Sensory processing disorder (SPD) is a disorder that can debilitate your child in some areas or all aspects of their life and make normal activities almost impossible. For my toddler, activities like eating, playtime, and family gatherings are an absolute nightmare. She is a sensory avoiding kid. I often found myself in guilt-mode wondering, ‘what is wrong with my child?’ and asking doctors, ‘what can I do to help her?’ with no avail. My answer now to any parent dealing with SPD is to start with The Out-of-Sync Child by Carol Stock Kranowitz, preschool teacher of 25 years and expert on SPD. In short: the woman knows her stuff.
Throughout the book, you are reassured that your child is truly experiencing something that is beyond their control and IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. Kranowitz accomplishes this by utilizing a style of language similar to that of a friend guiding you in hard times.
Through The Out-of-Sync Child, Kranowitz has set out to help parents, teachers, and medical practitioners recognize SPD and calls for immediate action on everyone’s part (so it’s not all on your shoulders, Mammas:)).
This is how the book works:
For a little over half of the book, Kranowitz basically helps you understand what sensory processing disorder (SPD) is, what it looks like in your child’s behavior and how to determine if your child has SPD. The Out-of-Sync Child teaches you what a normal and healthy sensory development is supposed to look like. Kranowitz brings it home through side-by-side comparisons of typical children to children who have over-responsive and under-responsive SPD, using real-life scenarios. The Out-of-Sync Child illustrates how these children malfunction in their day-to-day due to the inefficiencies in their sensory nervous system.
As a first time parent of a child with SPD, The Out-of-Sync Child is especially eye-opening since I have no other kids to compare my daughter’s development to.
What I Got Out of Part 1:
By the time I was done with Part 1 of The Out-of-Sync Child, I understood the category of SPD my child has (over-responsive or under-responsive) and which characteristics she’d been demonstrating through her behavior (‘sensory seeking’ or ‘sensory avoiding’). From there, I figured out which sensory stimuli were causing her to have ‘melt-downs’ (e.g., overly excited/loud family members or practitioners, too many items at the dinner table, fast moving kids and pets). I also figured out how to minimize, remove, or completely avoid the sensory input (e.g., telling friends, family and therapists to bring down their voices, diminishing number of items near her plate at the dinner table, or simply avoiding the park after 3:30 pm and weekends when it’s filled with kids). Equally important, I learned how to MANAGE MY OWN BEHAVIOR when she becomes overwhelmed. Understanding my daughter’s needs has completely changed the way I react to what I thought was ‘behavior’ problems due to bad advice from well-meaning doctors, therapists, and family members. The Out-of-Sync Child offers a very helpful questionnaire and several checklists of symptoms, associated problems, and characteristics that had me beside myself with one ‘ah ha!’ after another. I am confident that while reading The Out-of-Sync Child, you too, will go through your own revelations about your child with SPD.
Important Points in Part 2:
Part 2 of the book offers criteria for getting your child diagnosed and treated and tons of suggestions to help you and your kid cope with SPD. It was in this half of the book that I started to believe that there really is hope! To help guide you, there’s plenty of “What To Do’s,” and “What Not To Do’s,” with your SPD kid. (If you feel like you’re going to ‘lose-it’ because of your kid’s ‘behavior’, then I highly recommend you jump to this section as soon as you get the book). Reading this section of the book brought me down to earth and gave me a lens where I could imagine the world from my little girl’s perspective. Instead of getting upset over her ‘out-of-control’ behavior, I saw that she was actually disappointed in herself for not being able to do certain activities that other kids enjoyed. So I started to display more compassion and showed more love in her moments of overwhelm. I tell you… when my behavior changed, my toddler’s behavior drastically improved. In her internal chaos, she just needed for me to hold a safe space for her to begin to feel grounded and whole. Not for me–her rock–to lose it!
Kranowitz does a phenomenal job demonstrating how SPD is typically overlooked or misdiagnosed by pediatricians and other child health professionals, and often mistaken for bad behavior by teachers, making it even harder for your child to get early intervention. Because SPD has many symptoms that are look-alikes of other common disorders and can even overlap with other disabilities, it can be hard for practitioners to differentiate one characteristic from the other. To this, Kranowitz says, “The red flags are a child’s unusual response to touching and being touched or to moving and being moved.” I would add, a child’s unusual response to eating or being fed, or extreme responses to smells. The reason it is important to determine which symptoms are related to sensory processing problems and which aren’t is because improper diagnoses lead to improper treatment and possibly worsening SPD to a severe form or adding newer problems for your child and your family life. To make matters worse, having to stay home with your kid with severe undiagnosed or misdiagnosed SPD can have a huge negative economic impact on the entire family. It may cause the loss of your job and be a source of stress and pain, unlike anything anyone can understand. Hence, the unhelpful advice you just might get from well-meaning folks in your world. So the fact that Kranowitz offers advice that takes into consideration the child and the parent makes The Out-of-Sync Child a vital read.
By the time I figured out my pediatricians were oblivious to SPD, my daughter was misdiagnosed several times and I was told to give her many, many prescribed drugs to control her symptoms. It was ONLY because I was relentless in figuring out what was wrong with my daughter, spending countless hours conducting internet searches while crying my eyes out along with my toddler, that I was even able to discover the term SPD. Then I found an SPD clinic, got her evaluated and confirmed for having severe SPD. If I had this book early on, it would have been an open and shut case, where I would have minimized my disappointments and heartbreaks dealing with clueless doctors who went as far as having her go through surgery and worsening her condition. Instead, I could have simply helped educate them with the sage words found in The Out-of-Sync Child and found better treatment options. But so much for shoulda-coulda-wouldas.
What is important, Kranowitz says, is that you get your child carefully diagnosed for SPD and properly treated. If your kid has multiple conditions, get your pediatrician to figure out which of your child’s symptoms are SPD and which belong to the other conditions (like, autism, ADHD, even learning disabilities) and make sure that the doctors take this into consideration when developing a treatment plan. CAN I GET AN AMEN?
I also want to note, that the author’s 25-year observation of her preschoolers learning, at play, and interactions, give her what I consider to be her sixth sense (no pun intended… maybe a little). This sixth sense is her ability to identify children with SPD as a result of her will to dig deeper for the cause of her preschooler’s malfunction and not just write them off as ‘lazy’ or ‘the least brightest of the bunch.’ Kranowitz uses her sixth sense to inform you on how to get your child recognized at school and how to get special accommodations, all in her book, The Out-of-Sync Child. She has seen children in her classroom act completely outside of what parents know of their kid’s baseline. So I totally appreciate the advice she offers for teachers in the book, which is super handy to a parent interested in educating their child’s teacher about SPD without feeling overwhelmed in the process.
Finally, Kranowitz reminds you that with proper treatment your child may or may not be completely alleviated of the challenges of sensory processing disorder, but will definitely have the ability to live a fulfilled life by having the tools needed to meet life’s challenges and build on their self-confidence.
Okay…here’s what you won’t get:
If you’re looking for help with specific sensory issues your kid might have, like an oral aversion or feeding aversion, The Out-of-Sync Child does not go into details on how to help your kid with that. There are very light suggestions that might be helpful. At the least, you can use the suggestions as a baseline for your own research.
Again, what this book will do for you (in a nutshell):
Helps you recognize if your child has SPD (over responsive or under-responsive),
Get proper diagnoses and treatment,
Teaches you to be forgiving of yourself and your child,
And calls for you to take immediate action for early intervention to get your child the help he or she needs for a better quality of life.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I highly recommend this book.
So get it here and tell let me know how it goes!
Thanks for reading,
Mical–
Published 12/26/15