See The World Through Your Child’s Eyes. Hear It Through Their Ears?
If the autonomic nervous system is like a highway carrying messages between the body and brain, what exactly’s on the opposite end from the brain?
Answer: The Sensory System!
Literally all of the information that our children take in comes through one or more of their eight senses.
Wait a minute? Did she just say there are eight senses? I thought there were five…
In addition to the five basic senses that we all learned in school—sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell—there are three additional senses, the vestibular sense (think balance and movement), the proprioceptive sense (think awareness of your body in space), and interoception (awareness of your internal sensations and experiences). Our kids (all humans, really) are constantly receiving information from those senses and then the ANS sends that information to our brain for it to be interpreted. This means that if we know how sensitive our child is to these different types of input, we can better tailor our parenting to meet their needs.
Beyond the Five Basic Senses
I’m going to assume that you are familiar with the five basic senses—sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. So we’ll put them aside for a minute to take a closer look at these other senses, senses that you may not have heard of before today.
Have you ever noticed how little kids tend to be a little clumsy? This isn’t just because they are still learning how to move their bodies. It is also because they are still learning how to feel their bodies and what it is like to be in those bodies. This is the vestibular sense at work. This sense, which is “located” in the inner ear, tells us where our body is in space, if it is moving or still, how fast it is moving, etc.
Related to the vestibular sense is the proprioceptive sense. This is the sense that tells the brain about our body position (not balance, but rather whether things are contracting or stretching) and it is often related to pressure. The child who inattentively swings their bag into others or gets a little too rough during (real or play) wrestling matches is often a child who isn’t receiving strong enough messages from the proprioceptive system.
A final sense, which is incredibly important when it comes to emotional regulation, is interoception. This sense refers to the sensations that we experience—such as “butterflies” in the stomach—that give us information about what is happening in our body. It is our ability to be aware of the sensations in our body so that we can ultimately make sense of them. When a child can’t tell when they are hungry or thirsty, that is often a sign of an under-reactive interoceptive sense.
Not Just Interoception: The Relationship Between the Senses and Feelings
Have you ever wondered about the words “feelings” and “emotions”? I confuse them all the time and even researchers can’t seem to completely agree on the difference, but the basic idea that everyone seems to agree on is that emotions come first (they just “are”) while feelings are the way that we experience and interpret them. That’s a big reason why it is common for therapists, coaches, etc., to ask how and where you feel a given emotion in your body.
There are two big connections for parents to understand. The first is that when our kids learn to recognize, acknowledge, and accept the sensations in their bodies, they are increasing their ability to recognize their emotions—and ultimately choose how they respond in the face of those emotions. You can nurture this in your child by respecting when their bodies tell them they are hungry or have to (or don’t have to!) go to the bathroom, guiding them through body scans, and describing for them your own sensations when you have big feelings (which might be “good,” like joy, or “bad,” like anger).
The second is that if a child is struggling with emotional regulation, a parent may be able to help them regulate their emotions by helping them to regulate their sensory input. This can take numerous forms from weighted blankets to jumping on a trampoline to using noise-canceling headphones.
Is Your Child Underreactive or Overreactive to This Type of Sensory Input?
Now that we know about these “new” senses, let’s take a look at another very important concept--reactivity. Is your child easily overwhelmed by visuals or sounds? Or are they constantly seeking additional visual stimulation? (Or perhaps they ask you to lay on top of them? Or something similarly “odd.”)
One thing that I noticed recently is that while underreactivity often goes along with “seeking” behavior, it doesn’t always. An example of this can be seen in a child learning to ride a bicycle. I knew a child who really wanted to ride a bicycle. So his parents bought him one and one Saturday afternoon they all went out front for a lesson. It didn’t last long though, and the child didn’t look at the bike again for months. He wasn’t getting enough propioceptive feedback to feel good riding the bike, which caused him to lose interest in riding, instead of asking to do it all the time so he could get whatever input was there.
Note that a child who is over or under-reactive *might* have a sensory processing disorder. Or they might just have a more (or less) sensitive autonomic nervous system. Or perhaps they just need a little more time for their sensory systems to integrate. As a parent, you likely have a sense which of these is happening—or at least enough of a sense to know if you should get another opinion. Personally, I always took the approach that if what I was observing seemed roughly the same as what similarly aged peers were experiencing, I’d wait and see. But if there was a noticeable difference for more than a few months, a trip to a professional was in order. More often than not, I’d get a tip or two for what to do while we continued to monitor and the difference would disappear—or at least lessen—before the follow-up.
How We Can Use This Information to Better Support Our Children
If your child’s preferences aren’t already apparent to you, take some time to watch how they react to various types of input. Make a chart noting which ways they are under-reactive, which ways they are over-reactive, which ways they are sensory seeking, and which ways they are sensory avoiding. Once you have that information, you are likely to find that you are a lot more sensitive towards and understanding of your child. Perhaps you got annoyed by their sensitivity to noise, for example, but now that you understand it a little better, you feel more comfortable and able to accomodate it.
Depending on the nature and severity of your child’s sensory differences, your intuition might tell you that it is something that you can easily manage at home, either by addressing any sensory overstimulation as it arises or by building in activities to preemptively address reactions. (The latter is often referred to as a sensory diet.) Or maybe you decide that your child needs some more intensive support from an occupational therapist who is skilled at helping a child manage and integrate sensory input. (And give the child’s parents ideas for how to do so at home.) Or maybe you aren’t sure if your child needs ongoing assistance, but your intuition tells you that it is worth having them visit an OT a few times to give them a chance to play and you some more data on whether there is a “problem” and how you want to manage it.
But no matter what you decide, you will now have the start of a “manual” for caring for your individual child based on their unique sensory system instead of a general sense of what helps a mythical population known as “children.”
One Last Note On Our Own Sensory Systems
It’s worth noting that we parents also have sensory systems and those systems can sometimes seem to get in the way of parenting in the way that we want. I’ve most often heard of this in the context of parents who are overreactive to sounds. These parents often swear by headphones or earplugs that muffle the sound while still letting them hear when their kids really need them. Another common scenario is one where a parent is underreactive as it relates to proprioceptive input and is calmed by a weighted blanket or ball.
The point is that while our sensory systems do tend to integrate over time, highly sensitive kids are often born to highly sensitive parents who are inclined toward dysregulation if they aren’t adequately familiar with their own sensory systems.
Did you learn anything new from this post? Anything that’s already worked or that you’d like to try with your kiddo?