The Art of Manliness - #555： Dandelion Children vs. Orchid Children

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast you've probably

00:00:11.640 observed families in which one of the kids is super resilient and easygoing while the other

00:00:15.580 is super sensitive and anxious same family same parents but two extremely different children

00:00:20.320 what gives my guest today says that some kids are like robust dandelions while others are like

00:00:24.740 fragile orchids while the fragility of orchid children might seem like a liability in the

00:00:29.000 right circumstances these kids can actually thrive to an even greater extent than their dandelion

00:00:33.420 peers his name is w thomas boyce he's a developmental pediatrician and professor of pediatrics as well

00:00:38.120 as the author of the book the orchid and the dandelion why some children struggle and how all

00:00:42.140 can thrive we begin our conversation discussing the respective attributes of dandelion and orchid

00:00:46.220 children and how the increased reactivity of the latter influences their health emotional well-being

00:00:50.760 and development tom then explains how orchid children can be both the healthiest and sickest

00:00:54.760 of children depending on the environment in which they are raised we then discuss the theories as to

00:00:58.460 what causes orchid children to be orchid children including genetics and environmental factors and we

00:01:02.840 enter conversation with tips for parents of sensitive children how to help them thrive and succeed

00:01:06.940 after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash orchid tom joins you now via clearcast.io

00:01:12.920 all right dr tom boyce welcome to the show thank you very much glad to be here

00:01:25.500 so you are a professor of pediatrics who studied children's development and you've postulated that

00:01:30.800 there's a spectrum that kids reside on where on one end of the spectrum there are what you call

00:01:35.220 dandelion kids and on the other end of the spectrum you have what are called orchid kids can you describe

00:01:41.260 what you're talking about what is a dandelion kid what do they look like what does an orchid kid look like

00:01:45.920 so we we began years ago trying to understand why there was such variation

00:01:51.680 in children's health responses to the adversities and stressors that they encounter in their lives

00:01:59.600 and we decided that one way of indexing this would be to bring them into a laboratory

00:02:06.000 circumstance where we would sit them down in front of a previously unknown examiner

00:02:12.060 and we would ask them to carry out a series of mildly stressful tasks things like repeating a

00:02:20.180 series of numbers that the examiner says to them or asking them to watch an emotion evoking video clip

00:02:27.260 or having them take a drop of lemon juice on their tongue and we found that when we monitored the

00:02:33.660 stress response systems that are characteristic of the human body that there were there were tremendous

00:02:40.540 differences between children in their responsivity their reactivity within those systems to these

00:02:47.240 various stressors and when we began to then study patterns of illness and development within these

00:02:53.880 populations of children that we were studying we found that the most reactive children in the laboratory

00:02:59.720 in real life had either the best or the worst of the health outcomes depending upon the kinds of social

00:03:07.100 settings that they were living in their families their communities their schools so we began calling

00:03:14.060 these highly reactive highly sensitive children orchid children and then called the children who

00:03:20.820 were really the majority of those that we tested in the lab that had very little in the way of response

00:03:26.780 to these minor stressors we started calling them dandelion children so dandelions like a dandelion these kids

00:03:33.080 doesn't doesn't matter what environment they find themselves in they're going to do okay the orchid kid

00:03:37.920 needs something like orchids are delicate they need a certain type of environment to to prosper that's

00:03:43.880 right that's the idea the the the terms actually come from a swedish word mas cross barn which means

00:03:51.460 dandelion child and what the swedes mean by that is a child that can like the dandelion thrive in any

00:03:59.000 environment that it encounters and we coined the the second term orchid child to reflect the opposite

00:04:06.380 of that which is children who are are very sensitive and responsive to the kinds of environments they

00:04:12.600 encounter so when you talk about reactivity or sensitivity to stress in an orchid child what does

00:04:18.520 that look like i mean how do you know that a child is reacting or being is or is highly sensitive to

00:04:24.280 stress well in the laboratory we monitored these two principal stress response systems which are

00:04:31.260 the cortisol system cortisol of course being the a major stress hormone that's secreted by the adrenal

00:04:39.440 glands signaled from the brain so we monitored cortisol levels and we also looked at the autonomic nervous

00:04:46.400 system which is the fight-or-flight system that causes you know sweaty palms and dilated pupils and

00:04:53.900 increased heart rate so we had those two stress response systems in the lab that we could monitor

00:05:00.320 that would tell us whether the child was reacting vigorously or or minimally over the course of these

