Emotionally sensitive children are remarkable little people. Their joys are tremendous, their imaginations profound, and their ability to perceive and observe unparalleled. They are often more thoughtful and empathetic than their peers, often high-energy, and their minds are always active and attuned to their surroundings.
This sensitivity brings with it a lot of positives, but it can also make everyday life challenging, both for your child and your family. Emotionally sensitive children often need extra support to cope with sensory input and emotional experiences that wouldn’t phase less sensitive children.
Is your child emotionally sensitive?
Emotionally sensitive children’s minds are always active, examining and processing the details of the world around them. They don’t filter out as much of their surroundings as less sensitive children. As you can imagine, this can become tremendously overwhelming. Their attunement to their bodily sensations, the conversations around them, the moods of others, the complexities of social interactions, and much more can overstimulate them. This overstimulation can lead to disruptive or difficult behavior. A person’s sensitivity can become disruptive enough that they can be classified as having a highly sensitive personality.
Common traits and experiences of emotionally sensitive children include:
- Big emotions that are hard to recover from
- Black-and-white thinking
- Pronounced sensitivity to sights, smells, sounds, textures/touch, and tastes
- Difficulty dealing with change
- Meltdowns, tantrums, acting out
- A need for control and a lack of situational flexibility
- Distrusting or disliking new things
- Becoming quickly frustrated
- Unable to accept corrections or criticism without big emotions
- Perfectionism and difficulty starting/finishing things
- Sensitive to personal comments regardless of their intent
- Having strong emotional reactions to songs, stories, movies
- Needing a lot of quiet time to regulate
Parenting an emotionally sensitive child
Conventional approaches to parenting can even escalate this overstimulation, creating a cycle difficult for families to break out of without guidance. Parents may feel anger, fear, or even despair at the challenges their family is facing, but it’s important to know that emotional sensitivity doesn’t mean permanent difficulty. Disruption and upset do not need to become permanent fixtures in your family life, and you can be the catalyst for change that helps your child cope!
How to respond to an emotionally sensitive child
Parents often receive a lot of unasked-for input on how to engage with their sensitive child, and that input can include damaging suggestions like toughening your child up, rejecting or isolating them, or even outright abuse to “get them to behave”.
You know yourself and your child better than anyone, and when you receive “advice” like this, you know it’s not the right answer. But you do need parenting support! We’ve gathered together some parenting tips that are based on dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, that are meant to help you and your child use DBT-based life skills that make navigating the world, even when highly sensitive, an easier task. These tips let you and your child enjoy their sensitive nature, embracing who they are while helping them cope in healthy ways when they’re overwhelmed.
DBT tips to support parents of emotionally sensitive children
With children, the best way to lead is by example. As you use these DBT skills in your parenting journey, talk to your children about how they too can use these approaches to help them at times when their emotional sensitivity is working against them instead of for them.
Tip #1: Mindfulness helps create calm in the moment
Mindfulness encourages you to focus on the present moment, centering yourself and pulling your mind away from distractions. One way mindfulness can help with parenting is when your child is having a meltdown.
Narrate to your child the ways you’re staying present in the moment. Tell them you’re going to take deep breaths to stay calm. Tell them you hear what they’re saying, and you understand they’re having big feelings. See if you can remove some of the stimuli around you, for both your sakes; tell your child you’re finding a quiet place to sit and breathe while your sensitive child is overwhelmed. Stay with them and remind them where they are, who they’re with, and that they’re safe.
Tip #2: Emotional regulation gives kids a chance to identify feelings
When you or your child is overwhelmed, take it as an opportunity to voice how you’re feeling or help them identify how they’re feeling. If your teen is learning to drive and is frustrated at traffic, say, “It seems like this traffic is making you frustrated and anxious. I felt the same way when I started to drive; it’s tough!” From there, if you and your teen want, you can consider whether doing something differently will help reduce the emotional overwhelm.
It may feel silly at first, but when you pinpoint emotions and validate that they make sense, you remove some judgment around them. You demonstrate that your teen isn’t a problem for being frustrated or anxious; they’re just experiencing a feeling. This frees up some mental energy to choose responses instead of reacting.
Tip #3: Distress tolerance helps with sensory input
If your child struggles with sensory overwhelm, create a toolkit for them to help them cope. Distressing sensations can be easier with some coping tools. Headphones or noise-dampening earplugs can make loud spaces more tolerable. Fidget toys can help create non-disruptive distractions to help your child self-regulate. If they enjoy soothing sounds, smells, or flavors (like mint or lavender), find ways to let them enjoy these things in situations where they may be overstimulated, like a little plush keychain with lavender in it they can hold and smell.
Consider how you could use sensory soothing, or how you already do. Show your child the ways you will—or already do—calm yourself with, say, soft music, calm hobbies, unwinding with a cup of herbal tea, etc., and how these tools help you put up with the hard parts of your day.
Tip #4: Interpersonal effectiveness improves communication
Emotionally sensitive children are sometimes too responsive to others’ needs or feelings, which can lead them to set aside their needs until they hit a point of total emotional overwhelm.
Lead by example for your child by showing them how you respectfully assert yourself. When you say “no” to an added responsibility, tell your child about it. Show them that you’ve said no calmly and kindly, and if someone tries to push on that, tell them how you’ll respond. Respectful assertiveness is a great interpersonal effectiveness skill in DBT, and demonstrating it to your child shows them it’s okay to voice their needs and set boundaries.
Keep in mind, however, that they will also start setting boundaries with you as a way to practice! Try to stay flexible, especially if they are respectful in how they do it, and demonstrate as much healthy communication as you can, asking them to offer you the same. Treat these interactions as learning experiences for lifelong social skills.
Tip #5: Middle path thinking teaches flexibility
With middle path thinking you weigh two perspectives, possibilities, or realities and recognize they can both be valid. Emotionally sensitive children often struggle with black-and-white thinking, so when you notice this, e.g., “I never get to do what I want!” instead of arguing, validate their feelings (but not the content of the thought), and offer a balancing perspective; this demonstrates mental flexibility to them. Here’s an example:
“It makes sense you’re frustrated right now; it’s tough when you don’t get to do what you want. It felt good when you got to [insert example here], and it’s hard that you don’t get to do that right now.”
For children with signs of a highly sensitive personality, a strong relationship with a therapist can provide a steadying influence from a trusted adult, helping them navigate the world. DBT therapists for children and adolescents involve the whole family in a child’s therapy experience. While the specifics discussed one-on-one with a therapist will be confidential, multi-family group sessions where families learn DBT skills to use at home are a form of parenting support that helps the whole family.
DBT life skills can be invaluable for emotionally sensitive children, helping them navigate the world with more ease. They also help you parent in ways that work for both you and your child, co-creating a family life that feels calm and centered. If you’re ready to start on a path toward a life worth living for both your child with a highly sensitive personality and your whole family, contact us today at Suffolk DBT to work with one of our empathetic, caring therapists.