The Highly Sensitive Parent
Maybe you see to it that your children do not get to know “wild” kids or have certain teachers about whom you have heard mixed reports, or you have your teenage daughter learn some self-defense. Do you ever know if all this vigilance pays off? Often, we don’t at the moment—or maybe ever.
Prevention is a thankless business. I once heard a psychologist speak about the difficulty in funding the most obviously sensible mental illness prevention programs compared to treatment programs because it is difficult to measure how much prevention really helps. It’s like wearing a whistle around your neck to drive off elephants. If someone says, “That’s silly—there are no elephants around here,” you could reasonably say, “That’s because of my whistle.”
If you know where your child is at all times, are you overprotective? Hard to say, but your child surely has slightly better odds of surviving to adulthood, and that is what evolution is all about. Of course, all parents are highly motivated biologically and personally to keep their children safe, but as with the deer, it only requires a slight difference among individuals added to a slight difference in environment for close attention to pay off.
Does the highly sensitive parenting strategy work? Definitely, or sensitivity would not be a trait found all over the world.
How You Differ
Now that I have told you about “the” HS parent, you need to remember that none of you will fit the picture perfectly. You vary in age, wealth, culture, and so much else. Some of you looked forward very much to being a parent and have chosen to have more than one child. You may have even chosen to study child development or work in the field of child care. Others of you were more ambivalent. Perhaps you leaned toward becoming a parent in order not to miss the experience, or even to please a partner. But rearing children may not be your true calling.
Inheritance may be a factor, such as variations in the genes controlling your oxytocin levels. This neurotransmitter was first discovered in new mothers but is now known to be found in everyone, both men and women, to varying degrees.
Variations are also caused by how much your own childhood environment—family, schooling, and culture—prepared you for parenthood. It also depends on how well set up you are at home for caring for a child and how much support you have. Yet another way in which you vary is how difficult your child has been to raise—that is, to what degree they are distractible, highly active, emotionally dramatic, impulsive, inflexible, or persistent. Or they may be highly sensitive, too, and perhaps cautiously observing before trying new things, bothered by even mild noise or rough handling, and easily made anxious. None of these temperament extremes are abnormal. They do mean a parent must work harder to do a good job, which can be an enormous drain on any parent—but on the highly sensitive ones in particular.
Of course, there are other variations that hugely affect the task of parenting. A child may have a true disorder or “challenge,” even since birth. These can be physical, such as a tumor in the brain; emotional, such as a bipolar disorder; or cognitive, such as a learning disorder or a problem with brain development.
I say this because, again, I want to write for all of you, but in doing so I will not be addressing the needs of all of you, all the time.
Still, you are similar in one key way.
CHAPTER TWO
Coping with Overstimulation
THE PROPER CARE AND APPRECIATION OF A HIGHLY SENSITIVE PARENT
SAYS ONE HS MOTHER:
I think overall parenting has overwhelmed me. First, the job never ends. Second, the expectation from other parents and moms. If I tried to be like other non-HSP moms, I would probably survive one day and would pay for it for months.
Another HS mother’s thoughts:
I was there, but not there. I got through the day. Made the meals. Paid the bills. Did the laundry. Played chauffeur. Managed all the obligatory tasks in robotlike fashion because that is all I had to give. Outwardly, I appeared capable. Needless to say, I was not a bastion of warmth and security for my kids or my husband.
An HS father shares:
For an HSP—absorbing so much of life—it was a mental computer going full speed.
From my research survey, it is clear that sensitive parents are more stressed and overstimulated by parenting than parents without the trait. For example, HS parents were more likely to agree with two survey statements than parents who were less highly sensitive: “I do not get enough downtime” and “Getting enough sleep as a parent has been a problem.”
Before we continue, let me remind you that the HS parents were not necessarily or always hampered by their stress. Stressed or not, they were also more attuned to their children than other parents. For example, they agreed to these statements: “One of my strengths is the creativity I bring to parenting” and “When my child has experienced a major success or setback, it is as if it has happened to me.” But being creative takes work. Empathy is emotionally tiring. It’s all highly stimulating. High levels of stimulation drain energy from you, and you notice it because you feel less effective as well as less happy.
I repeat: All HSPs work hard at processing and feel their feelings more intensely, including empathy for others. They are quicker and more accurate when it comes to detecting subtle differences. And they are more stressed after hours of being so sensitive. You can’t have one without the other.
Imagine yourself as a battery (which is in a sense what we are, given our electrochemical nervous system). If you use yourself to be more attuned to your child, your battery is going to run down sooner than that of a parent who does not. Once you are nearly out of energy, you will be left vulnerable to being overwhelmed by noise, clutter, and demands for attention. Being more easily stressed and eventually overwhelmed is just a fact of life for HS parents, especially those with young children, and most especially those with more than one young child.
