The Highly Sensitive Child: Helping our children thrive when the world overwhelms them. Elaine N. Aron
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In childhood, however, there is a vast palette, even among HSCs. Consider Rhoda, a highly sensitive person with three older HSCs—ages twenty-two, twenty, and sixteen. As children, they were all more aware of stimuli than other kids. They all needed more rest and “down time” than their peers. People told all three of them at various times that they were “overreacting” and “too sensitive.” Each found some form of artistic endeavor to express their intense awareness.
But such different children! Ann, the oldest, is a photographer. She likes fresh experiences—she rides motorcycles, jumps out of airplanes. Andrew, the middle child, is conservative, particular, and “fussy.” He is a visual artist. His work is very detailed and careful. From birth he was always the most sensitive to sound and to scents.
All three are intensely emotional, but Ann and Andrew do not let it show. Tina, the youngest, has always been more dramatic and expressive. As a child she threw tantrums. As a teenager she has dark depressions. Her art form is poetry—something she can read out loud. Her colds are more likely to become bronchitis or even pneumonia, something that takes her to the doctor’s office.
WHY DO EVEN HSCS VARY SO MUCH?
One reason for the variation among HSCs is that temperament traits seem to be caused by several genes, each having small, cumulative effects. Thus each different flavor of sensitivity—sensitivity to the subtle, the overwhelming, the new, the emotional, the social, or the physical and nonsocial—may be caused by a different gene. Yet there is still something common to these different sensitivities and they may tend to be inherited together. (If the underlying trait was not one trait, my questionnaire would have uncovered several different “factors,” but there was only one.)
Here are more examples of the range of HSCs. Yes, Rhoda’s youngest, Tina, had tantrums, as do many HSCs when young and overstimulated. But in this book you will also meet Alice, who is three and has never had a tantrum. She is strong-willed and opinionated, but when she wants something, she says it in a way that is almost uncanny in its maturity.
You will meet Walt, seven, who hates sports (but loves chess); Randall, nine, who will only play baseball, and only if his mother coaches the team; and Chuck, also nine, who will play any sport and be good at it. He climbs high and loves to ski, but he knows his terrain and his limits. (On a recent skiing trip, Chuck was caught at the top in a blizzard. He cried from the stress of it, but insisted on going down anyway.)
Chuck is an indifferent student; Walt and Randall are doing great academically. Catherine has been advanced almost every grade, starting with a move from preschool to kindergarten. And Maria was her high school’s valedictorian and graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from Harvard.
You already read about Tina being an extrovert. Chuck is also extroverted, popular, already discovered by the girls. In contrast, Randall has limited friendships, mainly because he does not like to go to other homes—he dislikes the unfamiliar family members, food, and routines.
Sometimes the quality that parents notice most is their child’s emotional sensitivity. You’ll meet River, a teenager so aware of others’ emotions that he begged his mother to take in a homeless person he found in the park. (His mother decided to let the man stay until her son realized the problems with the situation and found another solution, which he did after three months.)
Melanie, eight, is another HSC with emotional sensitivity. She cries if she feels embarrassed or if someone else is teased. Her sensitivity also extends to physical pain. Afraid of falling, she did not learn to ride a bike without training wheels until her sister, three years younger, learned. Her pride finally forced her to take the risk.
Walt is mostly sensitive to new situations and people. Consider Walt’s first experience with grass: He crawled to the edge of a blanket, continued onto the grass, and cried from the shock of it. His mother remembers that two years later his sister crawled to the edge of the blanket, felt the grass, and just kept going.
Larry, thirteen now, is mostly sensitive to sound, clothing, and foods. Until kindergarten he only wore sweatshirts and sweatpants. He could not bear the roughness of jeans. Like Walt, he also doesn’t like new situations—he refuses to go to camp or take long vacations.
Mitchell, five, seems to have all the characteristics of an HSC. He is sensitive to social novelty, so he’s really struggling with starting school. He does not like birthday parties and will not wear a costume at Halloween, not wanting everyone looking at him. He is slow verbally because he’s thinking so much before he speaks—he developed some stuttering after his older cousins came to visit because he had trouble speaking as quickly as they did. He has the physical sensitivity, too, so that he does not like foods that have been mixed or socks that rub. His mother cuts the tags from his clothing because they bother his neck and waist.
THEN THERE IS EMILIO
Emilio, seven, is not quite like any of the others, yet he has the same underlying “feel.” He is very sociable and has no trouble meeting new people. He eats everything, eagerly, and is not fussy about what he wears. Yet despite his extroversion, he dislikes noise and parties and needs plenty of down time and a schedule. His sensitivity was clearly manifested in his self-imposed solution to overstimulation in infancy—in fact, it showed signs of true genius.
For the first two months of life Emilio had been crying every night at the same time, right on schedule, and was obviously miserable. Then his parents bought a playpen. From then on he was happy in it and nowhere else. He ate there, slept there, played there. If his mother took him out, he howled, and as soon as he was old enough, he crawled right back to it. He had no interest in exploring the cupboards or closets. He wanted his playpen!
Neighbors and relatives felt sorry for him, and told Emilio’s mother she had to get rid of that baby prison and stunter of exploration—a perfect example of that familiar, well-meaning advice that implies something is wrong with either the child or the parents.
But Emilio’s mother could not bear to separate her infant from his playpen. It made him too happy. The playpen was in the living room, so he was included in most family life, and to Prince Emilio it seemed to be more like a castle than a dungeon. So his mother decided to stop making an issue of it—as long as the floor of it did not break under her chubby son’s bouncing! She knew he would not be there when he was twenty. And in fact, at two and a half, when his younger brother needed it, he gave it up, not wanting to seem like a baby.
Another Source of Variation—Two Competing Systems
Another reason for the variations in the behavior of HSCs is suggested by one of the scientific models for the cause of sensitivity, which is that sensitive persons have a very active “behavioral inhibition system.” All brains have this system, but in the highly sensitive it is thought to be especially strong or active. For example, this system is associated with an active right hemisphere of the thinking part of the brain (the frontal cortex), and babies with more electrical activity and blood flow on the right side of the brain are more likely to be HSCs.
I prefer to call this system in the brain the “pause-to-check system” because that is what it really does. It is designed to look at the situation you are in and see if it is similar to any past situations stored in your memory. So it only causes “inhibition” for a moment—unless, of course, the prior similar situation was threatening. Otherwise, after a brief pause to check, one could just as easily decide to rush ahead.
For the highly sensitive, the pause-to-check urge is probably strong because they have so much input to process from every situation. Consider the two deer pausing at the edge of the meadow. The highly sensitive deer is noticing subtle scents, shadows, shades of color, tiny movements caused by the wind—or perhaps not caused by wind but by a predator. The less sensitive deer is not noticing all of this so has less to process, less reason to pause.
What the less sensitive deer has is a stronger “behavioral activation system”—it sees some good grass in the meadow and after a very brief check, it heads for it. This