Sensory Integration Education

How Can I Help My Highly Sensitive Teen, With Sensory Processing Challenges, Manage Their Emotions? 

You don’t grow out of sensory difficulties: children with sensory integration or processing difficulties grow into teens and adults with those same issues but, hopefully, plenty of tools to handle them. The teenage years can be a tricky time for individuals with sensory difficulties as they experience all the hormonal chaos of puberty on top of their sensory challenges. This can hamper their ability to self-regulate and make handling all the transitions at this time (different classes, teachers, social situations, bodily changes, etc) hard. You’re quite right to identify that your child will need support during these years.

Individuals with sensory processing difficulties can experience emotions more intensely so it’s important to help them recognise and validate their feelings and employ appropriate calming strategies. Alice Boyes, PhD, writes that there are ten skills of emotional self-regulation that we need to learn before adulthood:

1. Identifying which specific emotions you’re feeling.
2. Identifying which specific emotions someone else is feeling.
3. The ability to start and persist in pursuing goals even when you feel anxious.
4. The ability to tolerate awkwardness.
5. The ability to have intimate conversations rather than stonewall, avoid, or flee.
6. The ability not to crumble when someone is pressuring you.
7. The ability to soothe your own emotions.
8. The ability to soothe other people’s emotions.
9. The ability to delay gratification.
10. Understanding how to manage your positive emotions.

It might help to consider which of these areas your highly sensitive teen needs help with and to acknowledge areas they are already good at.

Here are some ways that parents can support their teenagers to develop their emotional and self-regulation skills:

Be a self-regulation role model

Can you model good emotional self-regulation and discuss with your teen what strategies you find helpful when feeling strong emotions? Also, just as when your child felt overwhelmed as a toddler and needed a safe, calm adult presence, your teen still needs an adult in their life who can respond appropriately and calmly.

Create emotionally expressive environments at home and school

Writer Linda Stade describes these as “spaces and places for kids where they feel free to say how they feel without fear of being ‘shut down’. There is a limit on behaviour but there is not a limit on emotion.” It’s easier to talk to your teen about emotional regulation and strategies when they are calm, not in the middle of a meltdown.

Seek a sensory integration evaluation by a trained professional

Teens may develop different sensory preferences and may need different sensory activities presented to them. The best way to find out how to support your teen's sensory needs is to seek an evaluation by a Sensory Integration Practitioner who can make recommendations specific to your teen and circumstances.

Allow your teen to make choices

Your teen will be well aware of what type of clothes, food, sounds, smells or activities soothe them and which distract them to the point of having to focus so much on tolerating them that they have no reserves left to cope with anything else. It’s easier to respect and work with these preferences rather than trying to fight them.

Find self-regulation strategies that work for your teen

These could include incorporating sensory activities (appropriate to your teen’s sensory needs) into the daily schedule; employing mindfulness exercises; encouraging healthy eating and sleep patterns; learning how to recognise and gauge the intensity of emotions; discussing scenarios and how one might best react; or learning cognitive reframing techniques (reinterpreting a situation in order to change your emotional response to it).

A Sensory Integration Practitioner can help you refine a toolkit of strategies for your teen to help themselves to manage their emotions and responses.

Help your teen build social awareness skills and learn that even positive emotions need to be regulated

Explain to your teen that their emotional behaviours impact on how other individuals behave and feel towards them. For example, talking over others, not respecting personal space and being over excited can be off-putting to friends.

Be aware of your teen’s mental health

Learn the indicators of anxiety or depression in your teen, and make time to discuss with them what that might feel and look like so they can self-report it to you too. Seek help from mental health professionals as appropriate.

Celebrate the strengths

Teenagers with sensory processing difficulties may be more aware than when they were younger of how their sensory difficulties make them different than their peers. Support them to find and be proud of the strengths of their different sensory experiences and unique perspectives.

The Out-Of-Sync Child Grows Up: Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder in the Adolescent and Young Adult Years by Carol Stock Kranowitz is a fantastic resource. It offers practical advice on living with sensory processing difficulties as well as covering the social and emotional issues that young people face. Topics include strategies for coping with the sensory aspects of grooming, social lives and dating, playing sports and music, and other issues, as well as how to find support and help from loved ones, occupational therapy, and other resources.

Finally, it may help your highly sensitive teen to read first-person accounts from other young adults with sensory processing difficulties:

“Sometimes we need things done a little differently because we can get overwhelmed, but if our needs are met we can be very successful. Do not think of people with sensory processing disorder as less than, because we are not. We can thrive just like everyone else. Sometimes we just need a little extra patience and help” - Alexzandra Benefield Puckett, What It's Like Having Sensory Processing Disorder as a Teen.