Sensory Meltdown: When a Tantrum Becomes More

What causes meltdowns?

There are so many reasons a child could have a meltdown. In my area of work, I most often see meltdowns associated with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD).

For children with this condition, the brain has trouble receiving and processing information from the senses. It leaves many children with anxiety and poor social skills for coping with school and everyday life.

Plus, it’s difficult on the parents because they cannot easily understand their child and to know how to cope with their child’s challenges.

Sensory Processing Disorders include several conditions and a wide variety of resulting issues in children. So, even if your child is not diagnoses with SPD, a large percentage of routine meltdowns stem from a stimulation overload.

Additionally, for children with ADHD, ADD, autism spectrum disorder, dyspraxia, or motor coordination problems, sensory processing issues often overlap with their other challenges.

This is why understanding how sensory processing works and how any amount of sensory overload can cause meltdowns is critical for parents to understand how to cope and adapt.

What is Sensory Processing and Sensory Processing Disorder?

If you imagine more than just the 5 senses, and instead imagine all of the sensations from the environment and our own body that we perceive.

This includes:

• Sight
• Hearing
• Taste
• Smell
• Touch
• Movement
• Body Positions
• Internal body process awareness

Here’s an easy example to illustrate the difference between a person without SPD and a person with. If your sense of hearing informs you that an action scene on TV is too loud, then you can easily get up and turn the volume down to make yourself more comfortable.

Or perhaps the sun is too bright, making it hard to see around you or to pay attention to what someone is saying because you’re distracted. So, you put on sunglasses and resume normal conversation.

There are many forms of Sensory Processing Disorders, and each one can affect someone differently. In the above examples, one person with SPD may have the same overwhelmed auditory reaction from something much more quiet or less obvious as the noisy TV.

Another person with SPD may feel the same sensation from the brightness that causes her to squint and cover her eyes, but doesn’t recognize the cause or how to regain stability.

She may not be able to carry on the conversation or even keep walking. Her “fight or flight” mode may kick in, and she is seemingly shut down, standing in the middle of the sidewalk squeezing her head with her hands.

With children, it’s so much harder because they often can’t recognize, explain or know how to cope with the overwhelmed sensory processing system. This is why an outburst of behavior, known as a meltdown, occurs.

A Meltdown Is Not the Same as a Tantrum

Before we get any further, it’s important to understand that a meltdown is not another word for a tantrum. A tantrum is an anger reaction to not getting what one wants.

Tantrums are common in all children and are a sudden outburst of anger, kicking and screaming, which often resolve within a few minutes once the parent establishes clear expectation. A tantrum passes moderately quickly, and the child can resume his normal routine as if nothing has changed.

Professionals in pediatric behavior explain a meltdown, on the other hand, as an overload of sensations. Despair and total inability to cope are characteristic.

Usually the “fight or flight” instinct kicks in, and it can take a long time for a child to be able to resume his activity. Even then, he or she might be affected for the whole day.

Understanding Thresholds to Understand Meltdowns

A meltdown typically occurs when a situation puts someone past their regulatory sensory threshold.

We all have sensory thresholds. We have high thresholds and low thresholds. Existing somewhere in the middle of these thresholds is optimal for self-regulation and normal daily functioning. And our typical sensory thresholds can fluctuate from day to day or even hour to hour.

If you’re tired, for example, your thresholds might be lower, and you might be irritated easily by noise. If you’re rested and in a great mood, you might enjoy a bit more noise and chaos in a social setting.

Someone with SPD has thresholds that are higher and lower than typical (for that culture). A child with a very high threshold might have poor attentions pans, exhibit sensory-seeking behaviors, and limited body awareness.

For example, a child may not pick up the sensations that urge him to use the toilet, so he has toileting issues.

Conversely, someone whose thresholds are very low have heightened awareness to their sensations – they might be overly-sensitive, easily overwhelmed, and anxious.

Strategies for Parents to Avoid or Cope with Meltdowns

Using the background context of sensory processing, SPD, and sensory thresholds, here are the techniques I offer parents to cope with their child’s meltdowns.

1. Observe and be sensitive to your child’s sensory thresholds.

What types of things seem to bother your child? Narrowing down the sensations that most-often trigger a meltdown can be tricky, but here are some common ones to look for:

• Bright lights/the sun, as evidenced by covering her eyes, whining and looking at the ground when walking outside, squinting and looking at the ground and having a hard time sitting still in brightly-lit rooms

• Loud noises, like traffic sounds, airplanes, hair dryers in a salon, construction. These are evidenced by covering her ears, screaming or crying, shaking, being fearful, hiding behind parents or clutching to their legs.

• Getting dressed/undressed, due to the discomfort or even painful sensation of putting on and taking off clothes. Children will often resist, get angry, cry, lie down and scream and kick or hit to avoid being dressed.

• Crowds, due to the frequency of being touched and bumped by other people. Some children with SPD absolutely hate to be touched, while others are overly-grabby or rough when touching other people.

• Dining, due to being picky about which textures and temperatures they can eat. This is evidenced by a picky eater who often has meltdowns during mealtime when encouraged to keep eating and trying new things.

If your child regularly refuses certain categories of foods (crunchy, cold, hot, wet, squishy) then these could be triggers for a meltdown.