00:05:07.060 minor stressors so that's how we we find those children in the laboratory now in clinical work finding

00:05:14.480 those kids obviously we're not going to be testing every child that walks through the door of a

00:05:20.380 clinic we we find that the the kids who are the the orchid children tend to be shyer there they are kids

00:05:27.840 who are typically shy they tend to withdraw from novel situations so uh going to a birthday party where

00:05:35.580 they don't know many of the kids would be an example of a novel situation that an orchid child might

00:05:41.300 might be more sensitive to and withdraw from and these orchid children also seem to have more in the way of

00:05:48.000 sensory sensitivities they have in all all of the various senses smell taste touch and so on they

00:05:55.920 seem to have greater sensitivity than do the dandelion children now listening to this we've had a guest on

00:06:03.160 the show talking about autism some of these things sound similar to autism is there a relation at all

00:06:07.940 between this sensitivity and autism well orchid and dandelion are not they they are not diagnoses they're not

00:06:15.920 diagnoses in the psychiatric sense of of being you know a definable mental health disorder but they do

00:06:23.800 overlap in certain ways with some of the the traditional psychiatric diagnoses so the one that

00:06:30.100 you point out is is a good example sometimes children who are somewhere on the autism spectrum

00:06:37.020 do have the same kind of hypersensitivities in the sensory modalities that do these children who we

00:06:44.480 find in the laboratory are orchid children okay that makes sense so that's a good point to make this

00:06:49.920 is not like this idea of like an orchid dandelion child is not you can't go to your you know child

00:06:54.140 psychologist and be like hey is my kid an orchid child they're going to be like that's not a clinical

00:06:58.440 diagnosis that's that's right okay so something you mentioned something earlier though that's interesting

00:07:03.380 when as you describe this hyper reactivity to stress that orchid children have people hear that and

00:07:09.820 think well that's not good you'd be better to be in dandelion child but in your research you've done

00:07:14.900 on orchid children orchid children in some cases do the best in certain situations can you talk about

00:07:20.580 this sort of paradox where orchid children can either you know depending on the circumstance do

00:07:25.160 either really well both in health well-being etc or poorly yes this was the the part of our early

00:07:33.160 findings that have been sustained both in our laboratory and other laboratories around the

00:07:39.200 world that was that was truly surprising we we had expected that the children who showed biological

00:07:46.280 high reactivity in the laboratory would be kids that when encountering major adversities in their real

00:07:55.240 life out in in real social circumstances would have the highest rates of illness and injury and

00:08:02.860 behavioral disorders and so on and sure enough that was true the the the kids who were high in

00:08:08.980 reactivity in the lab and who experienced lots of adversity in their normal everyday lives those were

00:08:15.180 the kids who were the the least well had the most developmental and behavioral problems but what we

00:08:21.380 hadn't anticipated and and what really took us by surprise and has been replicated now over and over

00:08:28.100 is that these same kids who are high in reactivity in the laboratory the so-called orchid children when

00:08:35.860 they're growing up in very nurturant supportive predictable conditions they don't just have average levels of

00:08:43.320 health they have the best health of all of the children in our samples so these seem to be children who have

00:08:50.240 either the best outcomes or the worst outcomes depending upon the character of the kind of social

00:08:57.020 context in which they find themselves so orchid children tend to get sicker more in the wrong

00:09:02.680 environment but they can be the healthiest kid in the right environment and this dichotomous outcome

00:09:08.520 isn't just about health you also see it in behavioral outcomes so in the wrong environment an orchid child

00:09:13.980 could be the most anxious most stressed out but in the right environment they could be the happiest most

00:09:18.700 you know thriving kid there is in a group that's right and that that really is kind of the hidden

00:09:24.320 good news in all of this it is that the kids that we sometimes worry about as parents or as physicians

00:09:32.380 teachers the kids that we worry about most in in certain circumstances can actually be the healthiest

00:09:39.640 and have the least developmental and behavioral issues of of any of the children that we contend with

00:09:45.860 and so this this connection of to health or you know getting sick that relates to the stress response

00:09:51.600 because i think what happens when someone you when you get stressed out a lot your body's immune system

00:09:57.180 sort of diminishes so i can see how an orchid child would get sicker more often because they're highly

00:10:02.600 sensitive to stress their immune system is going to take a beating that's right it's uh both of these

00:10:09.060 systems that we that we measured in the laboratory both the cortisol system and the the fight-or-flight

00:10:14.540 system both of those systems have really profound effects on immune competence and they can alter the

