Parenting the Highly Sensitive Child

Challenges and Strategies in Raising Seemingly Shy Children.

Mar 13, 2009

Highly Sensitive Children are not necessarily shy. They have a highly evolved nervous system and they consider everything deeply and carefully.

Does your child seem to sense what you feel? Does she startle or cry easily? Does he vacillate between extreme expressions of happiness and deep emotional distress at the other end? Your child may be highly sensitive if you answered yes to most of the above questions.

Dr. Elaine Aron, psychotherapist, with her ground breaking research about child sensitivity has some of the above questions and many others in an online test to determine if your child may be highly sensitive.

Why Highly Sensitive

Highly sensitive children have for long been misunderstood and termed as shy, introverted, fussy or fearful. Dr. Aron, in her book, The Highly Sensitive Child – Helping our Children Thrive When the World Overwhelms Them [Broadway, 2002], attributes sensitivity in children to a highly sensitive nervous system. She states that almost 15-20% of all children are highly sensitive, which proves that its not an abnormality, but an adaptive strategy that takes all factors into account before deciding something.

Strengths of Highly Sensitive Children

Challenges in Raising Highly Sensitive Children

While the following list might be causes of discomfort for most children, highly sensitive children are easily over-stimulated by situations that do not bother most non-sensitive children.

Parenting Strategies for Highly Sensitive Children

Among other methods, Dr. Aron lists the following 4 key strategies, in her book, for raising highly sensitive children.

Since highly sensitive children are acute self critics, parents should make their children feel loved, praising their accomplishments.

Highly sensitive children do not respond well to discipline when they are made to feel ashamed of what they've done. Comparison with their peers, or over-emphasizing parents' expectations of them, does not work well with these children.

Clear definition of rules is a first step towards wise discipline. Talking about something that needs correcting is all that's needed most of the time. The parent also needs to be a good listener and empathic. When real discipline is needed, its better to keep the consequences of bad behavior short, mild and related to the behavior.

Talking to the child about his sensitivity should be done in an age-appropriate, positive way. You can talk to your child about things he can change about himself and things that he cannot. With others – relatives and friends – openness of the person you are talking to and the context in which sensitivity is discussed should be taken into account.

Dr. Elaine Aron repeatedly emphasizes in her book that "To have an exceptional child, you must be willing to have an exceptional child". Sensitive children may pose unique challenges to the untrained caregiver, but they also amaze and enthrall their dear ones with their wit, wisdom and love. Most of the time, there is as much for the parent to learn from the sensitive child, as there is for the child to learn from the parent.