Should I Worry That My Teen is So Introverted?

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Dr. Lisa Damour:
What’s so fun is to move past this “introverts are like this, extroverts are like that, and extroverts are better” model that so much dominates and really muck around. And what makes an introvert an introvert? And what are those extraordinary skills and qualities that we often see associated with introversion that go vastly under celebrated?

Reena Ninan:
Episode 159, Should I worry that my teen is so introverted?
This is always the time of year when I’m itching to get out to somewhere warmer. And I know my girlfriend was saying, why do you make such a big deal over snow and it getting cold? This is winter. This is what is supposed to happen. But the problem is for those of us in the south who don’t really experience winter, it’s still painful. It’s still painful.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And also, I remember something you told me ages and ages ago, and I think this is such a wonderful thing that you’re set, your husband said you would go to the opening of an envelope. You love people, you love doing stuff you love. That’s why I love you. But you are Reena. I would say on the introversion extroversion scale, I would say you were way high on extroversion, wouldn’t you?

Reena Ninan:
Yes. But I feel like COVID, those COVID periods dampered it a little bit, but so it makes me so happy to say that you still would diagnose me on that level as being high, but winter makes me introverted and sort of not want to do stuff. So then I completely start to understand a little bit I think of what it’s like to be an introvert. But my husband’s like, no, you really don’t. You don’t get it. No, you don’t.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, and I think actually in this way, you and I have very parallel marriages because I am not as extroverted as you are, but I’m quite extroverted and my husband is profoundly introverted. And I think that’s the same in your family. Yeah.

Reena Ninan:
Yes, very true. Very, very true. He’d love to be with just a book and hanging out on the couch.
But it can be painful though. Lisa, when your child is such a super introvert and you see other kids getting out and doing stuff, what do you do? And this letter sort of sums it up. Well.
It says, Hi, Dr. Lisa and Reena, my son seems well adjusted and happy. He gets good grades, has a job, works out regularly at the gym. He’s respectful to my husband and I. Spends time with us. And for all intents and purposes, seems good. My concern is that he does not really socialize with his friends outside of school. On most weekends when not working, working out or volunteering with me, he’s mainly at home on his phone or computer. He talks about his friends doing things, but he doesn’t usually participate in those things. My perception is that he waits for his friends to invite him to activities, but if they don’t, he doesn’t seem to initiate. When my husband or I ask about why he’s not making plans with his friends, he really doesn’t offer any reason for why he will be going to college soon. And I’m concerned about how he will manage having a social life and if we should try to equip him with anything at all. Not sure if I should be worried or not. I appreciate the work you’re sharing with us parents. Thank you.
This sounds like an outstanding kid, Lisa. Should this parent even be worried? Should this parent be worried?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Lemme just say, I mean, I know I say this every time, but the letters, the letters. And I also am so grateful to our letter writers for giving us the context. This is a great kid. He’s doing great stuff. He’s totally solid. We have good working relationship with him. I mean, what does she say if he’s not working out, working or volunteering with me on the weekends? I mean,

Reena Ninan:
Beautiful.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Beautiful.

Reena Ninan:
I know.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right? And so it’s so helpful because thinking back actually, we’ve been talking about diagnostically, thinking back diagnostically, these are the kinds of questions I ask when I’m trying to make a diagnosis. Like, well, how are they getting along with people and are they functioning in school? I mean that we look at this big picture. So I’m grateful for how consistently our letter writers give us the bigger picture in which to consider the concern that got them to write to us.

Reena Ninan:
Should she be panicked? And I get that feeling because when your kid’s getting off to college, you’re like, have I equipped them? Are they ready? Are they going to be functioning? Is this one thing we need to work on? What would you say to her?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I think you’re exactly right that this is in some ways bubbling up because here comes college, and if I were this parent, it would be very easy to picture this sweet kid alone in his dorm room, not initiating things, becoming quite isolated. And that’s scary and that’s scary to think about as a parent, especially when they’re away and there’s not so much we can do, but we’re using the terms introversion and extroversion and they are, I think, the right terms here. And so I think let’s unpack what it really means to be introverted, and then let’s unpack why that is largely not that worrisome. And when it might be.
Thinking about this boy and thinking about what we were saying about the guys we’re married to, right? My husband, I trust your husband. They have perfectly good social skills. And I think this is an important thing to say about people who are introverted when they have to socialize, they’re completely capable of doing it. And yet when we talk about what introversion really means, some people will say, and I think this is true for some people, extroverts recharge by being with other people. Introverts recharge by being alone. I think one universal that is true is how much stimulation is enjoyable? So I think you like a very high level of stimulation. I like a very high level of stimulation. We find that exciting and energizing. And one thing that is almost universally true of introverts is they lower levels of stimulation are what is enjoyable for them.

