Helping a Child with Tactile Defensiveness Overcome Eating Challenges
Tactile defensiveness can pose significant challenges for children when it comes to eating. Sensory sensitivities can make mealtimes overwhelming and stressful. However, with patience, understanding, and a strategic approach, parents and caregivers can help their children overcome tactile defensiveness and develop a healthier relationship with food. Understanding Tactile Defensiveness Tactile defensiveness, or tactile hypersensitivity, is a condition where individuals experience an overreaction to certain tactile stimuli. For children with tactile defensiveness, the textures, temperatures, and physical sensations associated with food can trigger aversive responses, making eating a daunting task. It is important to remember that each child’s experience is unique, and their aversions may vary. Create a Calm and Supportive Environment Creating a calm and supportive environment during mealtimes is crucial for helping a child with tactile defensiveness. Reduce distractions, such as loud noises or bright lights, that may heighten their sensory overload. Establish a predictable routine and provide clear expectations. Encourage positive associations with food by incorporating enjoyable activities or storytelling into mealtimes. Gradual Exposure to New Foods Introducing new foods gradually is key to helping a child with tactile defensiveness expand their palate. Start with small portions of unfamiliar foods and pair them with preferred items. Please encourage them to gradually explore the new food with their senses, allowing them to touch, smell, and interact with it without pressure to eat. Celebrate any progress made, regardless of how small it may seem. Food Texture Modifications Food textures can be particularly challenging for children with tactile defensiveness. Modifying the textures of certain foods can help make them more manageable. Pureeing or blending foods to create smoother textures or offering crunchy alternatives like vegetable sticks…
Suffering Through the Pandemic, One Child’s Journey
How many of you are so sick and tired of this pandemic? I know I sure am. I will not say everything about the pandemic has been horrible. In the beginning, I enjoyed how slow life became. I loved all the canceled activities and us being able to be home as a family. We were able to spend a lot of quality time together. But, the pandemic wasn’t all fun and games for our family. We had our struggles. Online schooling was brutal. Some days it would take my oldest son five or six hours a day to do his school work. There were lots of tears from my daughter, who was in third grade. My preschooler did pretty well, but somedays, it was hard to get her to sit in front of the computer. My third grader is the one that struggled the most with everything. She did well at first; she got up and did her homework without question. After a couple of weeks, she started to regress. Her birthday is in April, and she had a hard with her birthday because we were stuck home. We couldn’t plan a party or do much of anything. It was a little underwhelming. I tried my best to make it a good day, but it was still hard for her. The day after her birthday, she came into my room at bedtime and started crying. She said she wanted everything to go back to normal. That night she laid by me and cried herself to sleep. That is when I knew we had a big problem that we needed to address. I knew she was…
Why You Should Do a Mother and Daughter Bookclub
This past year my daughter and I were asked to join a neighborhood book club for mothers and daughters. I was initially hesitant because we didn’t have the time to add something else to our schedule. I am not the fastest reader either, so I wasn’t sure if we would finish the books we needed to read in time each month or not. In the end, though, we decided to join. I am so happy that we did. It has been such a wonderful bonding experience for us. Our book club includes girls ages 7 thru 11. Both of my daughters are in that age group. They are both welcome to the club, but my 7-year-old isn’t always interested; however, my 11-year-old is eager to meet and discuss what we’ve read. Each month we are assigned a book. Whichever mother and daughter host the book club for the month, will pick out the book. They also pick the evening that we will get together to discuss the book. When we go to our book club, the girls will run the discussion with a bit of help from their mom. The girls will come up with questions we will answer or discuss. When we have finished the conversation, we have treats or dessert. It isn’t very long, only about an hour or so. But it works because the girls at that age don’t have a very long attention span. In our book club, some mothers like to read the book separately from their daughters. A few will also listen to it in the car with an audiobook. I like to sit down at night and read…
How to Survive Summer Break With a Summer Activites Poster
Summer break is here! For parents like me, it’s a love/hate relationship with summer! I love to be at home, but I know it is essential for the kids to get out and have fun. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get a little nervous about what I will do to entertain the kids for three months in the summer. I worry they won’t have enough activities, or I won’t be able to do enough to keep them entertained. The thing I like to do most, and one way my family survives summer break, is with a summer activities poster. What is a summer activities poster, you might ask? It is so simple; it is a large poster with all the fun ideas and activities written on it that we want to accomplish during the summer. As we do an activity, we cross it off, and when we need something to entertain us, we’ll look at the poster and choose one of the activities we have yet to do. To create a summer activities poster, you need three things: One large poster board A lot of colorful markers (we prefer to use colored Sharpies) Fun and silly stickers When we create our summer activities poster, we first decorate the poster with a heading written all fancy and crazy! We like to have fun with this. We’ll put things like “Our Awesome and Amazing Summer Activities” or “2022 Summer Of Fun!” Then we’ll add some stickers to it! The kids go crazy with this one! Once we’ve got our heading on the poster, and it’s got stickers on it, we write as many ideas…
What Is ADHD Inattentive Type?
