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Who hasn’t experienced it… Your child is standing on the floor kicking and screaming while you wait in line at the grocery store. To everyone, it seems as if your child is having a tantrum and trying to get his way…
But you know that your child is overstimulated . Your child suffers from a head that is too full. Strangers start staring and often give unsolicited advice: “he deserves a good spanking”.
But what these people don’t understand is that your child doesn’t react from his own perseverance. No, your child becomes overwhelmed by everything around him such as the many people in the store, the queue that is close to him, the smell of food mixed with perfume and deodorant. His nervous system is overwhelmed. His behavior has nothing to do with a tantrum.
We perceive everything that happens around us with our senses. We feel the heat of the sun on our skin, we smell the smell of bread when we walk past a bakery. Our brains take all this information and filter it based on importance.
For children with stimulus processing problems (SI problems), this process of filtering is very difficult. Their brains have difficulty organizing and keeping clear all the incoming sensory information. As a result, children with sensory information processing problems get upset more quickly, they become overwhelmed by all the various stimuli around them.
The sunlight may be too bright, the socks are not comfortable, there is an unpleasant perfume smell. Your child cannot ignore this information and place it in the unimportant folder. Your child cannot focus on what is important at that moment because the brain labels everything as equally important.
Then you see a ‘fight or flight’ reaction in your child (with a stimulus processing problem), which eventually leads to an overly full head and a meltdown.
Some children may kick, scream, run away, or even hurt themselves. Other children react the opposite. They can become quiet and fall asleep. Each child shows different behavior when overstimulated.
While ‘meltdowns’ are inevitable for children with sensory processing difficulties, there are ways to regulate behaviour. Read our 3 valuable tips:
This is probably the most important point to remember. Tantrums are behavioral outbursts with a goal in mind, while overstimulation has a neurological origin.
A child can throw a tantrum for many reasons. Maybe they want to watch TV for another 10 minutes or they really want another candy. Screaming and crying, although not appropriate, is a way for the child to express his feelings. The child has control over his actions during a tantrum, and once he gets what he wants, the tantrum usually stops.
An overstimulated child has no control over his behavior. His body reacts in a “fight or flight” mode and they have no preconceived goal in mind. With overstimulation, the brain is overloaded by the multitude of sensory stimuli. The overstimulation is an expression of an overly full head and manifests itself in a meltdown.
Maybe the lights are too bright or there are too many people talking, or people are too close to your child. Maybe there was a last-minute change in the daily routine? Learning to recognize the cause of the overstimulation will help you as a parent to deal with it better and prevent future meltdowns.
Try to keep calm yourself when your child is overstimulated. After all, getting angry or screaming loudly has a negative effect on your child who is already sensory overloaded. Try to support your child by being quiet or using comforting words in a calm soft voice. Of course, this is a challenge, especially when you, as a sensitive parent (with stimulus processing problems), sometimes suffer from a meltdown.
Read more tips for overstimulation
This is especially useful when your child is in an unfamiliar environment. Some ideas for a kit include:
Also read tips for setting up a resting place in the house (snoezelpek)
