The Sensory Chat team think about what sensory processing does, and how everyone has an individual combination of preferences and dislikes in their own sensory profile.  We consider how this relates to how we as parents might set up the routines and activities of the day, and what happens when there is a mismatch between the sensory preferences of different family members.  As always, we share practical ideas about to recognise where sensory differences are affecting family relationships, and how to recognise your own sensory style.

Transcript

Transcript

Speaker: Hello and welcome to this episode of Sensory Chat, the podcast for parents and others interested in all things sensory integration.

Speaker: Hello, I'm Amy Stevens and I'm calling in from Salisbury in the southwest of England. I'm a speech and language therapist and an advanced practitioner in Ayres Sensory Integration.

Speaker: Hello, I am Emer Broderick, and I am an occupational therapist based in London in the UK. I am also an advanced practitioner in Ayres Sensory Integration.

Speaker: Hi. I'm Emma Snowdon and I am a children's physiotherapist and I'm also an advanced practitioner in sensory integration.

Speaker: Hi, my name's Angela. I am an occupational therapist based in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm also an advanced sensory integration practitioner.

Speaker: Hello, I'm Lelanie Brewer. I'm a children's occupational therapist and academic and researcher based in Bahrain.

Speaker: This morning, we're going to start exploring the idea of a little bit of myth-busting, basically, about what sensory integration, sensory processing is. When we talk about sensory processing difficulties, sensory processing challenges, you might accidentally come away with the idea that sensory processing is a problem. If you've got sensory processing stuff, there's something going a bit adrift, but actually, that's not really the case, and we're going to explore a little more widely about what sensory processing more generally means.

Speaker: If we think about sensory processing, what it is, essentially, it's just how we take in all the information from all the senses that we have, and how our brain processes that and comes up with a response to that information. It's happening constantly throughout the day. Just a reminder to people about the senses we're talking about, we're talking about the five common senses, you know, what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste, and what we touch, and also some of our more internal senses. Our sense of balance, ou​r vestibula​r sense, we call it, knowing our head position and what position, our sense of movement.

Then we have our body awareness, knowing what our body is doing in space. We call that our proprioceptive sense. Then we also have aninteroceptive sense, which is picking up on those internal cues, things like hunger, earth, bowel and bladder cues, prompting us if we need to eat, if we need to drink, if we need to go to the bathroom. Our body's constantly taking in all this information from the environment from our body and processing it. It's a really complicated system and there's lots of things going on. We all process this information slightly differently, and how we process it can impact our response to it, and this is what we see every day in ourselves and in the people we support and work with.

Speaker: Our sensory preferences influence us in ways that we don't even realise every day from the moment we wake up, how hot or how cold is your shower? What clothes am I going to choose to wear today? What am I going to eat for breakfast? How do I get ready? Those are subconscious decisions that are actually informed by our sensory preferences and it also affects our choices in nature and everything we do.

Speaker: I think it goes even deeper than that, doesn't it, Lelanie? It influences our greater choices in terms of what we're going to do. I often say when I have children that I'm working with the proprioceptive seekers or vestibular seekers that really need to move their body a lot. These aren't the type of kids that are going to end up in an office job sitting down, and if they are, they're going to also probably be very active, and as soon as they finish work, they're going to go off on a 10-mile bike ride or go for a run.

I think our own sense and preferences really influence everything about our lives and what we choose to do and how we choose to work and how we choose our leisure time as well. We don't often think about that in terms of ourselves as adults or parents we work with when we start considering our own sensory preferences. It not only helps us to understand our children better, but it helps us to understand why we might have difficulties interacting with our children and potentially meeting their needs if they're different to our own needs.

Speaker: Absolutely. It's not until something disrupts the norm that we start worrying about it. When I used to see quite a lot of families in our clinic in London, it wasn't until there was one child doing something slightly different from the rest that it would become an issue. For example, let's just take a simple activity, go and eat to a restaurant, and this might be a particular food, maybe if people have a preference for curry or something spicy. Then there's the one person in the family who actually hates spicy food and wants to go for a burger instead.