When my son was about eight years old, he was diagnosed with ADHD inattentive type. For those that don’t know what this means, I will try and explain and help you understand. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) inattentive type means you have a hard time staying focused on tasks, struggle to pay attention to details, get distracted easily, have a hard time staying organized, and even with a routine will still forget things. Hyperactivity is very minimal. Staying Focused Those who have ADHD inattentive type have a hard time staying focused on what they’re doing. For instance, my son has a hard time staying focused on anything for very long. The inability to remain focused on schoolwork, tasks, or long-term projects is another symptom of inattentive ADHD. This trouble with focus is most easily observed in a classroom, during playtime, or at recess, as these children present difficulty committing to an activity for any significant amount of time. His biggest challenge is that he is unable to stay focused at school and will often forget the simplest things such as what his homework is that day, or to turn in an assignment that is due, or you’d be shocked about how many times he has forgotten to put his name on his assignments when he turns it in. Paying Attention to Details Paying attention to details can be a problem at school. My son’s teachers can tell him things, and he forgets everything his teachers have said. He will miss assignments or turn something in late because he didn’t pay attention to when the assignment was due. A child with inattentive ADHD may not pay…
Should You Medicate Your Child for ADHD?
Should you medicate your child for ADHD? That’s the big question. I want to tell you about my experience and share the decision we made on whether or not we should medicate our son for his ADHD. Before I get started, I want to remind you that I am not a doctor. I have no medical background. I am just a mom with a child with ADHD that wants to share my experience with medicating our child for ADHD. First, I know that medicating your child with ADHD is controversial. I only want to share what we did as a family and our experiences. We met with an ADHD specialist once my son was diagnosed with ADHD. We talked in-depth about what the best action for our son would be. Our specialist helped inform us about the different types of medication and the effects and side effects of the medicine. He also educated us on what we could continue to expect if we chose not to medicate our son. The specialist left it entirely up to us as parents, and In the end, we decided the best path for us was to medicate our son. We thought long and hard about what to do. We did our research at home. We wanted to give our son the best chance, both at school and at home. For us, that best chance was to medicate him. Understand, there wasn’t anything we viewed as negative about our son. He is brilliant, has a curious mind, and would often hyper-focus on various things. At school, he struggled, and it was difficult for him to make it through an entire…
Our Experience With an ADHD Diagnosis
Our son was pretty young when he was diagnosed with ADHD, inattentive type. He was halfway through second grade. He would have been seven, turning eight. It would have taken us much longer to have my son tested for ADHD if it weren’t for his second-grade teacher. I am incredibly grateful for her. I have a hard time remembering what happened last week, let alone ten years ago! Bear with me while I recall these events. When my son was a baby, I never really noticed anything, at least not that I remember. I didn’t start seeing anything different until he was a little older. I think I wasn’t paying much attention because we focused on understanding his tactile defensiveness and getting a diagnosis for that. Looking back on it, the only thing that I remember that would have made me question ADHD is that he could never do two-step commands. I always had to ask him to do one step at a time. For example, I could never ask him to put his shoes on, get his coat on, and then put his book bag on in one sentence. I had to break up my instructions. In first grade, his teacher mentioned that he had difficulty following directions. I just thought that was my son being my son. I didn’t know anything about it, so we didn’t do anything. His first-grade teacher ended up having my son tested at the school without our permission. That made me pretty upset. I wasn’t upset that he got tested, just that his teacher didn’t inform us or ask for our approval. With that incident with his teacher,…
Why Did I Create Perfectly Imperfect Family.com?
