By Winnie Dunn; 213 pages. Subtitle: Understanding Your Senses
Living Sensationally is not a parenting book, but it leads readers through a process that's important for parents of children with sensory proccessing challenges: realizing how their own sensory profiles may affect the way they react to their children's behaviors and needs. In your own way, you, too, may be a sensor or an avoider, a bystander or a seeker. If that conflicts with your child's sensory challenges, you're the one who will have to work hardest to learn to live with it, and this book has lots of good suggestions.
- Questionnaire helps you determine where your sensory preferences lie
- Examines sensory issues in many situations
- Plenty of solutions are offered for living comfortably with your particular sensory system
- One chapter does addresss parent-child mismatches
- Style is accessible and case studies are interesting
- If you're looking for help with your child, you'll have to adapt the material yourself
- Winds up reducing all behavior to a matter of sensory preferences, which seems extreme
- Doesn't account for the way some people can swing between seeking and avoiding
- You may find it hard to figure where you lie on this sensory spectrum
- Section 1: Learning About the Sensory Patterns
Chapter 1: Sensation Is Everywhere! - Chapter 2: How the Sensory Systems Work
Chapter 3: Cracking Your Sensory Code
Sensory Patterns Questionnaire - Section 2: Daily Life and Relationships
Chapter 4: Sensational Daily Life: Living Each Day With Your Very Own Style - Chapter 5: Sensational Relationships
Chapter 6: "Sense" Able Parenting: Negotiating Life With Your Children - Section 3: Cracking the Sensory Code in Specific Areas of Living
Chapter 7: Hungry? Let Your Senses Lead the Way! - Chapter 8: Sensational Wardrobes
Chapter 9: Your Home Is Your Castle: Creating Living Spaces That Meet Your Sensory Needs - Chapter 10: Work Is Life Too: Knowing Sensory Patterns at Work Helps You Succeed
- Chapter 11: Sensational Leisure and Recreation: Let's Get Personal
If you have a child with sensory integration dysfunction, you may be well-versed in how the need for sensation or fear of it can impact behavior. But do you know how your own sensory preferences factor into the situation?
Living Sensationally argues that all of us have a sensory profile that drives the way we structure our routine, choose our wardrobes, design our menus, and interact with co-workers, friends, and family members. The four profiles examined here are Avoider, what we might think of with our kids as sensory defensive; Sensor, a somewhat less defensive version; Bystander, for people who need lots of sensation to get going; and Seeker, what we might think of with our kids as sensory seeking.
For children with sensory processing problems, avoidance might mean screaming at loud noises or changes of body position, and seeking might mean crashing into things and making messes. In the book's descriptions, Avoiders are more likely to react to their sensory needs by creating highly structured settings and routines, and Seekers by creating noisy and visually exciting environments. But the suggestions made can be adapted and carried over to making your child more comfortable -- and sometimes, just learning how your child's behavior fits into a view of sensory needs as normal can help all by itself.
I wish the book had spent more time on parenting -- there's one chapter and some scattered case studies, but not much on the way that the mismatch of sensory styles between parent and child can set the stage for serious behavior struggles. You'll have to do the figuring out of that yourself, but the material is here to help you do it. Even if you can't easily find your own profile in the examples, it's interesting to think about why you do what you do. And it may, in the end, help you do better by your child, too.