It's really not a big deal, but that person will say, "Oh, there's nothing on the menu that I can eat." Then people start thinking, "Well, why doesn't he like this? Why doesn't she like that?" Then, going on holiday and choosing activities, and when you have a family with, say, three children with three different sensory profiles, it can get quite interesting organising your activities as well.

Speaker: I think one of the classic examples for me is always that messy play piece, isn't it? When a lot of the children that we work with really enjoy that messy play and I'm thinking clay and foam soap and glitter, that's always a contentious one, isn't it? Glitter. We often find that some of the parents really struggle with this and that they'll reveal that they have an issue with this and, therefore, those kinds of play activities aren't really usually done in the home. That's when we start to see that we have these competing then preferences, which impact on how then we play with our children and how our children get or don't get their sensory needs met.

Speaker: Listening to all of your comments and thoughts on this topic just got me thinking about a conversation I had with a mum recently. I guess explored this idea with her of thinking about her own sensory preferences as a way to help her reduce her stress. At the time of starting to work with this family, Mum had a lot of competing demands. One of the things she said to me was that she went to the gym that morning and she commented on just how, I guess, grounded she felt after doing that and it's something that she had missed in the week prior.

We started to talk about what type of sensory input was that giving her and this idea of heavy work and proprioception, and she'd never really thought of that activity, that exercise from a sensory lens. I guess by making that link to proprioception, she then went on to say, "Oh, is this why when I did that one week of trialing pilates classes, it just did nothing for me?" We then started to think about how different activities, lifting, carrying heavy things, carrying a heavy basket of washing, doing the vacuuming, going to the gym, versus the activities that don't involve that heavy work really didn't have the same calming and grounding effect. Essentially, this goes back to her preferences and this idea of her needing a high intensity of this piece to feel her best self.

Speaker: Similarly to that, Angela, I had a similar conversation also, very much around playgrounds, where our supporting a family, we actually were outside in playgrounds for our session, and I think the mum started to realise that she has a very reactive vestibular system and she was getting incredibly nervous around her child doing some activities which really challenged his balance. It was really a good opportunity to open up the conversation around this particular child loves swinging off things, he loves really, really intense vestibular activities.

It was a really good opportunity and it was great to be able to do it there in the moment around our sensory systems' needs may be different to what our children's sensory systems need and how we can have a think about that and going forward and what's best for our child and what's best for us. It may be different things.

Speaker: I think also, that ties into the different kind of roles that parents may play within a family unit. This goes back to what Emma was saying earlier around the parent that may not typically be the one that's setting up the messy play activity at home because that's not something that they would particularly enjoy participating in, but it's this idea of maybe the second parent if they're available, maybe that becomes their role because that's something they naturally gravitate towards because their nervous system can handle it or it might actually be fun for them.

I think the same can apply to rough and tumble play in terms of those parents that really like that physicality within play. Some parents, they'll happily hand that over to the fun aunt or the uncle or another member of the family. Again, subconsciously, this could be tied to our preferences and what our body enjoys.

Speaker: Angela, what's coming up for me listening to you talking is very much the idea that there isnt really such a thing as normal and not normal sensory processing. That we all, every single human being, has a way of engaging with the world of our senses, picking up information, and either that fits and that works with what we need or want to do in the day, or there's a mismatch, there's a clash and it's hard for us to do what we need or want in the day because how we process sensory information makes it harder for us to take part in those things.

Where that takes my thinking is that it's not really that sensory processing challenges are a problem, it's that there's potentially a sensory processing mismatch. We are looking more at problem-solving a mismatch than fixing a sensory system. That's quite a different way of looking at sensory integration, sensory process. Lelanie, what do you think?

