Сьюзан Кейн - Quiet [The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking]

Consider this cautionary tale, told to me by Dr. Jerry Miller, a child psychologist and the director of the Center for the Child and the Family at the University of Michigan. Dr. Miller had a patient named Ethan, whose parents brought him for treatment on four separate occasions. Each time, the parents voiced the same fears that something was wrong with their child. Each time, Dr. Miller assured them that Ethan was perfectly fine.

The reason for their initial concern was simple enough. Ethan was seven, and his four-year-old brother had beaten him up several times. Ethan didn’t fight back. His parents—both of them outgoing, take-charge types with high-powered corporate jobs and a passion for competitive golf and tennis—were OK with their younger son’s aggression, but worried that Ethan’s passivity was “going to be the story of his life.”

As Ethan grew older, his parents tried in vain to instill “fighting spirit” in him. They sent him onto the baseball diamond and the soccer field, but Ethan just wanted to go home and read. He wasn’t even competitive at school. Though very bright, he was a B student. He could have done better, but preferred to focus on his hobbies, especially building model cars. He had a few close friends, but was never in the thick of classroom social life. Unable to account for his puzzling behavior, Ethan’s parents thought he might be depressed.

But Ethan’s problem, says Dr. Miller, was not depression but a classic case of poor “parent-child fit.” Ethan was tall, skinny, and unathletic; he looked like a stereotypical nerd. His parents were sociable, assertive people, who were “always smiling, always talking to people while dragging Ethan along behind them.”

Compare their worries about Ethan to Dr. Miller’s assessment: “He was like the classic Harry Potter kid—he was always reading,” says Dr. Miller enthusiastically. “He enjoyed any form of imaginative play. He loved to build things. He had so many things he wanted to tell you about. He had more acceptance of his parents than they had of him. He didn’t define them as pathological, just as different from himself. That same kid in a different home would be a model child.”

But Ethan’s own parents never found a way to see him in that light. The last thing Dr. Miller heard was that his parents finally consulted with another psychologist who agreed to “treat” their son. And now Dr. Miller is the one who’s worried about Ethan.

“This is a clear case of an ‘iatrogenic’ problem,’ ” he says. “That’s when the treatment makes you sick. The classic example is when you use treatment to try to make a gay child into a straight one. I worry for that kid. These parents are very caring and well-meaning people. They feel that without treatment, they’re not preparing their son for society. That he needs more fire in him. Maybe there’s truth to that last part; I don’t know. But whether there is or not, I firmly believe that it’s impossible to change that kid. I worry that they’re taking a perfectly healthy boy and damaging his sense of self.”

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a bad fit when extroverted parents have an introverted child. With a little mindfulness and understanding, any parent can have a good fit with any kind of child, says Dr. Miller. But parents need to step back from their own preferences and see what the world looks like to their quiet children.

Take the case of Joyce and her seven-year-old daughter, Isabel. Isabel is an elfin second grader who likes to wear glittery sandals and colorful rubber bracelets snaking up her skinny arms. She has several best friends with whom she exchanges confidences, and she gets along with most of the kids in her class. She’s the type to throw her arms around a classmate who’s had a bad day; she even gives her birthday presents away to charity. That’s why her mother, Joyce, an attractive, good-natured woman with a wisecracking sense of humor and a bring-it-on demeanor, was so confused by Isabel’s problems at school.

In first grade, Isabel often came home consumed with worry over the class bully, who hurled mean comments at anyone sensitive enough to feel bruised by them. Even though the bully usually picked on other kids, Isabel spent hours dissecting the meaning of the bully’s words, what her true intentions had been, even what the bully might be suffering at home that could possibly motivate her to behave so dreadfully at school.

By second grade, Isabel started asking her mother not to arrange play dates without checking with her first. Usually she preferred to stay home. When Joyce picked up Isabel from school, she often found the other girls gathered into groups and Isabel off on the playground, shooting baskets by herself. “She just wasn’t in the mix. I had to stop doing pickups for a while,” recalls Joyce. “It was just too upsetting for me to watch.” Joyce couldn’t understand why her sweet, loving daughter wanted to spend so much time alone. She worried that something was wrong with Isabel. Despite what she’d always thought about her daughter’s empathetic nature, might Isabel lack the ability to relate with others?

It was only when I suggested that Joyce’s daughter might be an introvert, and explained what that was, that Joyce started thinking differently about Isabel’s experiences at school. And from Isabel’s perspective, things didn’t sound alarming at all. “I need a break after school,” she told me later. “School is hard because a lot of people are in the room, so you get tired. I freak out if my mom plans a play date without telling me, because I don’t want to hurt my friends’ feelings. But I’d rather stay home. At a friend’s house you have to do the things other people want to do. I like hanging out with my mom after school because I can learn from her. She’s been alive longer than me. We have thoughtful conversations. I like having thoughtful conversations because they make people happy.” *

Isabel is telling us, in all her second-grade wisdom, that introverts relate to other people. Of course they do. They just do it in their own way.

Now that Joyce understands Isabel’s needs, mother and daughter brainstorm happily, figuring out strategies to help Isabel navigate her school day. “Before, I would have had Isabel going out and seeing people all the time, packing her time after school full of activities,” says Joyce. “Now I understand that it’s very stressful for her to be in school, so we figure out together how much socializing makes sense and when it should happen.” Joyce doesn’t mind when Isabel wants to hang out alone in her room after school or leave a birthday party a little earlier than the other kids. She also understands that since Isabel doesn’t see any of this as a problem, there’s no reason that she should.

Joyce has also gained insight into how to help her daughter manage playground politics. Once, Isabel was worried about how to divide her time among three friends who didn’t get along with each other. “My initial instinct,” says Joyce, “would be to say, Don’t worry about it! Just play with them all! But now I understand that Isabel’s a different kind of person. She has trouble strategizing about how to handle all these people simultaneously on the playground. So we talk about who she’s going to play with and when, and we rehearse things she can tell her friends to smooth the situation over.”

Another time, when Isabel was a little older, she felt upset because her friends sat at two different tables in the lunch room. One table was populated with her quieter friends, the other with the class extroverts. Isabel described the second group as “loud, talking all the time, sitting on top of each other— ugh !” But she was sad because her best friend Amanda loved to sit at the “crazy table,” even though she was also friends with the girls at the “more relaxed and chill table.” Isabel felt torn. Where should she sit?