Orchids and Dandelions

This week’s article summary is Orchids and Dandelions.

As I’ve mentioned in article summaries on brain science, humans like to put things in categories as categorization more easily allows for storage in long-term memory.

The article categorizes people into dandelions and orchids.

Dandelions are those who rebound easily from misfortune while orchids are those who are dramatically affected by their environment.

The article also introduced me to two new terms: the Apgar Test and epigenetics.

The Apgar Test is assessed on newborns in five areas: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, respiration.

Epigenetics is the science of how environment influences the implementation of our genes; in other words, how nurture (our surroundings) influences nature (our genetic make-up).

As you’ll see in the article, while genes are important, they aren’t necessarily our destiny—the environment we live in greatly influences us and the implementation of our genes. And while 80% of us are dandelions who can often rise above an adverse environment, the 20% of us who are orchids need a very supportive and safe environment to grow, thrive, and flourish.

As an educator and a parent, I read the article thinking a lot about my students who were most likely orchids and the importance of creating a positive environment for them.

Joe

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Many children are able to thrive in any environment, while others may flourish only under the most favorable conditions.

Early experiences with psychological trauma and adversity create obstacles to normal development and impair mental and physical health, but there’s variation in how children respond: While some are powerfully affected by trauma, others are able to effectively weather adverse experiences, sustaining few, if any, developmental or health consequences.

The two types are:

• Dandelion children: About 80 percent of kids show a kind of biological indifference to experiences of adversity with stress response circuits in their brains that are minimally reactive to such events. Like dandelions that thrive in almost any environment, such children are mostly unperturbed by the stressors and traumas they confront.
• Orchid children: About 20 percent show an exceptional susceptibility to both negative and positive social contexts with stress response circuits highly sensitive to adverse events. Like orchids, which require very particular, supportive environments to thrive, these children show an exceptional capacity for succeeding in nurturant, supportive circumstances, but sustain a disproportionate number of illnesses and problems when raised in stressful, adverse social conditions.

Why did orchid children survive over the course of human evolution? Early hominids may have benefited from having a few individuals in their midst who were super-sensitive to impending attacks by animals or hostile rivals.

Being an orchid might also be of great benefit to those living at the other extreme in environments of exceptional safety, protection, and abundance. Here, the propensity of orchid children to be open and porous to environmental events and exposures would garner even greater advantages. Most children would thrive in such settings; orchids would thrive spectacularly.

Recognizing this differential susceptibility is an essential key to understanding the experiences of individual children, to parenting children of differing sensitivities and temperaments effectively, and to fostering the healthy, adaptive capacity of all young people.

In a telling experiment, researchers measured the correlation between newborn babies’ Apgar scores in the first five minutes of life and teachers’ observations of the same children in kindergarten. On average, children with lower Apgar scores were less compliant with rules and instructions as five-year-olds and had more difficulty sitting still and focusing, less interest in books and reading, and more difficulty grasping and using a pencil. At each lower step on the Apgar scale such physical, social, emotional, language, and communication domains of development were all significantly more compromised five years later.

But it’s not all about genes, researchers have found; genetic characteristics create children’s dispositions, but don’t necessarily determine the outcomes. Children born with orchid-like genes who are raised in different environments – for example, those placed in cruel, negligent orphanages versus those welcomed into nurturing foster homes – had strikingly different outcomes: the latter recovered remarkably well from a bad start in terms of development and mental health. What’s at work here is epigenetics – the new science of how the environment influences the expression of genes.

There’s an adage among pediatricians that all parents are environmental determinists until they have their own children, at which point they switch to believing that it’s all about genes. Watching a child throwing a tantrum at the next table in a restaurant, a pre-child couple says it’s clearly the parents’ fault for not raising their child properly. But when the same couple is dealing with its own out-of-control child in a public place, we hope that those around us understand that we’ve done our best, but the child came into the world with this temperament. It’s far more comforting to ascribe the behavior of our own noisy or troubling toddler to genes, for which we have only passive responsibility, than to our capacities as parents, for which we are more directly accountable.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle: it’s not either/or but rather both/and. Every human disposition and disorder of mental or physical health depends on an intricate interaction between internal and external causes to take root and advance. The key to understanding human differences will involve a keener knowledge of how genetic difference and environmental variation work together to change biological processes. This approach to ‘unpuzzling’ human nature and wellness brings us closer to understanding what makes orchids and dandelions bloom, wither, or move between these states over the course of a changing life.

You can think of human life as the song that issues from the epigenetic piano and its equalizer, the result of a complex compositional process shaped by both genes and environments. Each person is predisposed to play certain types of scores, like those of the orchid or the dandelion, but there is abundant space for unique variation and improvisation.