00:10:21.840 the ability of a child to resist pathogens like viruses and bacteria i thought the interesting thing

00:10:27.880 about that related bacteria was about cavities it's not just just eating sweets that causes cavities

00:10:33.500 it's you know the sweets plus bacteria plus stress that causes increase in cavities one of the studies

00:10:40.980 that we did was to examine carries in in children and we did this by asking them to donate to us the

00:10:50.200 the the the baby teeth that fall out at about grade one we paid them ten dollars a tooth which was

00:10:57.960 far above the going rate at in their family homes and they gladly gave us these teeth and we were able to

00:11:05.980 study both the teeth that were that were still in their mouths and look at the level of carries that

00:11:11.940 the children had experienced but also look at the the microstructure of the of those deciduous teeth that

00:11:19.320 had fallen out and we were able to show that the kids who had more in the way of carries were the kids

00:11:26.080 who had greater stressors in their lives and who had greater sensitivity of those teeth by virtue of

00:11:34.080 exposures to cortisol and other kinds of biological factors and and how soon can you you and your

00:11:42.340 researchers tell if a child is going to be on that orchid spectrum like how is it is it at birth or even

00:11:49.440 or is it happen you have to wait a little bit before you start seeing that our studies have primarily

00:11:55.380 been in four to eight year old children so sort of middle childhood but one of my primary colleagues

00:12:01.200 Dr. Abby Alcon who's a professor of nursing at UCSF has along with Dr. Brenda Eskenazi has studied

00:12:09.420 children in farmworker families and has begun to look at reactivity and stress responses on down into

00:12:17.600 infancy and those studies show what I think most parents and and pediatricians would have suspected

00:12:25.860 that right from birth there are differences in the the infant's reactivity and responsivity to

00:12:32.880 the the changes and perturbations in the environment so there actually are children

00:12:37.560 that we think we can identify very early in life that have these these predispositions to high reactivity

00:12:44.580 and you can tell that with that APGAR test I remember my kids as soon as they're born they're swept

00:12:48.600 away and they do that APGAR test to figure out that sort of thing they sort of test the response of the

00:12:53.620 the infant yeah the interesting thing about the APGAR score is that most of the the signs or signals

00:13:00.760 that are used to score the APGAR are signals that are mediated by these stress response systems so it's

00:13:08.680 things like respiratory effort and heart rate and circulation and and many of those things are are

00:13:15.920 actually influenced by these stress response systems so we we think that the APGAR score may in fact

00:13:23.480 be a kind of index or indicator of stress response even in the first moments following delivery

00:13:31.620 so this if you can see this if the research is suggesting you can see this high reactivity at birth

00:13:38.720 and that suggests there's like a biological genetic component to it but you know that can lead you down

00:13:45.500 the path of genetic determinisms like well you know that's your genes there's nothing you can do

00:13:49.640 about it is there more going on um is there like a is is the environment and genes sort of working

00:13:55.920 together to determine whether this high reactivity is uh displayed yes and that's that's exactly right

00:14:03.480 and you may ask well if if there are differences in reactivity even in the first moments of postnatal

00:14:12.780 life you know where does the experience part come in but what we're learning more and more is that

00:14:18.460 there are experiences that the fetus has during intrauterine life just as surely as an infant does

00:14:25.280 during the first six to nine months postnatal life so we we think that the development of these

00:14:32.980 patterns of orchid or dandelion responses actually begin post-conception and they involve not just

00:14:41.980 biological factors like genetic variation but they also involve experience and exposures that children

00:14:50.000 have both during intrauterine life and and then in postnatal life as they go into infancy it's a

00:14:57.840 matter of gene by environment interaction not simply an effect of genes or an effect of environments

00:15:04.140 in isolation and that's the epigenetics right where the environment influences what genes are expressed

00:15:10.380 that's that's right um epigenetics of course means epi means on top of so the epigenome is the part of

00:15:19.780 our genome that lies on top of our our actual dna sequence and those marks that lie on top of the genome

00:15:29.480 are the things that govern whether a given gene is expressed or not expressed and have a lot to do

00:15:36.600 we think with the development of these orchid or dandelion phenotypes so that can explain so if let's

00:15:42.980 say the mother experiences a lot of stress while she's carrying a child that could turn on some genes

00:15:49.580 in the the fetus saying okay the environment out there is really stressful you need to get ready for

00:15:55.380 that so we're going to help you be highly sensitive to stress so you can so you can notice it when you

