When my fourth child, Dax, was born, I had a recently minted four-year-old, Scout, a soon to be three-year-old, Max, and a twenty-month-old, Tiggs, with as yet undiagnosed yet patently obvious ADHD. Our house – especially our kitchen – was a very busy place. One day, when Dax was maybe three months old, he was sitting in his bouncy seat happily watching Scout and Max roar with laughter as they danced in a circle to whatever Disney sing-along song happened to be booming out of the stereo. Tiggs was doing his own interpretive happy dance which involved singing the wrong words while racing from one side of the room to another and a lot of jumping.

Nothing made my heart sing more than watching my kids engulfed in this kind of loud, full bodied, romper room joy. But when I happened to glance at Dax, I noticed that he was not sharing my experience. As I watched, his relaxed body grew rigid. The hands he’d been joyfully waving moments ago clenched into tight little fists.  A look of dread overtook his smiling face and his wide eyes stared at my other children, unable to look away. As if someone had just turned off Winnie the Pooh to watch Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Of course, I ran right over to him to see what was wrong, my face inches from his. Once I had gobbled up his entire field of vision, my happy, smiling son returned. I searched for sharp objects and dirty diapers and anything else that might have caused such sudden dismay then, finding none, went back to the sink. Dax resumed gleefully watching his circus-performer siblings until, a few minutes later, it happened again. The stiffness. The wide-eyed grimace. The fixed stare. 

Again, I ran over and, again, as soon as his gaze shifted to me, he settled right down. When it happened a third time, something dawned on me. Rather than trying to figure out what was wrong, I simply turned Dax’s bouncy seat away from my other kids. Within a minute or two, he was right as rain, happily contemplating the virtue of a blank beige wall.

That’s when I realized I had an optrovert on my hands.

“Optrovert” is a Word I Use to Describe Those of my Children who Landed Far from me on the Introvert/Extrovert Scale.

I, my friends, am an extrovert. I love to meet new people and hear their stories and work collaboratively. I’m always the last one to leave the party – usually because I throw the party. I solve problems out loud, readily seek and offer advice, blurt out the answer before the question is finished, and emote all over the place. Two of my children have landed on my side of the road. The expression on Dax’s face after watching twenty minutes of the wild rumpus in my kitchen told me that he definitely had not.

Before I talk about how to mom across this particular personality chasm, I think it’s helpful to understand how big that chasm can be. Psychologists describe extroversion – sometimes thought of as sociability – as one of the five core traits that define our personalities. That’s big. A tendency toward extroversion or introversion is linked to neurobiological differences. That means we’re born with it. It’s not something we choose or can necessarily change. That’s also big. Now imagine raising a child who was confused or felt badly about twenty percent of his core personality. Worth bridging the gap, right? 

Introverts and Extroverts Process Stimulation Differently.

People who study this sort of thing used to think that introversion and extroversion were about how and where people filled their tank. That extroverts were energized by the company of others while introverts were drained by it. The thinking now is yeah, no.

Turns out both extraverts and introverts crave and are energized by social connection. We’re social beings and all have an abiding need to belong. The difference between them lies not in where they get their energy, but in how they integrate it. Introverts, while enjoying and needing social connection, can find it overstimulating. They lean internal. Long parties eventually send them running to a quiet place to reflect and process. They are more energized and comfortable in calmer settings. 

Extroverts, on the other hand, love the scene. They’re jazzed by it, interact with it easily and immediately, and don’t necessarily feel the need to silently digest the experience. The serenity introverts crave leaves extroverts a little blah.

When Raising an Optrovert, we Need to Distinguish our Social Style from our Child’s.

If you’re an extrovert raising extroverted kids, you probably won’t have much of a problem identifying with them. 

You want to invite your entire kindergarten class over this Friday? Awesome! I’ll pick up pizza and waterguns!

Same if you’re an introvert raising an introvert.

Of course we can leave Sarah’s birthday party early. We’ve already been here for forty-five minutes and this place is so loud.