Reena Ninan:
And it’s hard as an extrovert to understand that because I, like you said, get energy from other people being around and whatever. So then I guess hearing you say, this is their way of recharging themselves. Makes sense now.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It can be. And if you think about a school day, and if we think about an introvert who doesn’t, who doesn’t like a very high level of stimulation. I mean, have you been in a high school? Have you walked through the hallway of high school, right? I mean it would overwhelm you and me, right?

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So if we think about this boy coming home on the weekends and shutting it down and not wanting to engage so much, one of the ways we can think about it is the school day is too much stimulation and he is stuck there. And so once he can regulate it, he brings the stimulation way down. And what does she say? He goes on his computer, he does stuff with me. So you can just see sort of the titrating down of the stimulation level. Now what’s really great is, and this is where I’m like, no, I wouldn’t worry about this kid too much. She’s not saying, so he smokes tons of weed, so he gets numb. She’s not saying he shuts us out and is icky to kind of keep us away. He still likes to engage. He’s still doing something. It’s just not with all those kids.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, I want to ask you, because we recently discovered your favorite age in the teen years is 14, which if you haven’t another episode a few episodes back, that was really shocking to me.
So Lisa, could this potentially be normal that how the kid is processing it? You were talking about overstimulation at school and sometimes you want to take it down a notch at home, understandably. But do you think this is normal?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s totally normal. And again, normal is a wide range, right? And normal is there are some of us who are very extroverted, some of us who are very introverted, everybody raised themselves between these two points, some people. And then of course new things get invented, like the extroverted introvert, which is probably me, even though I’m saying it’s invented. And what I love, I mean this is why I’m a psychologist. I love human variety and I think it’s very easy for us to get attached to this idea that there’s one way to be, and often I think that’d be way to be that we celebrate is extroverted out there talking to people. Susan Cain wrote a fabulous book called Quiet, which I highly recommend to anybody who’s raising an introvert and wanting to understand them better.

Reena Ninan:
Could that count for husbands too?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yes, yes. And also one of the things that Susan Cain makes the argument for is the kind of low need to be out there in the world, that kind of steady focus, that interior way of being that generates novels, that generates dissertations, that generates, I mean to do that kind of work often requires a temperament that is much more internal.
And so she makes a phenomenal case for not only recognizing it as normal, but for actually celebrating what introversion, what that need for lower levels of stimulation actually makes possible.
There’s something else here, Reena, that doesn’t actually come up often that I think is really, really critical. Sometimes people worry or wonder if people who are introverted are like cold fish, if they just don’t like people, right? If there’s sort of a disengagement, and of course that can be true for some introverts. One thing that goes underestimated, and I’d be interested, I see this in my husband, I’d be interested if it’s something you see, they’re actually extraordinarily sensitive to cues and to things going on around them. They pick up a huge amount of information maybe because they are operating in this quieter way. And so there’s a need sometimes to withdraw just because not only are overstimulating situations overstimulating, but even very stimulating situations. People who are introverted can actually have an extraordinary, and it’s often this is why they end up being novelists, sometimes exquisite sensitivity to the subtleties of what’s happening around them. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Reena Ninan:
I absolutely do. But I thought the reverse was true that introverts didn’t get it, that the reason why they’re introverts is because they miss all the social cues. But you’re saying it’s quite the opposite.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It can be. It can be. And the language I’ve heard introverts themselves use for this is almost a quality of a skinlessness. The world comes in at full volume, at a very high volume. And so in order to make that tolerable, they actually need some more distance. Now the skinlessness can be very hard on them, but it also does give rise to extraordinary creativity and extraordinary artwork and extraordinary understanding. But what’s so fun is to move past this, “Introverts are like this, extroverts are like that, and extroverts are better,” model that so much dominates and really muck around. And what makes an introvert an introvert? And what are those extraordinary skills and qualities that we often see associated with introversion that go vastly under celebrated?