00:16:00.900 when you see it yes um that's that's what we think is going on now the the we're in the very early days

00:16:08.820 of studying stress experiences during pregnancy during fetal life but the early evidence is that there

00:16:15.700 may be these epigenetic differences that determine orchid or dandelion phenotypes based on experiences

00:16:22.980 during fetal life and genetic variation that the fetus inherits from his mom and his dad this could

00:16:29.980 get really interesting because i've read some stuff about epigenetics where some researchers postulate

00:16:34.260 or theorize that even grandparents can influence grandkids based on the stress they experience i think

00:16:40.840 they talked about holocaust survivors and the grandchildren of holocaust survivors they tend to be

00:16:46.600 more highly reactive to stress i think that's what it is but it's this is an interesting world that it

00:16:52.020 opens up with epigenetics it really is you know we've we've known for a long time that both differences

00:16:58.920 in genes and differences in environments affect child health and well-being but up until just in

00:17:06.340 in recent decades in the last 20 30 years we've now begun to actually be able to identify the the physical

00:17:14.240 locus where genes and environments come together and that is these this epigenome these epigenetic marks

00:17:21.460 that lie uh on top of the of the genome and one part of the book you talk about the epigenetics of

00:17:27.960 orchid children is sort of nature's way way of hedging bets and allows them to survive in a stressful

00:17:35.120 environment i mean we think of this sort of like being highly reactive to stress would be maladaptive

00:17:40.280 but in a way weird way it's kind of adaptive can you talk about that well it's adaptive in the in the sense

00:17:47.340 that if you're growing up in really comfortable supportive nurturing conditions it actually

00:17:56.140 is an advantage to be highly sensitive because then you're if you will sort of able to take in more

00:18:03.260 of the goodness that that environment provides for you so you you could argue that that both the best of

00:18:11.060 environments and the worst of environments would be affected by this sensitivity that some children

00:18:16.880 have to those social contexts we also can think about environments of evolutionary adaptedness you know

00:18:25.400 back uh thousands of years ago when children were part of hominid troops that that wandered various

00:18:33.820 continents those those kids you can see how children who were highly reactive and highly sensitive

00:18:41.540 might have had bad outcomes under conditions of predation and danger but on the other hand it may

00:18:49.640 have been helpful actually to a troop of early early hominids to have individuals who are highly

00:18:57.900 sensitive to the stressors and the dangers that that may have been out there on the other hand

00:19:03.740 during periods of of quiet and peaceful existence those same individuals might have thrived and that

00:19:11.660 that provides us with a kind of evolutionary account of uh of why these phenotypes might have persisted

00:19:20.780 in those ancient environments so there's a biological component a genetic component but as we've been

00:19:26.740 talking about uh the social environment plays a huge role and the first social environment that most

00:19:32.640 children are put into as a family but yeah the the chapter we discuss family and and the interaction

00:19:39.140 with orca children you say no two children are raised in the same family what do you mean by that

00:19:45.000 and what are the implications for orca children what i mean by that is that the the differences in

00:19:52.360 uh gender in birth order in personality children in certain ways create the environments of their

00:20:00.380 family and it's it's pretty clear that the experience of one child in a given family is not the same as

00:20:07.340 the experience of another child so a sort of shorthand way of thinking about that is to say

00:20:13.080 that really actually no two children are raised in the same family in the sense that their experiences

00:20:20.160 of their parents of their sibship and so on are very different one to the other the implications of that

00:20:27.520 are that children growing up in the same family can have very very different health outcomes and

00:20:33.800 developmental outcomes from one sibling to another it's a common experience of pediatricians

00:20:41.400 that a family comes in for primary pediatric care and you know a parent will say maybe they have

00:20:49.380 three children that these two kids are healthy all the time but this one that one is is sick most of the

00:20:56.060 time or you know has problems of one kind or another and we think that that may come from

00:21:03.160 these differences in the experience of the family environment that different children have right and

00:21:08.680 also yeah like when i when you when i read that i started thinking about my own experience or watching

00:21:13.680 other families i mean if a child's born at a certain stage and say the parent's career development

00:21:18.680 that can influence how the parents behave and whether they're stressed out or not stressed out at home

00:21:23.920 when they're younger there's a difference between if a parent's older and they have a child i thought

00:21:28.200 it was interesting did you talk about the story of you and your sister as an example of same family

00:21:33.020 but different outcomes because it it wasn't the same family she was more sensitive and she experienced

