are important environments that have elements of their characteristics that interplay with this tendency that the child has biologically to either be highly responsive or less responsive.
- [40:48]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
So you mentioned just being born in different places. You've looked at temperament across cultures and communities and countries. Yeah, so. Because I think that a lot of people will say, well, this is very American, or this is very. Can you speak to that?
- [41:03]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, I don't think it's in any way very American other than, of course, you know, it's hard for me to talk about this without getting into my own reactivity to contemporary America.
- [41:19]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
That's okay. Say whatever you want.
- [41:20]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Well, I, you know, I think different nations have different levels of sensitivity to the needs of children.
- [41:28]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Now that you offered that, you do think about where we are in this contemporary America.
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Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah. I mean, there are remarkable generational differences in parenting and child rearing. As, as you know, as well as anybody. It's, there are just vast differences and in, in some ways it's sort of a national experiment as we go along.
- [41:54]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Yeah.
- [41:55]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
From generation to generation. The, the kids that come into those generations of parents have certain commonalities, you know, not least their degree of biological reactivity to the things that are presented to them, that are done to them. But there are really, really vast differences. I, I, I'm a grand grandfather six times over now, and it's, it's just been very interesting to watch and you'll, you'll eventually experience this yourself. You know, to watch your own children parenting their children is a remarkable phenomenon.
- [42:43]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
I can't even imagine.
- [42:44]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
It's both endearing, it's magical. It's, and it's just amazing. It's, it's amazing. And, and at times probably frustrating too, because they, one thing for sure is that they're not going to parent their kids the way you parented them.
- [43:04]
Unknown
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- [46:08]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Now, when you're making these observations, like what? I, I just think it must be so interesting. Do you feel like currently the pendulum has swung a bit far? Do you feel like perhaps there's a space between where, where do you land?
- [46:30]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Well, I think first and foremost I land at the point which says human beings and human children are nothing if not adaptable. And they have extraordinary plasticity and they can grow up in a whole variety of environments. Look at the cultures around the world. They're so different. And you know, they're different in everything from philosophies of parenting to religiosity to the availability of foods to, you know, it's just vast differences and yet there seems to be this enduring adaptability of the human species that is remarkable and reassuring. So, you know, I think there's a lot for young parents to be very fearful about these days. And my, my biggest response to that is to want to quiet their hearts and to have them know that kids can sustain remarkable differences in parenting. I think that the, the most important component of parenting is this, you know, Latin word caritas, which means enduring love, sustaining love and care, that in all of its manifestations, and there are a whole bunch of different manifestations, that, that is the, the key, I think that.
- [48:07]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
That may be the key is that we maybe are so worried that there's only one manifestation of enduring love. And in fact, it can look so different.
- [48:17]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah.
- [48:17]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And maybe we're trying to curate it so much that it's just not. It doesn't need that level of detail. Yeah, I think this whole field can be a landmine because you want to give information to families to have the best opportunities to support their children and to have children thrive. And also the words, the language can be so scary because if sensitive caregiving is so powerful, which I say it is all the time, and you do, and anybody who's in this field does, then there's a possibility that that gets interpreted as every single moment and interaction needs to be so beautifully attuned that you could go crazy and actually it would potentially be very not appropriate or you could go too far. So I, I really do want to hear more from you about this because you're one of the people who's taught us how important that sensitivity of care is. And so I think hearing from you that that can be taken to an extreme would be so relieving.
- [49:27]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
I absolutely think it can be taken to an extreme. And it, it can be taken to an extreme where it's, it's no longer. I mean, it's, it's no longer good for children. It's no longer beneficial. It kind of doubles back on itself and becomes a detriment rather than an asset. But the one dimension of this that I come back to is that this business of steadfast love, of deep, pervasive, enduring care for each one of your children is, Is what is essential. And you can't do that too much. That's not, you know, the. You can, you can do certain kinds of parenting behaviors in, in service to that. That can be too much. But holding and, and hanging on to your compassion and your love for your kids is simply something that you can't do too much of.
- [50:34]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
So can you give three or even one. Like, can you give some concrete examples to help people wrap their brains around how the parenting behaviors could be too sensitive or too much in that area that doesn't strip away the enduring love?