Reena Ninan:
You said something earlier about how we always have in our head, we often have in our heads one way that children should be, and it’s extroverted. So if your kid isn’t extroverted, something is wrong with the kid. This is the first time someone has explained an introvert to me and what could be behind all of this and where it comes from. But do you think it’s a problem that this kid doesn’t initiate interactions? Is the parent right to be a little concerned before he goes off to college with this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s an interesting question, and we certainly, based on what we’re talking about, can see why this kid is like, “Oh, I am not calling anybody on the weekend. Are you kidding me? I am hoping no one calls me,” and that that could be all wonderful and healthy and perfectly adaptive. The worry here is that this kid’s going to end up isolated and isolated at college. And what she describes, and I love this, it sounds like the kid has perfectly good friends who keep him more than enough company all day who do reach out to him on the weekends to see if he wants to be included. Sounds like he sometimes says yes. But what happens when you get to college and you’re not with kids that you have been with? Often kids have been together a long time. They were on teams together because they had to be. Things like that. I can see where the worry comes that he won’t have that as a fallback. And so then I certainly could be a parent lying in bed, awake at night thinking, is he going to reach out to anybody? Is he going to have coffee with anybody? I see where the worry comes from. My hunch, my recommendation would be like, wait and watch. See what happens. This kid could end up with a great roommate who keeps him tremendous company. This kid could end up with a terrible roommate who has him out of the room meeting people because he doesn’t want to be there, that this will just unfold. But what she knows right now is that this is a likable kid with social skills who doesn’t need a huge amount of social activity.

Reena Ninan:
So knowing what you know about this kid, how do you think the parent should respond? Should they raise it? Should they have a conversation? I feel this mom so much of like, I want to get this right before college. I want to sort of get them thinking about this. What could the mom do in having the conversation? Because you always say parents often need to listen to that inner gut. There’s a reason she sent you that letter. So how do you respond to that inner gut of this parent who is still slightly concerned?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, I think we could start in the here and now. She’s got a little worries about the here and now and then a lot of worries about what’s to come. I think it would be if the parent needed this to sleep better at night, I think it would be okay for the parent to say, “Hey buddy, just check in. Are you cool with your weekend plans? I noticed you’re not reaching out to anybody. Is that okay with you? Do you wish you were doing more with your friends on the weekends?” Just ask. My hunch, is this kid’s going to be like, oh, I am so cool with my weekend plans and we have to go with the rule. If the kid’s good with it, we got to go with it. We absolutely have to.
Then I would be cautious about taking it to be like, “Okay, but what the heck are you going to do in college?” Because kids were already anxious about college and I think we want to be mindful of not dumping our worries on them too.

Reena Ninan:
Are you worried for this kid in college, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Not really.

Reena Ninan:
Really?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Not really.
Because he sounds lovely. He does. He sounds lovely, right? And kids in college, they go to class and they sit next to someone and then they start to meet them. I mean, even though college doesn’t have the long trajectory of kids coming up through school together, even introverted kids meet lots of people in college. Usually you have more than one roommate in many settings. I mean, there’s lots of ways for this to work out. He’s got his head on straight. He sounds like a sweetie. I don’t know, actually, I’m not that worried about this kid.

Reena Ninan:
I interrupted you, but about what you would say to the mom. Is there anything else that you’d want to add to that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No, I mean I just think let it play out. Let it play out a little bit.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, I’m curious, is being an introvert or an extrovert something you were born with or is it learned?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s pretty much something you’re born with. Okay, so this is where Reena follow me down the nerdy road. Wow, I love it.

Reena Ninan:
Path I love following you down please.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so we do these studies that can pick up elements of temperament and we can do them with really little babies. And for example, one of them is in terms of sensitivity to novelty. And the way we do these studies is we create these wheels that have ping pong balls in them. So it might be all like pink ping pong balls and we spin the wheels, show these different ping pong balls to babies, and then we throw in a fresh color like a new one, and some babies see the fresh color and they’re like, oh, check it out. That’s interesting. Other babies see the fresh color and they’re like, oh my god, oh my God, what was that?
We can even in their reactions at early one in two week old babies, little babies start to get a sense of temperament traits that do correlate with personality later in life. So yes, it is in many ways quite inborn. And here’s where it gets super interesting, Reena. We’re now going to go deeper down the nerdy road. So Thomas and Chess started to identify three categories of temperament. They took all of these different dimensions of temperament and had three categories of babies or three categories of kids. And the names for their temperament was Easy Temperament. So these are kids who are pretty regular in their routines, not that reactive, sort of sunny in their mood, Difficult Temperament, which we probably would not use that term to describe kids, but these are kids who are more reactive, less regular in their temperament. And then the third is Slow to Warm-up Temperament.
They were able to easily to describe these three categories. This describes most kids and the key thing, this is the magic finding. When they look at easy, difficult, and slow to warm up temperament kids over time, all of them can have fantastic outcomes. It hinges on goodness of fit with the parent.

