- Adequate, high-quality sleep
- Daily time spent outside
- A variety of nutrient-dense food to eat
- Opportunities to experience unconditional love
- Opportunities to experience success and achievement
- Predictability (of personnel, of schedule, of routine)
We know that these are some of the elements that Humans need in order to thrive.
In child development, these are some of the Biggies.
In Orchid Land, these “Big Six” of development are ESSENTIALS.
Most kids can stand a little variability, mediocrity (or complete failure) in one or more area (those are the dandelions, btw).
They won’t be a total disaster if they miss a good night’s sleep every once in a while (because they already have good sleep and are generally well-rested).
They won’t go into a failure spiral at school if they have one ‘bad day” (because they have enough experience with success to mitigate that experience).
They won’t go into fight/flight/freeze/fawn when the routine changes (because their nervous systems can handle that).
Not. Orchids.
Orchids – by definition – are super sensitive to their environments. Their systems are finely tuned to variations in every aspect of the physical, social, sensory, and temporal world.
How does that translate?
Well, without adequate opportunities for the “Big Six” of child development, an Orchid Kid can easily become dysregulated and melt down “for no reason”.
Theirs is a fragile ecosystem; easily disrupted.
How hard that must be!
And yet, they live in the world with us, so what’s a parent to do??
As parents of Orchid Kids we can:
- Focus on maintaining developmental hygiene by guarding the “Big Six”
- Ask some different questions
With Orchids, it’s less about what children need than about what your specific child needs.
- Do they need a schedule that is very structured or less structured?
- Do they need more or fewer activities in that schedule?
- How much outside time is optimal for them? (and how much can they reasonably get?)
- How much sleep is optimal for them?
- If their diet is limited, how can we begin to increase the variety (slowly)?
Summer is sometimes hard on Orchids because that school structure piece is missing. If your Orchid is having a hard time with the summer schedule, I am offering some 1:1 Summer Strategy sessions where we can troubleshoot and optimize the schedule for the varietal of Orchid living at your house.
You can schedule that using THIS LINK, or reply to this email if you have questions.