- [50:53]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, I mean, one I've already given, which is that you can decide that you're not going to put your sensitive orchid child into any circumstance, into any setting that that child finds aversive or threatening or concerning in some way. So you, you know, the kid says, I don't want to go to that birthday party. There's too many kids that I don't know. And you say, of course you know that, that you, you do not have to go to that. And you do that over and over and over again. And, and you know, that's, that's counterproductive to that, that child's development and that child's sense of, of mastery. So balancing fear with mastery is certainly one example of this. Any of the things that, that I've talked about with regard to parenting can be, can be too much other, other than that central one of the, the karitas, the steadfast love. But, you know, you can have a family that has so many routines and rituals that it, it becomes, you know, sort of a carnival of sameness and doesn't, doesn't allow the child to experience differences in day to day, month, month to month life. You can be so dedicated to the recognition and expression of the self in your children that you don't recognize it when one of your kids is dominating the whole sibship out of respect for that child's self and protecting that child's dominance within the family. So I think any of these things can be, can be overdone and they become, they, they become harmful is too hard a word. But they, they become counterproductive in the parenting that you're, that you're trying to do.
- [53:03]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
I mean, you said something so cool. You said sibship and that, you know, we don't want to undermine the sibship by. I imagine what you were referring to is like being so sensitive to the orchid child, for example, that the dandelion is sitting there being like, oh, the whole household culture centers around sensitivity of care to this sibling. Yeah, I guess I'll just be over here taking care of myself. And would that eventually undermine the relationship between those two siblings? And I would like to hear more from you about this. Yeah, and I'm curious, like, wouldn't there be, wouldn't we not have an orchid temperament in the world if that was like, genetically not a survivable trait?
- [53:55]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, I've made the case in some of my papers and maybe I did in the book, I can't remember, that there's a very Darwinian account for why there are these highly sensitive people always through the generations growing up in our, in our midst. You know, back when we were bands of hominids roaming the savanna, it was absolutely essential to have some individuals who were sensually and in, in other ways hypersensitive to threats coming to that social group. So it was, it was, it's a form of sort of social selection, I think that, that we have people who are extraordinarily sensitive and, you know, not, not only did they protect hominid bands back you know, millennia ago, but they also are. Many of them are great artists and are great musicians and composers. So there are, I think, all kinds of reasons to think that there is actual natural selection for these individuals.
- [55:16]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
So I guess I'm so curious if we sort of understand that people come to this world sort of responding to the environment in different ways, is there. I'm trying to think of the right way of phrasing this question. It's almost like, what happens to the adult version of, like, what? If you just figured out, wait a second, I'm an orchid, like, this explains things. Now that I'm not being nurtured by others anymore, how do I move through the world in a way that helps me thrive?
- [55:54]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah. I can't tell you how many people I've had respond to my book via email saying, I'm an adult orchid and I never knew it. And I now understand so much about the way I was as a child, my responses to my family. And I understand more now about how I. How I sort of stick myself into the world, that there really are these differences and. And that I. I understand my responsivity and sensitivity to the things that are happening in my adult environment that I. That I didn't previously know. I've had a lot of those people contact me.
- [56:44]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And what would you say would help them thrive?
- [56:49]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
I would say many of the things that. That I think are characteristics of families that allow an orchid child to survive. Having predictable routines, not being embarrassed about the. The fact that, you know, I. I love sameness. Over days and weeks, acknowledging to myself that there are human differences and that my differences that may be viewed by the world as awkward and strange in some way are legitimate good differences that help the whole human project to thrive. Being kinder to myself, understanding that there are certain characteristics of relationships that are going to be better for me than others and avoiding the ones that are not and pursuing the ones that are, things like that.
- [57:49]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And if you realize, oh, my partner is an orchid, like this explains so much. How can you be a better partner? Same thing?