Research on Chaos and HS Parents
The mess that two kids create makes me stressed, and I don’t feel calm until the house is clean. So I spend one or two hours every day cleaning the house and putting things where they belong.
Theodore Wachs at Purdue University used the HSP Scale (combined with another measure, of noise sensitivity) to see how chaos affected parents differently according to their sensitivity. He rated homes for their noise, clutter, and crowdedness. Household disorder has been associated in other studies with parents (not HS parents in particular) who are less responsive and involved, provide less educational stimulation, use less effective discipline, don’t think that their children sleep enough, and feel less confident as a parent. This does not mean household chaos causes parents to be ineffective or that if you are struggling to control the chaos, you are a bad parent. It could be the cause is the other way around: Ineffective parents (probably found mostly among the other 80 percent) allow their homes to be messy. Which factor is the cause isn’t clear, but it means that where there’s chaos, parenting problems are more likely. Obviously, Wachs wondered how this works if a parent is especially sensitive.
Wach’s study of chaos and sensitivity found that households clearly differed in their noise and disorder, but HS mothers and the researchers sent in to observe the households both rated the chaos similarly. Homes that were chaotic were felt by the HS mothers to be chaotic. This was especially true when there were more people at home or when there was no place for putting away children’s toys. But those without the trait did not tend to perceive their home as chaotic, even if the raters did. This study did not go on to measure the effectiveness of the HS parents who were burdened by chaos (not all were, of course), but our research indicates that they at least report themselves to be very effective—more than those who are not HSPs.
Other Sources of Overstimulation Specific to HS Parents
In addition to household “chaos,” another source of overstimulation is our emotional responsiveness. Feeling everything more deeply is a form of stimulation, as you know. For many, the greatest difficulty is the unavoidable social stimulation. As one HS parent says:
Playdates are the worst. Another child added to the mix!
Then there are the decisions. I have listened to young parents agonize for hours over which babysitter, pediatrician, child care option, or preschool to choose. HS parents ponder deeply whether to go back to work or to have another child.
None of these are trivial decisions. Sometimes, they are decisions about personal values, but often there is information available that could help. The problem today is finding it. How many hours can you comb through the Internet before you are overstimulated and exhausted? (I will address this in more depth in chapter four.)
Your body is another source of overstimulation. HSPs in general report on the HSP Scale that they are more sensitive to pain. All parents are vulnerable to muscle strains and pains, for example, but HS parents may feel them more. All physical stimulation is stronger for the HS parent, including torturing your back by sitting in an uncomfortable chair during a meeting, walking around an amusement park in bad shoes, and whatever smells that, to you, amount to a stench.
Complicated things are also overstimulating, as when you are trying to understand complex instructions, remember something, or decide what to do next. You can process it, but it requires energy.
Then there is stimulation from two sources or more—for instance, your children talking to you when you are on the phone or trying to figure out a recipe.
Even mild stimulation, such as the TV in the background, is overstimulation if it goes on too long, and a greater deal of focus is required if you are trying to also do something else. Self-control requires mental energy, which requires physical energy in the sense that your brain is another physical organ needing nutrients and rest to restore itself.
How compassionately you treat yourself in your thoughts can make a huge difference in the amount you stimulate yourself from the inside. Self-criticism is exhausting.
The Physiology of Parent Burnout
Overstimulation occurs in response to children of any age, just in different forms. If you have a child under two or three, there is an excellent book, Mother Nurture by Rick Hanson, Jan Hanson, and Ricki Pollycove on mother burnout. (Almost all of it applies to fathers, too, and certainly to HS fathers.) Indeed, if your children are older, you still might appreciate the information in this book. It was coauthored by three medical professionals with vast experience on the subject—a doctor, an acupuncturist, and a therapist. While it was written in 2002 only with mothers in mind, and not specifically for HS parents, it explains the physiological side of your problem very well and suggests a wide range of treatment options.
Highly sensitive fathers, please—take the problem of burnout for yourself very seriously. Granted, in the second survey, which did have enough fathers who responded to analyze the data, HS fathers did not find parenting more difficult than those without the trait like HS mothers did. Even so, some of you may still be under considerable stress. You may be suffering physical effects as much as your partner. Although she may have been the one who was physically pregnant, starting then and continuing on, you have probably taken on extra duties as well as worries. For example, the stress for fathers may come from increasing pressure to earn enough or keep up with work while more is going on at home, and we did not ask about work pressures in our questionnaire.
