Quiet, sensitive kids aren’t flawed, and extroversion is not a requirement for health, goodness, or normalcy.
It’s 1994. I’m five years old, walking hand-in-hand with my father down the hallway of his new apartment building. My parents have recently divorced, and I’m adjusting to the strange new rhythm of my life — dinner with my father on Wednesday evenings and visits to his place every other weekend.
Lost in my own world, I’m studying the geometric patterns on the carpet. Suddenly, my father asks sharply, “Why don’t you ever smile?”
I remember feeling incredulous. Even then, I was thoughtful, sensitive, a bit melancholic, and introverted — the same adjectives I’d use to describe myself today. I thought, We’re just walking down the hallway. What am I supposed to be smiling about? I hadn’t yet learned that it was my responsibility to perform “okayness” — the appearance of being “okay” — so that the adults around me could feel okay, too.
A lot has changed since the ‘90s. As the world becomes more aware of introversion and neurodiversity — the idea that humans come in a wide range of neurobiological variations, with diverse internal experiences — people have started to advocate for introverted children. Parents need to know that their quiet, sensitive kids don’t need to be “fixed,” and that extroversion is not a requirement for health, goodness, or normalcy.
But I think it’s important to dig a little deeper into the impulse so many adults have to worry about introverted children, and consequently, how they pressure them to change. What is it about quiet children that makes parents and teachers so uncomfortable? What are they so afraid of?
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The Pressure to Perform ‘Okay’
When my daughter was the same age I had been that day in the hallway, we were facing our own disaster — this time, it was global. Her school had just shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and my marriage was hanging by a thread. The three of us were living in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. Even the walking trails in the woods near our home — the one place I felt safe, my personal introvert sanctuary — had been closed.
Inside the apartment, I felt an immense pressure to perform “okayness” for our daughter: to bake cookies, paint watercolors, and homeschool. But every few hours, when the anxiety bubbled up to an unbearable level, I escaped to the fire escape to cry.
Across the street, in a high-rise building, dozens of locked-down residents sat on their respective balconies, smoking and coughing. Hiding from my daughter, I cried in full view of those strangers. I couldn’t help but wonder what they thought of me, this odd woman in mismatched pajamas, quietly weeping.
Nothing was okay. Yet I desperately needed my daughter to be okay.
I had known from early on that my daughter was like me. Her preschool report card once said, “She plays alone, but she is a happy person.”
I had never shamed her or worried about her introverted behavior. But amid the chaos of the pandemic, I found myself constantly scanning her face for signs of sadness. I could endure the lockdown, the isolation, the uncertainty, and even my own grief. But my daughter’s suffering? That was something I would do anything to protect her from.
Compassion for Worried Parents
Did I need my daughter to be “okay” in the same way my father needed me to be? I hope to God I didn’t pressure her to perform happiness — I hope I succeeded in keeping my own suffering confined to the fire escape so that I could be the mother she needed during such a strange and scary time. I hope she felt free to be herself, whatever that looked like, and knew that I accepted and supported her experience.
Looking back, though, I feel compassion for my father. He was trying to survive his own kind of disaster, and perhaps my neutral, unsmiling face reminded him, on some level, that he couldn’t protect me the way he wanted to.
This raises the question: Why are adults so triggered by quiet children — especially those who are introverts? I think it’s because, in our culture, extroversion — chatting, cracking jokes, joining the sack race — signals happiness. It reassures us that everything is all right.
That moment with my father was one of the first signs that something about me was wrong — or at least different. My unsmiling face and seriousness made people uncomfortable. But now, as a thoughtful, introverted, slightly melancholic adult, I can see that discomfort had nothing to do with my inherent goodness, rightness, or “wrongness.”
Instead, it had everything to do with my father’s own fear — an existential fear I believe lives deep within every parent. In my personal mythology, my father’s frustration with my unsmiling face was a way to avoid confronting a deeper terror: the fear that he had created me, given me life, and I was unhappy. Think of Dr. Frankenstein fleeing from his own creation. Think of the grief that comes from believing you can give your child the perfect life you never had, only to see evidence that no, in fact, you cannot.
Embracing Our Introverted Children — And Ourselves
When we expect our introverted children to perform happiness (or extroversion) for our sake, the natural order of things gets turned upside down. Instead, we need to carefully observe them to ensure they’re thriving and broaden our understanding of childhood happiness to include introverted expressions, like getting lost in a book or a creative project. In other words, we need to recognize quiet happiness when we see it.
If our children aren’t okay — if they’re grieving or suffering — we must help them. But we also need to look inward, to acknowledge and process our own fear and grief, so that we don’t project them onto the people we love.
Just as our children don’t need to be fixed, we don’t need to be fixed either. We need compassion and support as we do the hard work of guiding our introverted kids into adulthood amid a complex, disaster-filled world. We need to take our illusions — especially the ones where we believe we’re perfect and capable of shielding our children from every hardship — and toss them into the compost heap. And we must do the same with the idea that our children are merely reflections of us, rather than their own people on their own journeys.
I hope that what grows from this fertile soil is a way of being in the world that’s honest, real, and respectful of human differences — a way of being that doesn’t require the people around us to force a smile just so we can feel okay.
Do you have an introverted kiddo in your life? Pick up a copy of my picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020). from your favorite bookseller. 
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