- [57:57]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah, I think so. You know, just being aware of the. The differences in individual responses to certain settings is such a vast benefit to relationships. You know, knowing that my wife knows that while we'll go into a party and she will interact with all kinds of people and come away with, you know, a boost in energy, I go into this exactly the same setting and come away absolutely depleted of energy. So, you know, being aware of those, of those differences, I think is just a huge benefit to relationships. We. We've been married 52 years, by the way.
- [58:54]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
I wonder what are the questions that. Because I have a million questions about how we come to be who we are, and I feel pretty steeped in research. And I was thinking there's endless questions left. We don't really have many answers. I think you helped a whole, I mean, decades of research that has just contributed so much to helping us understand these things. But what are the questions you still have left?
- [59:25]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Oh. Oh, that's a wonderful question. Well, of course, you know, one thing that we haven't really touched on very directly is the whole business of the biological mechanism, of how all this happens. And part of my just great interest in epigenetics is that, you know, I believe that. That this field of epigenetics has. Has revealed to us the. The actual nexus, the actual molecular nexus for where environment and genes come together to change personalities and temperaments and behavior. And that's. That's fascinating. And it, you know, that's work that is going to go on for generations to come, and we don't. And certainly there are huge questions still left in that. But that's in some ways too easy an answer to a very profound question that you pose. But I think for me, Elise, the deepest questions in this whole field have to do with how things happen. And, you know, I've answered it at the level of biology and molecular mechanism, but there are obviously going to be answers at different levels as well. I think there are profound questions that we've only scratched the surface of. One that you alluded to is how is it that a man and a woman who have very different temperaments and very different behavioral styles, how do they come together? I don't think we have the scantest understanding of how that actually happens and how that selection of somebody to love, how that actually happens. And I. And that's, to me, one of the deepest questions of life is how that happens. I think there's a lot that we don't know about that. It's not just mutual attraction and where you happen to grow up. You know, there are deep, profound mysteries in human life and in life on this earth that we just have barely approached.
- [61:58]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Do you think that having a high sensitivity makes you. I mean, it has to. Does it make you a deeper thinker and does it make you sort of imagine. I'm actually curious if there's like a religious or spiritual. More spiritual than religious, but is there some kind of association between orchids and spirituality?
- [62:24]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
I love that question, and I don't know the answer to it, as far as I know, nobody knows the answer to that, but it's a very potent question. And my guess would be, my hypothesis would be that there is an association between spirituality or even religiosity and sensitivity to the social world. I wouldn't at all go so far as to say that people who are more on the orchid side of the spectrum are necessarily deeper thinkers or more reflective or certainly there's nothing that has to do with intelligence or anything like that. So there are discoveries to be made and profound things to be done by people who are all across that spectrum. But that I think there probably is a bias toward the very sensitive people having different experiences of life than those at the other end.
- [63:28]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
I even wonder, I could see being so encumbered with all of the details of the world as an orchid that you might not be. Be able to focus on taking a test in the same way, but you could also, like, blow people's minds with how deeply you've thought through something that is incredibly challenging. So I don't know how you'd measure any of that, but I would think that there are different types of intelligence that bend in one of those directions.
- [64:07]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
One of the things that we found about families of orchid children who are exceptionally thriving is that they, they provide plenty of opportunity for imaginative play. That's the child version of, I think, what you're talking about, which is the. Yeah, the richness of the imaginative. Imaginative involvement in the world that I think the highly sensitive person engages in.
- [64:37]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
And is this stable over time?
- [64:40]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Yeah. And actually my colleague Nikki Bush, who took my position at UCSF after I retired, has looked at this and there's the sort of test retest correlation between reactivity status in infancy and then in toddlerhood and middle childhood and then on into adolescence. The, the test retest stability of that characteristics characteristic grows over time. So I think it, it's like, you know, it's. It's like an embedded thing that becomes deeper and deeper.
- [65:23]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
It's really spectacular work.
- [65:26]
Dr. Thomas Boyce
Well, thank you. Thank you. You're doing wonderful work and I want to encourage you to keep it up. It's just such a. It's such an important thing for young parents to be hearing these voices and, you know, to be understanding what we know about, about parenting and its effects.
- [66:02]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services.
- [66:07]
Unknown
Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products.
- [66:12]
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Or services referred to in this episode.