This blog has been years in the making. It all started a couple of years ago as I talked with my husband. I had mentioned to him how I hate how blogs always look so perfect. They only seem to show the perfect side of things. The people in them seem so perfect. Their families seem perfect. Their kids seem perfect. It drove me nuts! As we continued to talk, I mentioned to him that I know everyone has their problems and that they aren’t perfect, but it would be nice to read some blog posts about things that weren’t so perfect. To read blog posts about the struggles that people go through and the mundane in their lives. I wanted to read something authentic. I told my husband that I would like it to be completely authentic if I started a blog. To show people how life is not always perfect. To show people that we all struggle, have boring days, and are all normal and rarely perfect. At the time, that is where the conversation ended, but that thought has stuck with me for a couple of years. So why now? Why start blogging? I am terrified about starting this blog! Have you ever been nervous to start something new? I am a very shy person and have convinced myself that nobody would want to read anything I had to say. But, the more I have thought about it, the more I was convinced that there had to be other people out there that felt just like me. People that desire to read about the authentic side of life. To see that they…
Have You Ever Been Nervous About Starting Something New? I Am!
Have you ever been so nervous to start something new? I am completely terrified out of my mind to start blogging and share my experiences. I have always wanted to start this blog, but I’m completely terrified, if I’m being honest! I have always had a running dialogue in my mind every day. I know I’m not the most graceful writer, so I kept having doubts about myself and wondering whether or not I should start this blog? I often wondered, what do I have to offer? Will I be embarrassed with what I put out there? Will I offend anyone? Is someone going to make a mean comment? What will my family think? For a long time, these questions ran through my mind repeatedly. I always kept delaying the start of this blog even though I have wanted to do it for well over a year. My reasoning behind starting a blog was that I wanted to find a community going through some of the same things. I would be a part of a community of parents who have a child with tactile defensiveness, ADHD, or Anxiety. I would love to get new ideas and suggestions from other parents dealing with these situations. At the same time, I think that maybe I have ideas that can help others. Finally, I just told myself that I needed to go for it. I don’t know about you, but sometimes it is just so hard to get out of my head. I told myself that I needed the courage to put myself out there. Try starting a new blog and see what happens. If I don’t even…
A Mother’s Experience With Tactile Defensiveness
I am sure there are some of you reading this who are wondering what tactile defensiveness is. It is a term used to describe someone very sensitive to touch. As a result, someone who experiences tactile defensiveness is much more sensitive to touch than usual. Our son, who is 14 years old, has been diagnosed with tactile defensiveness. He received his diagnosis when he was 18 months old. As parents, we became concerned that he wasn’t walking or trying to walk. It also concerned us that he would pull his feet up to avoid standing when we would try and have him stand up on our laps. Also, when we would try and have him stand up on the ground, he would do the same thing. He would never let the bottom of his feet touch anything and do everything he could to avoid it! My husband and I asked our family doctor about our concerns, and he referred us to a physical therapist. When we went to the physical therapist, our son was diagnosed five minutes into our appointment. It was extremely quick. It surprised me, but the therapist immediately knew our son’s diagnosis as he watched our son’s behavior! Our son avoided physical contact because of how things felt on his skin. The therapist explained it like this to me. He said that when you cut your fingernails too short, the skin under the nail gets exposed, and it feels weird. He said that is the feeling my son has all over his body. After I learned what it was, we realized that there were signs of it from the day he was…
