I’m Sorry, Highly Sensitive is Not on My Checklist

Has your child ever been tested for a disorder? Perhaps at the request of school? Parents of highly sensitive children can often answer yes to this question. It’s a process that often ends in frustration. Simply because ‘highly sensitive’ is not a box on a professional’s checklist. Highly sensitive traits don’t tick the boxes.

Expectations v Children’s Behaviours

Society creates round holes for children to fit in.

We see it in schools. There are expectations of what a five or six year old child should be able to do: sit still in a classroom environment and keep quiet, listen for great lengths of time and absorb information, concentrate whilst thirty children chatter around you, get home and start on a pile of homework.

Smoothing the Edges of a Square Peg to Make it Fit in a Round Hole

When they don’t meet those expectations, children get a label stuck on them.

We hear from their teacher that our child has concentration issues.

That our child drifts off into their own world when they should be doing maths.

That our child has anger issues.

We hear that our child is hyper, because at age four he can’t sit perfectly still and listen for fifteen minutes.

When our children won’t fit nicely and uniformly in the pre-made round hole we start looking for answers. We look at the square peg we are trying to fit in the hole. That is surely where the issues lies, and not with the round hole we expect every child to uniformly squeeze in to.

What the system attempts to do is smooth down the edges of the square peg so that it fits in the round hole.

My Highly Sensitive Child in School

My highly sensitive child was a role model child in school.

He listened when he should listen. Carried out the tasks set. Didn’t put his head above the parapet.

But when he got home he was a ball of stress and anger from holding in his emotions all day.

His bucket was filled to the brink by all the noise and busyness of his classroom. This pent up emotion came out daily in a series of prolonged meltdowns where he was lost to us completely.

We couldn’t reach him inside those tantrums, which came out of nowhere. He was also physically ill for long periods, unable to shake off regular childhood cold and flu viruses. So we sought help beyond the deaf ears of his teachers and school.

Getting Professional Help

I explained to a paediatrician that my son is highly sensitive. I told how the classroom environment is too much for him. And that we, that he, needed help expressing and understanding his emotions.

We needed tips to help him get his feelings out at school instead of saving them for his trusted home environment.

I explained that my four year old son needed to feel less stress in his little body.

We needed help to stop his bucket filling so quickly every day. Most importantly we wanted to be able to help him empty his bucket in a safe, non aggressive way.

However, the idea of him being highly sensitive was almost instantly dismissed. Yes, it may be a factor but that wasn’t the issue behind the meltdowns, the stress and the physical symptoms.

And so it Began: Testing a Child for a Disorder

So there were blood tests. Physical exams. A referral to a child psychologist who did an IQ test with him. She observed him in the classroom. And then she tested for autism, ADHD and any other series of initials you could care to come up with.

There were boxes on forms that needed to be checked. And being highly sensitive wasn’t one of them.

When round after round of testing was finished, it was declared that maybe he was acting up out of jealousy. He suddenly had two brothers to contend with for attention after four years as an only child. Maybe he was just trying it on so he didn’t have to go to school.

Furious is not the word.

Highly Sensitive is Not on My Checklist

Maybe he simply didn’t fit in one of the many boxes that sat on a therapists or pediatrician’s checklist? Turns out that testing for a child disorder can be a frustrating process. However, it can be a necessary one to rule out disorders.

In our case, he’s simply highly sensitive and there is no disorder. My instinct told me this, but this was a process we had to go through.

He doesn’t have a child disorder. Or a behavioural problem. Or a medical issue. And it was not about jealousy.

He needed someone to tell him he’s okay. Tips on how to empty his overflowing bucket were actually what he needed. He needed to be able to still his mind whilst there was chatter all around him. He needed help with stress which came out in the form of physical illnesses.

But he wasn’t offered any of that because neither a paediatrician nor a therapist could tick a box on their forms.

I do need to stress that if your child’s traits are preventing them from functioning in regular daily activities, then seek professional help. If their behaviour concerns you, seek professional help. Underlying disorders should be ruled out in such cases.

Treat Children as Individuals

Maybe school was trying to squeeze him into a round hole when actually what he needed was a square hole.

Or his own individual shaped hole.

Maybe he needed to be treated as the individual that he is.

Maybe he needed his teachers to listen to him when he told them how exhausted he was. The sarcastic comments that he should go to bed weren’t actually what he needed. Maybe he needed a little understanding when he relayed that the noise in the classroom was making him ‘full’.

At the end of months of testing and expense we got to hear that they couldn’t actually find anything wrong with our child.  He, surprise surprise, didn’t have a child disorder.

I made it very clear that I knew that from the beginning. It wasn’t why we came for help.

We never went to professionals looking for a root cause for the meltdowns, for the stress. Because we knew the cause. And yet still, those we asked to help us were only interested in being able to tick off a box on a checklist. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t.

That’s how the system works. But not all children fit neatly in a box on a checklist.

Hope for the Future for Our Highly Sensitive Children

There is change in the air. People like Elaine Aron and Susan Cain are helping to forge a path through the general misconception that you need to be loud, extrovert and tough to be a success in life.

People like Aron and Cain are rocking the boat and showing us all that it is those round holes we try and stick everyone into that need to change – and not the beautiful square pegs that don’t neatly fit into them.

I am the proud mother of more than one square peg. In fact, I am a square peg myself. And I am immensely thankful that my child doesn’t come close to ticking a box on a therapist’s checklist.

Further Resources

For the Dutch speakers among you I highly recommend Jennifer Petterson’s podcast Opgejaagd. She has also focused on the unnecessary testing of children for disorders in the Dutch system.

Over to You

Has your highly sensitive child been subjected to testing? Or has testing for a child disorder proved useful to you? Let me know in the comments below.