The adventure of sensory experiences

Have you ever had that shiver run through your entire body when someone scratches their fingernails over a blackboard or when someone is working with polystyrene packaging? That feeling of something pulling together all your muscles involuntarily, causing your fingers to contort and pull together. Describing it now makes it seem almost like a scene from a horror movie, but we all know the feeling. We’ve felt it somewhere in our lives, where the only thing to do to relieve the creeping spasm is to shake it off…literally. Twitching your neck or shaking your hands to get your muscles back to normality, seeming, once again, like something from a horror movie.

Luckily, though, there’s nothing that will give kids (or adults) sleepless nights about those shivers. It all comes down to a sensory experience and the way our bodies react to certain stimuli. It can be borne out of any of our senses and each of our responses is entirely subjective. Even when they are shared by some, not everyone responds the same to sensory stimuli.

I’m sure we all know someone with what we call a “sensitive gag reflex”, people who simply can’t handle certain imagery or smells or tastes and then…well, “gag”. I can’t help but think about poor Phil Dunphy in Modern Family, who simply cannot stand the smell of wet paint. While I can’t help but rewind a few times to see the most loveable dad in sitcoms get tangled up in his paint-smudged shirt all over again, I also understand how strenuous such a situation is, where the people around you cannot comprehend your experience and distress.

As adults, we are able to understand these reactions to certain sensory stimuli - maybe not always why they happen, but at least we know when they’ll happen. For our kids, it’s still very much a learning process, where they look to us, the parents, for guidance.

I can just imagine my daughter’s thoughts at the dinner table, “Hey, I don’t like this icky green stuff…this…this…spinach…in my plate. It’s all…green…and…chewy.” So, where does she look for guidance as she processes this new stimulus? Across the table at her mother or me, where I am either contemplating whether our Scottish Terrier would actually eat the spinach if I sneak it to him under the table, or where I am wolfing down the green stuff like Popeye. Luckily our household would make Popeye proud, so spinach is a hurdle we never had to jump over. No shivers or muscle contractions here, thank you. Well, until we get to textures. Oh, man. I’m already feeling my body tense up just thinking about textures.

I can’t stand wearing a knitted sweater over bare arms. The scratchiness and warmth are simply unbearable. My daughter feels much the same and when she says she doesn’t want to wear her farm-animal sweater, I immediately know why and can find her something that will keep her warm without irritating her. The joint dislike of wool ends there, however. While my skin overheats and becomes irritable under a wool blanket, necessitating comforters and bedsheets on my side of the bed in wintertime, my wife and daughter are able to snuggle up under a wool blanket in a way that baffles my mind.

When we understand our child’s experience, it’s easy to accommodate them. But it’s extremely important to approach the instances where their experience doesn’t make sense to us in the right way and allow them to work through it with our constant support (and hopefully, at the end of the day, understanding). It’s also important to let them experience things for themselves, even if we don’t like it. Otherwise, we just pass our worldview over to them, which, while we obviously think is the best view to take, is probably not perfect.

These differences in sensory experiences are very important to keep in mind during your kid’s journey to self-discovery. While sensory sensitivity is an issue that can lead to hardships if it isn’t dealt with adequately, all of us have different responses to sensory input that change the way we experience the world around us. It’s part of what makes us all unique.

Make a game of trying to find out how different family members react to different things. Make it an adventure, not an issue. And above all, enjoy every second of it, shivers and all!