FOUR SYSTEMS, PLUS ONE
Four systems in your body can wear out during the first years of parenthood, especially if the mother had a difficult pregnancy or if either parent beforehand was run-down, had a poor diet, had other illnesses, or was under emotional stress from other causes. Each system is crucial to the other three.
GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM. With the stress of parenting, your gastrointestinal system—stomach and intestines—may digest poorly, giving you problems such as nausea, constipation, diarrhea, or gas, as well as malnutrition. That means the rest of your body—those other three systems—receive fewer nutrients and also work less well.
NERVOUS SYSTEM. Your nervous system transmits information throughout your body, so it gives you notice when things are wrong in the form of general worry or troubled moods and feelings. A poorly functioning nervous system still produces thoughts. It cannot stop that basic function. But the thoughts it produces may be harmful to your health.
Further, if you have frequent treatments for headaches, lack of sleep, or distressed mood caused by a poorly functioning nervous system, these will probably bother the gastrointestinal system. They all interact.
There are at least four neurotransmitters that could be off due to stress. They can be treated in various ways to balance them, but figuring this out almost always requires a psychiatrist experienced with parents specifically, one who has seen it all before.
ENDOCRINE SYSTEM. Your endocrine system produces thyroid, testosterone, oxytocin, cortisol, estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, DHEA, insulin, and many other hormones. (Men and women produce all of these—some, obviously, in differing amounts.) These hormones take messages to all parts of the body, but they could fail to take or give the wrong messages. When your hormones are out of balance, you may be fatigued, irritable, jittery, waking in the night and unable to go back to sleep, depressed, and all the rest. They, in a sense, tell the entire body “we are now under stress,” putting digestion, the nervous system, and the immune system on the alert.
IMMUNE SYSTEM. The fourth system affected by stress is the immune system, the main defender of your health. When it is over- or underactive due to stress, hormone imbalance, poor food, depression, or something else, you will have more infections and allergies, plus possible autoimmune reactions leading to symptoms with more difficult causes to diagnose, such as fatigue and inflammation.
All four of these systems will affect the functioning of your muscles, as well—how well you handle all the lifting, bending, roughhousing, dancing, and stretching. All in all, parenting is a very physical experience. It is natural to become depleted over time. You want to feel strong, invulnerable—almost perfect for your child—but accepting the stress your body is under should lead to more compassion for what it needs, especially if you are highly sensitive. That means a thorough plan for self-care for all of these systems. In turn, that means making time for whatever you need, plus giving yourself some slack when you become ill or need to see a doctor.
FOR HS PARENTS, THE BURNOUT POTENTIAL NEVER GOES AWAY
The purely physical effects of overstimulation when raising school-age children and adolescents are the same as when your children are younger, but you may have more control over your self-care, and the overstimulation comes in different forms. You may still be losing sleep because you have to get up early to prepare your children for school and get them there. You have to deal with everything children bring home from school—from works of “art” to homework to emotional wounds and sticky questions, plus their own overstimulation, which their bodies rely on you to absorb and sooth. Plus, there are constant expectations from teachers and other parents, sometimes leading to some very intense interactions that you cannot avoid. Therefore, you cannot afford to let up on your self-care.
Teenagers? When they’re at home, they tend to be loud for some reason—their music and their voices, plus their loud friends. And there are so many issues to think about with teenagers. Meanwhile, you are aging, so all of your systems need more care. I often quote the line in Steel Magnolias when Dolly Parton tells the middle-aged ladies in her beauty salon, who are watching a young bride being “done” for her wedding, that there is “No such thing as natural beauty after twenty.” Except I say, “There is no such thing as natural health after forty.” Suddenly, we have to take care of everything even more to avoid aches, pains, and chronic illness.
What About Attachment Parenting?
Going back to the first two years, now that you understand the physical stress you are under as a parent of an infant or young child, it is time to discuss how to create the most secure child—with the least stress on yourself. As a psychologist, I know well the importance of a child having a secure attachment. Indeed, it is one of my special interests. Further, I like the principle of attachment parenting—of responding to an infant’s needs as much as possible. I think it is healthy emotionally as well as physically to breastfeed for as long as mother and child wish. (I breastfed my son until he was almost three.) Babies do like to be in constant contact with a reliable caregiver’s body. When a parent carries an infant in some kind of baby carrier with body contact, it often makes life easier for the parent as well, because hands are free and the baby often falls asleep while still retaining that all-important closeness.