Reena Ninan:
What do you mean?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, this is so important. So you might have a kid who is a slow to warm up kid that is constitutionally who they are, who may have a parent who has no patience for that, who is like, we’re going to the playground, get in there. Whereas really what that kid is going to want to do is go to the playground and stand on the sideline for 20 minutes before deciding how to engage. If the kid has a parent who’s like, we’re going to go to the playground and you can stand on the sideline until you feel ready to engage, thriving all the way. It’s only when the parent can’t adapt to the temperament of the kid they have. So back to the questions about what this parent should do or how worried they should be, I’m already hearing incredibly good fit between this loving parent and this wonderful boy, but I think keep going with the goodness of fit and keep going with the awareness of like, this is a great kid, this is how he rules. You can make room for it. He’s not giving you much to worry about right now. He’s actually giving nothing to worry about right now, I would say. And then if he gets to college and if he is having a hard time making connections, again, just gently, gently recognize, I think this is a kid who gets overstimulated quickly or likes a very low level of stimulation. So maybe then it’s like is there a chess club for you to join? Is there a quiet study room in the library where you might find your people? Right? I mean, I think just continuing to recognize we’re all built in different ways and as long as the parent can adapt to the kid they’ve got, things go great.

Reena Ninan:
Now I feel good about this parent and this kid, but now I’m worried for all the parents who might have kids that are clashing and they don’t fit in together. You’ve now added this layer of anxiety to me and it’s like now I’m thinking, do I fit in? Do I fit in with my kid? What?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, that’s important, right? Let’s think about that for a minute. So I think it’s good for people to know the truth that you want to try to adapt to the kids you’ve got. I think it’s also really good for people to know that even kids with, and again, finger quotes, I’m going to use “difficult temperament.” Kids who are reactive and don’t get onto routines very easily and very sensitive to things. Those kids, there’s nothing in their temperament that doesn’t mean they’re going to not be fantastically thriving adults, but it does mean we have to adjust to it. So in that case, I would say if the kid tells you the sweater’s too itchy and they cannot wear the sweater, even if you can wear the itst sweater in the whole wide world, what? Find that kid some very soft cotton. I mean those kinds of adaptations can matter.

Reena Ninan:
Wow. Because I’ve sent them to church in that itchy sweater. I’m like, you’re going to be fine. Go, go.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And you know what else, Reena? Kids are pretty durable. So you can get it. You do not have to have goodness with a fit. You do not have to get an A+ on this. You don’t have to get an A+ on this for your kid to come out great. Kids also have to adapt too, but I just love that finding, especially given that we call some kids difficult in this model. I just love the finding. It’s not about the kid, it’s about the parent’s ability to work with the kid they’ve got.

Reena Ninan:
So before we go, Lisa, how can parents of introverted kids really be the most helpful and what should we look out for?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think being most helpful is making sure your kid has social skills. Kids do need social skills. I think that that is important. But beyond that, if they have friends, if they have social skills, if they feel satisfied that they have enough social stimulation, I think honoring that is what goodness of fit looks like.

Reena Ninan:
Again, this is another topic that I never would’ve thought of and I found being introverted very difficult because I’m such an extrovert. So I just assumed everyone should operate until you really peeled back the layer on this of helping me understand the perspective of an introvert, and it’s not that they lack social skills or that it could be very much potentially the opposite, that they are so sensitive to the world.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It can be, right? That in fact it can actually be around in a very heightened awareness of dynamics and things happening. And I just love honoring that and I love Susan Cain’s work for celebrating that because I do think the world tends to celebrate extroverts.

Reena Ninan:
Absolutely beautiful. And for those parents who are introverts and have extroverted children, what’s your advice?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh man.

Reena Ninan:
Is that another podcast episode?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, but that’s also such a great example of flipping the goodness of fit. So the parent themselves may be like, you know what? It’s the weekends we’re shutting things down. And the kid may be like, I need 14 social plans and can you help make them happen again? Goodness of fit, goodness of fit. Try to meet the kid at least halfway is what I would say.

Reena Ninan:
Thank you, Lisa. And what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I want to rest on what I said about you don’t need an A+ on goodness of fit. I think there can be so much parenting guidance, hopefully not ours, but I’m sure sometimes ours included that give parents the impression that you got to get this right, you got to get it right every day. You got to get it right all day long, and you don’t, and you can’t. And actually, part of how we help kids learn and grow is helping them adapt to the world and adapt to us too. I just want parents to know, take guidance that feels useful to you. Take what addresses a problem you feel you have, but do not let anybody, us included, ever make you feel like there’s only one way to do this, and you got to do it that way.

Reena Ninan:
It’s so easy to feel that way. There’s only one type of kid you need and that’s the kid we need to push towards, and this is how you’ve got to do it. So thanks for getting us to rethink it all.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh, of course, of course.

Reena Ninan:
Now, we talked about introverts, this week we’re going to talk about something that is totally different on the spectrum. Should you ever require your teen to be on birth control, okay? This is a topic I never thought we’d get to, but we’re going to tackle it next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Alright.

Reena Ninan:
I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.