00:21:38.940 some hard times with your family that you didn't experience and that affected her and influenced her the

00:21:44.280 rest of life and she even ended up taking her own life in adulthood yeah that's right and of course i think

00:21:50.640 there were there were major differences between my sister and myself in our in our sensitivities to

00:21:57.180 the adversities that we experienced within our family i you know believe in retrospect that my sister was

00:22:04.460 a classical orchid child and i and i believe that i was mostly a dandelion child so our our differences

00:22:13.740 and sensitivity to the experiences within our family um were probably profound so another social

00:22:20.860 context that that have a big influence on children are uh is school when they go off to school what role

00:22:27.420 do peers play and whether an orchid thrives or or struggles oh i think they play a major role first of all

00:22:35.860 there there is the issue of bullying which is way too prevalent in our in our schools today it's

00:22:42.720 we're we're gradually becoming aware of it um of how children treat each other but those experiences

00:22:49.080 that probably are pretty universally experienced among kids in in primary school age groups those

00:22:56.160 experiences are are very different depending upon whether you're an orchid child or a dandelion child

00:23:02.820 we also know that there are social hierarchies that are set up within groups of school children any

00:23:10.280 kindergarten teacher can tell you this that within a couple of weeks after 20 or 30 five-year-olds are

00:23:16.320 brought together in a novel social group that is a new kindergarten classroom that those children set

00:23:23.660 up a pecking order with some children at the top of that order that are the dominant children and those

00:23:29.340 at the bottom that are the the more subordinate children so there are these experiences of of

00:23:36.040 hierarchical position and bullying and coercion and so on that that very much affect the well-being and

00:23:44.120 the experience of of one child versus another teachers also uh can can dramatically influence those

00:23:51.680 experiences right so those sort of highly stressful situations like that could cause an orchid child to

00:23:57.920 flounder but if he's in a if if they were in a better environment they could actually thrive and do well

00:24:02.720 in a school that's right and we we actually have have found that in in some of our studies uh that

00:24:09.980 were done in berkeley california primary schools kindergarten classrooms our our research assistants kept

00:24:17.780 coming back into the lab and saying you know this class is very different from that other class and

00:24:24.020 describing to us these profound differences in the way that the in the cultures that the teachers

00:24:30.080 set up and we began seeing that that some teachers almost cynically use the uh the social hierarchies

00:24:39.580 that kids set up as a means of behavior control within their classrooms while other teachers go out

00:24:46.580 of their way to be sure that the kids that that are at the bottom of those hierarchies are having

00:24:52.080 positive beneficial experiences as well doing things like uh showing to the class the the special

00:24:59.780 capabilities of those children that are in the subordinate positions so the sensitivities and and

00:25:06.760 abilities of of school teachers turn out to be very crucial to the outcomes that children experience in

00:25:13.360 school settings and what about parents like what if there's a parent who's listening they they got a

00:25:17.520 hunch that their kid is highly reactive to stress they've noticed some of those things there's a

00:25:21.720 social they're novel social situation they're shy they hide things like that so they think well maybe my

00:25:27.120 kid's an orchid kid on that you know that sort of orchid side of the spectrum any advice for for those

00:25:33.000 parents who have who have sensitive children yeah so in the book there's one chapter that deals with

00:25:40.080 strategies that seem to be helpful that parents use to help children with these high sensitivities

00:25:48.040 and interestingly enough they're they're the same strategies that very sensitive good teachers use

00:25:53.900 to help children with those same kinds of of hypersensitivities we talk about six strategies

00:26:00.440 which have the the happy coincidence of of forming the mnemonic orchid or chid and those are beginning

00:26:09.860 at the top with o own true self the the way in which the parent recognizes and honors the expression of the

00:26:18.580 child's own true self i think one of the highest responsibilities that we have as parents is to

00:26:25.680 allow each child to come forth and and and express who that child is in honest and in open ways

00:26:35.620 the r stands for routines we've also found that orchid children seem to thrive in conditions that are

00:26:42.840 predictable and routine even monotonous at times that seems to be something that is helpful to orchid

00:26:50.120 children the c stands for caritas the latin word that means steadfast love we all strive as parents to

00:26:59.800 love all of our children but this kind of steadfast support and love provided to orchid children seems to

00:27:08.080 have especially profound effects on them the h is for human differences some families try to obscure or

00:27:18.640 blur the differences between children the families that are the most helpful to orchid children are those where

00:27:25.760 human differences are celebrated and expressed openly the i is for imaginative play some people think of play as

