Parenting a Sensitive Child

By Terri Goodwell
Web Exclusive

We’ve all known sensitive, shy kids. These are the introverted ones who hang on the fringes of the group. They are the ones we often call “slow to warm up” because they look very carefully before accepting new people, places, or things. They are the children who avert their eyes when spoken to by a stranger and shrink away from being the center of attention. Because they typically act quiet, clingy or anxious in unfamiliar social settings, the general consensus is that these kids are fearful and lack confidence. Unfortunately, by thinking of them as socially inept or weak, we fail to understand all that may be underlying this introverted behavior and often don’t appreciate the many positive attributes of having a sensitive, quiet nature.

My Personal Experience

When my daughter Sophi was about three, she started being classified as “shy” and “slow to warm up” at her preschool and other classes. I was constantly hearing comments like “Your daughter is so shy!”, “Does she talk at all at home?” and “She refuses to join the group”.

I tried pushing Sophi to be more social. I tried forcing her to join the group of children at school, and I constantly reminded her to say hello and answer people back, but all to no avail. I somehow thought that if only I gave her the proper social training, and she tried hard enough, her shyness would be eliminated. I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Often when parents such as myself cannot get their child to change in order to fit in, they feel that something must either be wrong with their child or their parenting. It was this feeling, combined with my daughter’s strong and lingering emotional reaction to the death of our family cat, which sent me searching for professional help. Concerned about the sudden behavioral changes in our daughter, my husband and I took her to a local child psychologist. After the therapist helped her through her grief, she told us she thought Sophi was a highly sensitive child.

Since we did not know exactly what this meant, she strongly urged us to educate ourselves about Dr. Elaine Aron’s new research on shyness and sensitivity. This marked the beginning of my greater understanding of my daughter and her temperament.

“Shyness” Redefined

This research sheds new light on shyness, challenging many sensitivity our society’s negative preconceptions about it. Rather than associating shyness with fearfulness, low self-esteem, or poor social skills, Elaine N. Aron, PhD., a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, believes that shyness often results from an individual’s inborn temperament of sensitivity. In her two books, The Highly Sensitive Person and The Highly Sensitive Child, Dr. Aron describes what we typically call shyness as “the expression of a sensitive individual’s innate preference to pause and observe before proceeding.” Dr Aron describes highly sensitive individuals as “those who are born with a tendency to notice more in their environment and deeply reflect on everything before acting, as compared to those who notice less and act quickly and impulsively.” She believes that these sensitive individuals are more easily overwhelmed than the average person when confronted with large quantities of input arriving at once. When the sensitive individuals try to avoid this overload of information, by withdrawing or backing off, Dr Aron says, they seem to be shy or timid or ‘party poopers’.” When they cannot avoid the over-stimulation, they sometimes react negatively and seem to outsiders to be “easily upset” or “cry babies” or “too sensitive”.

These highly sensitive individuals are born with a highly developed nervous system that is extremely good at registering subtle nuances in their environment. Because of this, it makes perfect sense that when they are in highly stimulating or unfamiliar social settings, they need to take more time to process all the extra bits of information flooding into them. For example, an average child, with an average nervous system, will walk into a room, notice the people in it and maybe the furniture, and begin to investigate and interact. On the other hand, highly sensitive children, with their finely tuned nervous systems, will walk into the same room and notice, not only the people and furniture, but the general mood in the room, the feelings of the individual people in it, and anything particularly unusual or noteworthy about the room. Because it will take longer for them to process all this information, they will understandably take longer to investigate or interact.