Speaker: Absolutely, and I think that's where it becomes really interesting is when you live by yourself and you can plan your whole day according to your own sensory preferences. Then in a family situation, it starts becoming very different because there are other people's needs to consider. I had a friend who thought she give baby-lead weaning a go and it was a disaster for her. Because the child, this child loved it, complete mess, caked in food, and I think my friend thought she took on more than she could handle. They got over it but it was just interesting. It was just everything as you say from the messy clay, but it's also just all the other things as well and daily routine. It's definitely when your sensory preferences, when there are other people to consider, even the volume of the TV can become an issue if there are different people in the household.

Speaker: I think that's important to think about when environments change then because you may be in a home where your sensory needs are met quite easily and then there may be a big change. You may start school, for example, as a child, and suddenly, you're in a very different sensory environment with very different sensory demands, and that's where things can potentially get quite tricky. Having an awareness of how your senses work and how you process that information can be really helpful.

Speaker: I like that idea that actually, maybe the place where supporting your child to be able to manage their sensory processing needs. The place where that starts is perhaps recognising your own preferences and your own pattern. That actually, when you understand that, you may well have set up your world, may well have set up your home, may well have set up the routines of the day to fit your own sensory needs, to fit your own sensory preferences, as it would be perfectly normal to do. That maybe recognising that would be the place to start. I wonder just to finish up, does anybody have any ideas or ways that people could start to do that, start to recognise their own sensory preferences?

Speaker: I think one of the ways maybe of doing that is really just being very reflective and also just focusing on how things might feel for us. I think for me, the way that I've been able to do this is really just tuning into myself about what I find good and what I find not good. Really keeping it really, really simple. I think this is how I start with the children that I work with as well. What just feels good and what doesn't feel good? It's not that we're trying to avoid everything that doesn't feel good and just focus on why that is and what's happening in our body.

Speaker: I really like that Emma, that have got me thinking about the daily tasks we do that we participate in throughout the day from the moment we wake up. Thinking about what things are currently embedded in your morning routine, for example, and thinking about what's the purpose of those activities.
Just say you are someone that wakes up and the first thing you need to do is to have a shower. It's thinking about, okay, so why do I think that I do that? Is it because it helps me to feel more alert? Does it help to soothe me? Then what follows, is it a cup of coffee? It's thinking about, yes, our likes and our dislikes, but also then does this particular thing that I do, does that make me feel more alert or does it help to calm me? We can start to bring in I guess those two elements too. How does that sensory input change the way I feel?

Speaker: I think that's really important, isn't it? Then not to assume that our children are the same as us. To look at what they do and how certain activities impact them because I think this is one of the things we have a very belief about of the way I experience the world must be the way that everyone else experiences the world and that actually the more and more timely work with children within this sensory processing, we realise that actually, no, that's not the case. We all experience it in a very different way and each way is perfect and valid. Do it for ourselves, to understand ourselves, and also try do it reflectively for our children as well.

Speaker: It's like a beautiful way to celebrate our unique differences, right? Our sensory preferences, really.

Speaker: Beautiful. Thank you so much, guys. Obviously, I think that was a really interesting conversation. Maybe where we'll take this for another episode is starting to think now about how can a parent, when they're in tune with their own sensory preferences, how can they support their child to manage their child's sensory preferences? Once you start with yourself, how do you then move on to help somebody else to co-regulate somebody else? Maybe that's where we'll go next. Thank you very much. Lovely to talk to everybody today.

Speaker: Sensory Chat is produced by Sensory Integration Education. In each episode, qualified sensory integration practitioners share their personal opinions and ideas with parents and families in mind. We would love to hear from you. You could find us on Facebook and Instagram at sensoryintegrationeducation. Please note that for specific advice for your child, a sensory integration assessment would be needed.

Speaker: Sensory Chat is produced by Sensory Integration Education. In each episode, qualified sensory integration practitioners share their personal opinions and ideas with parents and families in mind. We would love to hear from you. You could find us on Facebook and Instagram at sensoryintegrationeducation. Please note that for specific advice for your child, a sensory integration assessment would be needed.

Sensory Chat is brought to you by Sensory Integration Education

www.sensoryintegrationeducation.com