Sensory Parenting for Sensory Children by Tanya Van Dalen

Author:Tanya Van Dalen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2023-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Why might we kangaroo?

Tolerating the distress of our child can be harder for some of us than others. If you, like me, are easily pushed into jellyfish and become overwhelmed by your child’s strong emotion, or into rhino to try and control it, you may be tempted to spend energy trying hard to keep your child regulated. You need them to be regulated because you get pushed out of your window of tolerance fast. This makes sense; feeling overwhelmed yourself is not a good place to be. We might be tempted to try and avoid any strong, negative emotions by ensuring that everything is always just right for our child. Our need to kangaroo may well be more about our difficulty tolerating distress than our child’s ability to tolerate it.

Being finely attuned to the needs of our children helps us adapt ourselves and the environment to ensure they feel safe. This is a wonderful attribute, a parenting skill we could all strive to learn. However, when we kangaroo, we are at risk of believing that we are the sole person who can provide for the needs of our children. We unwittingly set ourselves up to the be the very best and we leave little room for others to learn too or do it differently. We may well have a small select group of chosen people that we feel can help, but we don’t call on them too often. Of course, as we are exploring in this book, parenting a sensory child can’t be always done in the typical way and does require us to educate others and help them to really grasp how to adapt themselves and the environment for our children. The risk when we kangaroo is that we hold it all close to our chest and forget to reflect on when our kids may be ready and able to tolerate another way of being helped. We risk expecting everybody to be like us.

Messages our western culture feed us through advertising and social media don’t help either. Our innate, culturally cultivated belief that ‘being successful requires us to be happy’ feeds our need to keep our children happy at all costs. We wonder if people look into our lives and decide how successful we are as parents by how our children are managing life. This is something that I have had to reflect on, especially when my daughter’s mental health became poor and happiness was not always on the cards. As humans, we strive for comfort and happiness so that we can feel that our lives are a success. When asked what we want our children to be in the future, most of us will say, ‘I just want them to be happy.’ Yet, we all would agree that we can’t always be happy all the time. Life is a rollercoaster; some moments we are simply just holding on. I love the Disney Pixar movie Inside Out. The emotions inside a young girl are depicted as characters, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger.

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