But I think having only one primary caregiver that the infant recognizes as a secure figure is not good for an HS parent. An HS parent must receive many breaks from the constant contact. It is an illusion that you as a parent are necessary at all times. Humans evolved within extended families and tribes in which older siblings, grandmothers, and just about anyone regularly took over for the mother so that she could recover from stress, care for an even younger child, or return to working as the ablest adult. Why have we lost track of the naturalness of multiple caregivers? (I won’t answer that—you do not have the time to read my hypothesis.) The fact is that many of us still have extended family members who will help or can use friends for support as if they are family. Plus, many parents have partners. Young parents in a community can share duties, becoming extended family. And I suppose day care is a modern way to extend the available “family” that has always been there for us. It’s being home alone that appears to be less traditional in human parenting.
An extended family of those who really care about your child is still attachment parenting in the basic principles—responding to an infant’s needs and maintaining physical contact with an infant as much as possible. But this kind of attachment can form with one or more persons that the infant knows they can rely on. Maybe, at least for an HSP, these principles of responsiveness and physical proximity can only be supplied when someone else can also step in to fill that role. For all we know, infants may be built to expect a few caregivers, not simply one.
Further, there is actually no research as of now, at least that I know of, demonstrating that attachment parenting with one parent is better than “mainstream” parenting, although my intuition, and probably yours, assumes it is better. But attachment has to involve two, caregiver and child. It seems that the focus should be on how it works for caregiver and infant as a dyad. Some babies do not want to nurse very long. Some parents might injure their backs carrying infants too much. What if the parent providing all the care is paired with an infant who rarely sleeps through the night, so that this single caregiver is awakened over and over? Remember all those physiological effects of overstimulation?
In short, the idea of constant contact with one caregiver, normally the mother, may work well in some cases, but I think rarely for an HS parent. Maybe “well-rounded” children are less likely to be produced from a parent going through the motions of attachment parenting while screaming inside.
Yet out of conscientiousness, many HS parents will try. That is why I wish personally to give HS parents permission, if they need it, to provide their child with a sense of security in ways other than never leaving their side. If you have ever had a cat with kittens, you know the mother cat steps out of the box at times, no matter how much the kittens holler. Imitate your cat!
Some HS parents’ experiences with one-person-only attachment parenting:
I need my space, but this method of parenting doesn’t allow for that. I need some peace, but with children around most of the time, total peace is rare. I need less stimulation, but the pressure is relentless. Is all this worth it for raising well-rounded children? Who knows?
For an HSP, attachment parenting puts more pressure on us, since the child is within our “zone” 24/7. My ideology was saying one thing—“this is the way I want to do it”—but my sensitivity was saying another—“get this child away from me, I need a break!” It has been a difficult and stressful journey.
I am so sensitive and interested in the greatest health for my girls, and so I have dedicated myself to “attachment” parenting, extended breastfeeding, bed-sharing, and compassionate communication. With our oldest daughter, we bed-shared until seven months and then had her sleep alone and let her “cry it out” (which went on for the next year). With our youngest, we did no-holds-barred bed-sharing until about twenty months. I know I’ve been trying to make the best decisions I can at any given time. I just wish I had valued my sleep much more, and that of my daughters, as well. If I could go back, I would start sooner letting my infant cry herself to sleep in the loving and compassionate arms of Dad.
How to Deal with Overstimulation
I could provide endless tips for reducing overstimulation for HSPs—these ideas are all over the Internet. Still, I want to list some of the more unusual ones or very important ones for parents especially.
I like to divide the problem of overstimulation into three categories: avoiding it, coping with it while it is happening, and recovering from it (although, of course, they overlap). Here are a few ideas:
AVOIDING OVERSTIMULATION
The best solution, of course, is avoiding overstimulation in the first place, which often begins with your child. When your child is overstimulated or otherwise stressed, you will also be heading in that direction soon if you are not careful.
Do what you can to avoid overstimulation meltdowns in your child. How quickly it happens will depend on your child’s sensitivity, of course. But low-sensitive children tire out, too. The world is new to them, so even the simplest thing may be novel and require more processing and adaptation than you think. You can’t avoid stimulating children and still raise them well. Going exciting places—places they love, places where they learn—can leave a child exhausted and both of you at risk of a meltdown. Just being with friends will tire them, even if they are extraverted. (See chapter five for more about tantrums.)
Become an expert on how much stimulation your child needs and can handle. Some need a great deal; if their day does not include quite a bit of excitement or physical activity, they may create it by acting up or being defiant. Others need more quiet time. Observe the amount of after-school, weekend, and vacation time activities your child needs and the signs that they have had too much or not enough. Most can use quiet time after school or when they come home from day care. Some children, if they’ve had to sit still or follow directions, may also need to “let off steam.” Both quiet time and activities like soccer or dance lessons can provide a break for you if you allow yourself to take it instead of doing chores or chatting with the other parents.