00:27:35.360 kind of trivial child activity it is not it's it's really profoundly important in the lives of children and having the

00:27:43.720 opportunities to have this kind of imaginative play seems especially important to orchids and finally the d is for

00:27:52.240 danger one of the most difficult things to do as a parent of an orchid child is to decide when to push the child into

00:28:01.360 situations that feel dangerous to the child versus allowing them to withdraw from those experiences so it's things

00:28:09.760 like if a i mentioned earlier going to a birthday party where a child doesn't know many of the children parents have to

00:28:17.120 make a decision with orchid children in those circumstances about whether this is a circumstance where we want to push that

00:28:24.480 child nudge them forward into experiencing a victory over that over that concern or fearfulness or is this a

00:28:32.960 circumstance where we want to allow that child to withdraw so those are six kind of strategies that parents

00:28:40.720 seem to use that seem to be helpful to all children but are especially important to orchid children yeah i think it

00:28:47.360 works for all children as i was listening to that it made me think another key point of that recognizing differences

00:28:52.480 between your kids oftentimes think parents think well like you know it worked for this first kid it's

00:28:57.120 going to work for kid number two probably not so you have to adapt on the fly i'm curious what have you

00:29:03.680 guys done research on what uh development for an orchid child looks like in adulthood like what happens to

00:29:09.360 these highly sensitive kids as they get you know into their 20s and 30s well if we study it at the level of

00:29:16.320 of stress reactivity those biological responses that we talked about earlier if anything it appears that

00:29:23.760 one's position on the spectrum of reactivity tends to become even more committed in the transition from

00:29:31.920 childhood to adulthood children who are highly reactive tend to be even more solidly high reactivity as

00:29:41.280 they get into adolescence and even more so in the transition into adulthood now in adulthood we also

00:29:47.760 begin to develop coping mechanisms and and approaches to dealing with stress and adversity that may be you

00:29:55.360 know profoundly helpful to us and may make a an orchid individual a far more adapted than that individual

00:30:05.680 might have been during childhood but we think that that the profile at least biologically of being an orchid

00:30:13.920 or a dandelion on that spectrum of reactivity that tends to become even deeper and more committed as

00:30:21.760 individuals go into adult life but with the proviso that that these ways of coping and and dealing with

00:30:29.280 stress become ever more elaborate and effective as we get to be adults

00:30:35.520 what are those like positive coping mechanisms look like well i think you know i think in in

00:30:40.960 certain ways they are the uh the same strategies that parents use but we we gradually begin to learn

00:30:49.520 over time as orchid individuals that that those same strategies we can use on ourselves so for example feeling

00:30:58.800 open to uh recognizing and affirming who you are as a person allowing those those differences to be

00:31:07.200 expressed and not suppressed having uh a relatively routine uh life where things are predictable from one week

00:31:15.760 uh to the next from one day to the next so that these routines that are effective and helpful in orchid

00:31:22.880 children can also be instituted by an orchid adult you know taking care of and and finding uh the kind

00:31:30.720 of support and love uh that an individual needs within an individual life all of these kinds of things

00:31:36.800 that parents provide early in life we begin to learn to to provide to ourselves later in life so yeah

00:31:44.320 i imagine the person who's like on that orchid side of the spectrum they would probably choose a

00:31:47.840 job that has pretty you know stable routine they want to have a stable you know family life so that'll

00:31:53.840 provide that that sort of stability that they they thrive in and i imagine orchids uh there's mal you

00:32:00.400 know there's maladaptive ways to cope with stress and you know things like alcohol or drugs or things like

00:32:06.000 that and that would just be even worse for an orchid adult that's right that's that's exactly right well

00:32:14.000 tom this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book and your

00:32:17.680 work well the book was uh published in in january 2019 by knoff it is out there and available um

00:32:26.560 that's probably the best summary of the work the book also includes a listing of the scientific papers

00:32:34.080 on which the book is based both my own and and that of other investigators so i would say the book and

00:32:40.800 the and the papers and perspectives that are referenced in the book would be the best place

00:32:46.400 to begin fantastic well tom boyce thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thank you pleasure on this

00:32:50.960 end as well thank you brett my guest today was w thomas boyce he's the author of the book the orchid

00:32:56.080 and the dandelion it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere and be sure to check out our

00:32:59.920 show notes at aom.is slash orchid where you find links to resources we can delve deeper into this

00:33:04.400 topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at

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The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

#555： Dandelion Children vs. Orchid Children

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