But when you’re raising an optrovert, it’s very easy to unintentionally impose your own style of interacting with the world onto a child who has a fundamentally different way of being. For an extroverted mom to glimpse her son sitting alone on the school yard and clutch her heart.

Why weren’t you playing with the other kids? It looked like they were having so much fun! You should have gone over to join them!

Or for an introverted mom to sigh at the thought of another Saturday afternoon at Chuck-E-Cheese.

We were just there two weeks ago. Don’t you think a nice quiet weekend would be a better way to get ready for school on Monday?

The risk, of course, is not just that you and your child are fundamentally misunderstanding one another. It’s that your suggestion that your child act in a way that is counter to their natural inclination might imply that you think something is wrong. With one of their core personality traits.  This is peril indeed, but one we can completely mitigate by helping them understand their own socializing style and validating it. For the extroverted mom to say, I saw you taking some time for yourself at recess today. Did you enjoy it? And for the introverted mom to enlist Dad for Chuck-E-Cheese duty. 

But it’s unlikely you’ll think to do that if you don’t realize you’re raising an optrovert.

And Help Them Figure Out – and Validate – Where and How They’re Most Socially Comfortable.

I’m sure you have a pretty good idea, even if unarticulated, where you fall on the introversion/extroversion scale. It’s a continuum, right? Some people fall at the extremes, some closer to the middle. But even though your child was likely born with a predisposition toward one end of the scale or the other, they have no idea that their experience is different from anyone else’s. You need to help them learn and honor that. 

What I learned – the slow way – was to pay close attention to my kids’ reactions, especially when they seemed to be different from mine. It wasn’t until Dax had shown me three times that it occurred to me that he might be overstimulated. That’s because I’m an extrovert. Overstimulated isn’t generally in my wheelhouse.

Once I realized I was raising an optrovert – three, actually – I began an ongoing conversation with them about how they experience the world. Key to that was sharing my observations about them with them. 

You always seem to feel so much better after you’ve had a chance to talk something through.

I notice how centered you are after you’ve spent some time drawing.

You do such a great job being inclusive. You seem very comfortable meeting and talking to new people.

I love how you and Mia really invest in your friendship. I think spending so much one-on-one time together helps both of you really understand one another.

I think your kids will thank you (way, way later) if you adopt the habit of reflecting back to them, in the most complimentary terms, what you notice working for them. It shows them two important things. First, that your style isn’t the only – or even the best – one to have. And, second, whichever interactive style they have has its own strengths and gifts and advantages.

Because, let’s face it, the world judges.

With Reflection Rather than Judgement.

You might notice that, in reflecting things back to my kids, I leaned into ideas like comfort and effectiveness and enjoyment and avoided labels like “introvert” and “extrovert.” That’s because those are incredibly heavy words. Final. Comprehensive. They carry a lot of assumptions and myths that may have absolutely nothing to do with your child. 

This is especially true of “introverts.” Many people conflate the word “introvert” with “shy.” But they reflect wildly different internal experiences. A shy person feels uncomfortable or anxious in certain social situations. An introverted person may feel completely comfortable, perfectly poised, but simply prefer socializing in smaller groups or quieter settings. Shyness may require an intervention; introversion only requires respect.

That’s something neither “introverts” nor “extroverts” get enough of. Our society puts a thumb on the scale in favor of extroverts, falsely assuming that they’re better leaders, better communicators, better networkers, and more popular. This can lead “introverts” to feel somewhat less than, as if they don’t have the constitution to be a leader or networker. On the flip side, these assumptions shoot expectations way up for people pegged as extroverts. They may feel that they are expected to be better leaders, communicators, and networkers, to be constantly “on,” and sense some disappointment if they don’t live up to the hype. 

I have kids on both ends of the extroversion spectrum and I don’t want any of them absorbing these inaccurate and limiting beliefs. Because the truth is none of us lives in a vacuum. We all need to learn how to understand and honor, work with and appreciate not only our own styles and needs and rhythms, but also those that are different from our own. That’s quite the chasm to cross. But, if you take the time to bridge it, you’ll not only see and celebrate your optrovert for who they really are – you’ll help them see and celebrate it too. And the view from that bridge is amazing.