New Research Supports Orchid Hypothesis

Today’s Globe & Mail reports on a new study published in the journal Child Development that shows that children who are highly reactive to stress do worse than their peers at school if they come from a home where there’s lots of stress but do better than their peers at school, both academically and socially, when they have a stable and nurturing home.

This finding supports the Orchid Hypothesis (described at length by David Dobbs in The Atlantic late last year) which speculates that certain genes that have been tied to vulnerability to anxiety, depression, hyperactivity and behavioral problems may in fact simply make their carriers more sensitive to both positive and negative environmental influences. Under this hypothesis, people who are hyper-sensitive to their environment often respond so well to positive interventions that they surpass their less sensitive peers.

Click here to read the Child Development paper discussed in the Globe and check out our other posts about Orchid and Dandelion Children:

New Theory Suggests that Overly Sensitive Children Have Over-sized Potential,
More on Orchid and Dandelion Children,
Following the Orchid and Dandelion Discussion