Put two children in the same supermarket and one glides through while the other is undone by the lights, the beeping and the smell of the deli. Neither child is being difficult. They’re getting different information from the same room, and once you can see that, a lot of puzzling behaviour starts to make sense.
The eight senses (yes, eight)
School teaches five senses. Bodies run on at least eight. Alongside touch, sight, sound, taste and smell there are three quiet ones doing a lot of work:
- Vestibular, the movement and balance sense, run from the inner ear. It’s why swinging is thrilling for one child and alarming for another
- Proprioception, the body-position sense, fed by muscles and joints. It tells you where your limbs are without looking and how much force a task needs. A child who hugs too hard, presses through the paper and stomps rather than walks is often working with fuzzy proprioceptive information
- Interoception, the internal sense: hunger, thirst, a full bladder, a racing heart. A child who goes from fine to starving-and-furious with no warning, or leaves the toilet run very late, may simply be getting those signals late
Seeking and avoiding
Every nervous system filters this flood of information differently, and the differences run in two broad directions.
Some children register input faintly, so they go looking for more. They crash into the couch, spin until they fall over, chew their sleeves, turn everything up loud. Their body is asking for the input it needs to feel organised.
Other children register input loudly, and an ordinary day arrives at full volume. Clothing tags scratch, the hand dryer roars, mixed food textures feel wrong in ways they can’t explain. Avoiding those things is a sensible response to what their body is reporting, not fussiness.
Most children are a mix, seeking in some senses and avoiding in others, and different again when they’re tired or unwell. The pattern is the useful part.
Why the meltdown happens at home
Imagine each demand on the senses filling a cup. School fills it steadily for six hours: the noise, the lights, the sitting still, the holding it together. Home is where the cup finally overflows, because home is where it’s safe to overflow. The after-school explosion over the wrong-coloured cup is rarely about the cup. It’s the whole day arriving at once, in front of the person they trust most.
What helps at home
None of this needs special equipment. Mostly it needs the day rearranged a little.
- Build in heavy work every day. Pushing, pulling, carrying and climbing feed proprioception, which is calming for almost every child, seekers and avoiders alike. Carrying the shopping in, digging, kneading dough, a rolling-pin steamroller game before bed
- Movement before stillness. Expecting a child to sit and focus straight after school skips a step. Run, climb or bounce first and the sitting goes better
- Warn the senses. Say what’s coming before the noisy, busy places. Let them wear headphones at the shops, and cut the tag out of the shirt. This isn’t giving in; it’s removing static so there’s capacity left for the parts of the day that matter
- Keep food low-pressure. For texture-sensitive children, food on the table with no obligation to eat it moves things further than any amount of “just try one bite”
- Watch the pattern, not the moment. When things fall apart, jot down what happened just before. Over a few weeks the same sense usually keeps turning up, and that tells you where to make the day gentler
A note on labels
You’ll meet the term “sensory processing disorder” online. In Australia you’ll more often hear about sensory processing differences, which can stand alone or sit alongside autism or ADHD, and plenty of children have sensory differences with no other diagnosis at all. Either way, support doesn’t wait for a label. What matters is how the days are going.
When to bring someone in
If sensory differences are shrinking your family’s world (places you’ve stopped going, mealtimes that have become battles, sleep that won’t settle, a kinder asking for ideas), an occupational therapist can work out which senses are driving what and build strategies with you rather than handing you a printout. That might look like play-based therapy for your child or coaching for you. We see families across Melbourne’s inner north west, and if this article sounded like your house, get in touch.