For years people spoke of sensitive children and children who weren’t, as though there were two drawers. When genuinely large samples were analysed, three appeared. And the third one changes the way you look at your child a good deal.
Dandelions, tulips and orchids
A team led by Francesca Lionetti, with Elaine Aron and Michael Pluess among others, applied statistical analysis to several samples of children and adults to see whether sensitivity is distributed continuously or in groups. Three came out.
About three in ten are low in sensitivity. Four in ten are in the middle. And about three in ten are highly sensitive. The authors named them after plants and the name stuck: dandelions, tulips and orchids.
The metaphor works because it is exact. A dandelion grows in the crack of a pavement. It needs nothing and almost nothing affects it. An orchid needs particular light, particular humidity, particular temperature. With that, it produces a flower a dandelion will never produce. Without it, it withers.
Neither is the better plant. They are different plants with different requirements.
The part almost nobody tells you
What makes all of this interesting isn’t that sensitive children suffer more. It is that they respond more, in both directions.
There is one study that shows it better than any explanation. Ninety-nine nursery-age children were followed, measuring their biological reactivity to stress and counting how many respiratory infections they had over the school year.
The more reactive children who came from high-stress families fell ill more than any other group. So far, what you would expect. But those same reactive children, when they came from calm families, were the healthiest in the whole sample. Healthier than the low-reactive ones.
And the low-reactive children fell ill at more or less the same rate wherever they came from. The environment barely moved the needle for them. For the sensitive ones it moved it all the way, downwards and upwards.
What this means for you
It means that what you do at home counts for more with this child than with another. It isn’t a burden, even if it can sound like one as you read it. It is the other side of the same coin: if you are already paying the price of having a child who is overwhelmed by noise, the benefit is yours too.
There is a school trial that confirms it from the positive side. In a poor borough in east London, a twelve-session depression prevention programme was given to three hundred and sixty-three eleven-year-old girls. A year later, those who scored high on sensitivity still had fewer depressive symptoms. Those who scored low were exactly where they had been at the start.
The programme didn’t work or fail in the abstract. It worked with those who were ready to take it in.
What the research doesn’t say
It doesn’t say your child is superior. Orchids aren’t premium plants, they are demanding plants. Selling sensitivity as a superpower is as false as selling it as a defect, and it also puts a pressure on the child that they never asked for.
It doesn’t say everything is in your hands either. Temperament has a biological basis, it shows up early and you didn’t cause it. What does depend on you is the environment in which that temperament develops.
And it doesn’t say you have to wrap them in cotton wool. A well-cared-for orchid isn’t one that never leaves the house. It is one that has the conditions to grow and then grows.
The sentence worth remembering
When a bad day comes, and they will, the frame that helps is this: you aren’t raising a fragile child who has to be protected from the world. You are raising a child who responds a great deal to the world, and you have more influence over how things go for them than most parents do.
Sources
- Lionetti, F., Aron, A., Aron, E. N., Burns, G. L., Jagiellowicz, J. and Pluess, M. (2018). Dandelions, tulips and orchids: evidence for the existence of low-sensitive, medium-sensitive and high-sensitive individuals. Translational Psychiatry, 8, 24.
- Ellis, B. J. and Boyce, W. T. (2008). Biological sensitivity to context. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(3), 183-187.
- Pluess, M. and Boniwell, I. (2015). Sensory-Processing Sensitivity predicts treatment response to a school-based depression prevention program. Personality and Individual Differences, 82, 40-45.