Why Does My Child Fall Apart Over Small Things?

From someone who was one

I was a highly sensitive child, long before anyone had a name for it.

I was quiet and kept to myself. I loved being alone with a book, or outside collecting small odd things, or with my dogs, or building pretend worlds with stages and characters. Sometimes I thought I could feel what my dogs were feeling. Now and then I knew things I had no way of knowing. None of it seemed strange to me, because the inside of my head was always so full of color and pictures that it all felt ordinary.

What nobody could explain, me included, was what happened to me in certain places. I couldn’t be in a room where people were angry. I needed an adult nearby. Not too many people and not too close, but my mom or dad or some grown-up had to be within reach. My parents saw fear, and they set out to work it out of me. They weren’t cruel. They did what most of us do when we can’t see what’s happening underneath. They reached for a fix, probably the one that had been used on them, and the fix was to push me into the thing I was afraid of until I learned I could do it.

So I held frogs, because my dad made me. I was a nature girl in a lot of ways, but I far prefered the soft, fluffy animals. I held the frogs anyway, until my dad let me put them down.

I was signed up for group activities. I had to play sports, and join Brownies, and try gymnastics class; all things I hated, because my parents viewed all avoidance as evidence of fear rather than dislike.

And once, they went for a run and left me at home. They told me they were going, and that they wouldn’t be gone long, and at first I thought I’d be fine.

Then they were out of sight. Our house had been broken into when I was younger, while none of us were home, and it left me on edge for a long time. The moment I couldn’t see them, I was sure someone was waiting somewhere on the property. I started screaming and couldn’t stop.

They heard me all the way down the street and came racing back. They found me technically okay. Nobody was there. I was only more frightened than I knew how to hold.

What was actually happening

What I needed was for one person around me to know something about the nervous system. Anything at all.

Here is the short version. Your nervous system is always taking in information, from inside your body and from the world around you, and deciding how safe things are. When it takes in more than it can sort, it raises the alarm. The heart speeds up, the muscles get ready, and the part of us that thinks things through goes quiet so the part that protects us can take over.

A highly sensitive child takes in more. More sound, and more of what the adults in the room are feeling and not saying. The research name for this is sensory processing sensitivity. The psychologist Elaine Aron, who has studied it for decades, describes it as a trait a child is born with, and a normal one.

So when that child falls apart over a sock seam or a change of plans, the sock is only where it finally showed. The noisy lunchroom was already in there. So was the teacher who snapped at someone else, and the car ride home where someone was quiet and tense. What looked like fear in me was my body saying too much, too much.

How many children are highly sensitive

For years the number people quoted was 15 to 20 percent of children. That figure comes from Aron’s 2002 book, The Highly Sensitive Child. Her own website now says 20 to 30 percent. And a 2018 study of more than 3,500 children and teenagers, led by Michael Pluess with Aron as a co-author, found that somewhere between a fifth and a third of them fell in the high-sensitivity group. The rest spread across medium and low. Sensitivity runs along a range, from a little to a lot.

If you’ve been thinking your child is rare, or that something is wrong with them, neither is true. They are one of a great many children.

What it looked like in me

These were mine:

• ✦I needed an adult close by.
• ✦I couldn’t be where people were angry.
• ✦I felt every mood around me, sharply.
• ✦Noise wore on me, though not to the degree I’ve seen in other children.
• ✦I cried easily.

Signs other children might show

Your child’s signs may look nothing like mine. These are some that parents often describe:

• ✦Holding together all day at school and coming apart at home
• ✦Not wanting to go to parties
• ✦Finding seams and tags in clothes unbearable
• ✦Noticing that an adult is upset before anyone says so

Children already know how to settle themselves

Crying was one of the ways my body tried to calm itself down. There’s research behind this. In 2014 a team of researchers reviewed what’s known and found “converging evidence for the direct, self-soothing effects of crying,” probably because crying switches on the body’s calming response.

My dad often threatened punishment for crying. He was doing what he’d been taught. But it meant the one thing my body knew to do to settle was the thing I got in trouble for.

Here are some of the ways children settle themselves:

• ✦Crying
• ✦Shaking or trembling after a scare
• ✦Yawning
• ✦Humming or singing to themselves
• ✦Rocking or swinging
• ✦Crawling into a small space, under a table or into a closet
• ✦Going quiet and leaving the room
• ✦Wanting to be held tight, or leaning hard against you

Children also do many of these when they’re perfectly settled. A child humming in the corner may be calming herself down, or she may simply be happy. Rocking can mean either. Wanting to be alone can mean either. So you can’t read a child’s state from the behavior alone.

What helps is paying attention, and that starts with your own state, because a calm parent notices things a rattled one misses.

What the pushing cost

I could call those early years wounds, and they were. I’ve spent a long time working with them, and what they’ve taught me is what pushing teaches a child.

Follow any emotion down far enough, and you’ll find fear at the root of it.

So a child taught to push through fear is being taught to push through everything, and that’s what I learned. Any time I was scared, I leapt into the thing that scared me. Sometimes that was right, and we all need some of it. But I pushed through exhaustion and through pain. Sometimes I pushed into situations, and toward people, I knew weren’t right for me, and went anyway. I pushed against the system and against every convention I ran into.

The pushing only held while someone was watching. If someone was paying attention, I pushed through. If no one was, I folded, and I didn’t do the thing at all. And I kept to myself, so a lot of my life happened where no one was watching. Each side fed the other. Pushing in front of people wore me out, so I spent more time alone, and alone was where I stopped trying.

So the child who pushes through in front of you may be doing something very different when you’re not in the room. It’s the same nervous system, answering the same alarm in two ways.

I thought I was making good decisions, and who’s to say. You can only judge a choice from a distance, and even then good and bad blur. What I can see now is that I was reacting far more often than I was considering. Considering comes from a nervous system that feels safe enough to pause. Reacting comes from one that’s already sounding the alarm. Plenty of times I’d have done better to take a beat, if only to walk into the thing with clearer eyes.

Pushing also made me someone who can walk toward what scares me. I’d keep that. What I’d want is the choice of when.

She doesn’t need fixing

A child who takes in that much from the people around her is taking in the rest of the world too. You see it in what she notices and how she thinks, in the moments you stop and wonder where on earth that came from. It came from everything she’s been taking in. That much intake is a gift, and it is hard on a nervous system.

If you have a highly sensitive child, here is what I wish someone had told my parents.

She doesn’t need to be fixed. She needs someone to help her regulate her nervous system.

Where to start today

Start with yourself. The next time your child falls apart, notice what’s happening in your own body first. Maybe your jaw is tight, or your voice is getting sharp. Just notice it, without judging yourself for it.

Then take three breaths, and make each exhale longer than the inhale.

That’s all. A 2023 Stanford study found that people who spent five minutes a day on breathing built around a long, slow exhale had a bigger lift in mood after a month than people who meditated for the same time. You won’t need a month to feel three breaths, though. They change the state you carry into the room, and your child is reading your state long before she hears your words.

The child psychologist Mona Delahooke makes a related case in her book Brain-Body Parenting. She asks parents to look beneath a child’s behavior to the nervous system that’s producing it, and to look after their own.

What I write here can support you. It isn’t a substitute for appropriate professional care when that’s warranted.

This is about you, and that’s good news

You can’t do your child’s regulating for her, and you can’t reach inside her and turn the volume down. The part of this you can actually work on is you: how full you are when she comes apart, and what your body does next.