2. Understand how your child reacts to approaching his sensory threshold

Observe your child really well to read the cues that indicate that he’s approaching a sensory threshold. In much the same way that married couples need to recognize when their spouse has had a long day at work that puts them on edge at home, it can help parents to recognize behaviors in their child that indicate an approach to sensory overload.

Sometimes it can be triggered by an obvious event which everybody around can recognize. For example, if you’re walking down the street, and there is construction up ahead.

You notice your child is fixating on the direction from where the sounds come, starting to rub his ear, squint, and squirm a little. It might be obvious to you that getting any closer will lead your child into an overstimulation of his senses, which might trigger a meltdown.

But what about when it seems like there was no trigger at all?

Sometimes, being overwhelmed by choices can trigger a child to shut down. School shopping is a prime example. You’ve asked your child to pick one of several options from the shelf, over and over again throughout the school supply list.

Which backpack: Wolverine or Spiderman? Which color pencil box: blue, gray, red, or green? Which lunchbox do you like best?

Now your son is tugging at his ears, staring at the ground, and has become unresponsive to your queries. You may have not noticed that he was approaching sensory overwhelm.

Or, it could be that your child has a build-up of small triggers throughout the day and then explodes at seemingly nothing. This often happens to children after school – they can be on best behaviour at school and then explode as soon as they arrive home.

They use up all their energy maintaining calm through the small triggers that took place at school, but when they reach the safety of home and parent, they can’t hold themselves together anymore and simply “go to pieces.” All of the energy and effort they put in to “holding it together” all day completely overwhelms them by the end of the day.

If you feel like your child has meltdowns out of seemingly nowhere, it’s very likely that you’re dealing with a pattern of escalation of sensory overload. Pay attention to what activities were going on in your child’s life for the few hours leading up his next meltdown.

Keeping a journal is a great way to help you notice trends. The next time your child comes home from being out for a while (at school, at a friend’s house, out shopping, etc), take notice if your child is agitated, doesn’t want to talk, or perhaps lies on the floor and fixates on a toy for a period.

These behaviors could help you notice a pattern of meltdowns to help you cope in the future.

3. Know what behavior to expect in your child when his sensory threshold has been crossed

What does a full-blown meltdown look like in your child? Does he lie on the ground, screaming and fighting? Does she cry with wide eyes as if in terror, shaking, and sobbing while clinging to you?

Or is it more of a “shut down,” in which your child stops talking, covers his ears or eyes, finds a dark corner to hide in, or tucks his knees to his chest and rocks?

Knowing how your child acts during a meltdown can help you know the right action to take to resolve it.

4. Identify what works best for relieving your child from a meltdown

Try out different soothing strategies to see what works best for unwinding your child’s meltdown. Be sure to write them down and give copies to his teachers and other care providers.

Here are some common soothing strategies for you to try:

• Remove your child to a quiet, safe area. This is not a “time out” in the disciplinary sense, and you should not leave a child alone who is having a meltdown. This is simply to remove the stimulations that are upsetting your child’s equilibrium and to help them feel safe and secure until their body and sensory integration can rebalance.

• Hold your child tightly against you and rock slowly.

• Breath deeply and slowly while looking into your child’s eyes so she can synchronize her breaths with yours.

We also use the Zones of Regulation to help kids to identify how they feel and to help them to feel when a meltdown is building up. Taking a moment to communicate clearly about your child’s emotions and physical sensations can often help them take control of themselves again.

5. A sensory diet can be useful to prevent meltdowns

A sensory diet can do wonders for preventing meltdowns. A sensory diet is simply a plan that parents use to ensure that their child receives the sensory-rich activities he seeks at regular intervals throughout the day.

For a child who needs more sensory input to be in their optimal threshold zone, a typical sensory diet would include regular periods of play and movement in an area with high levels of sensory stimulation.

He can have 4-5 ‘movement breaks’ in which he can do jumps on the spot, fitness exercises, enjoy a chewy or crunchy snack, carry heavy objects around, or utilize a fidget toy when physical movement is limited.

Conversely, a child who tends to have low thresholds and is easily overwhelmed, their sensory diet would include periods of time where she can escape to an environment with very low stimulation.

4-6 times per day, she goes to a quiet, low-lit room where you give a deep-pressure massage with soft music and slow, rhythmic movements for 5 minutes. This helps her physically and mentally decompress in order to be more ready to cope with the next overwhelming sensory situation.

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Meltdowns – Identifying Your Child’s Thresholds, Triggers, and Strategies to Cope

I hope that by taking the time to understand some background context for why some children get overwhelmed by certain situations, more parents will be able to set their child up for success in their daily routine.

By understanding sensory thresholds and what triggers can cause an escalation, we can be prepared to diffuse a meltdown before it begins.

Plus, by experimenting with different soothing strategies dependent on the type of sensory input each child needs, parents can feel armed to cope with meltdowns as they occur.

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Marga Grey (MSc OT) has served as a pediatric occupational therapist for over 40 years with a specialization in sensory integration. She has worked in both private and public settings, including service as a Clinical Educator at Queensland University.

Marga developed the occupational therapy department for Tyack Health (the largest multi-disciplinary practice in Australia), where she currently serves as the Leader of the pediatric team. The department, which focuses on pediatric patients, addresses sensory processing and motor skill development.

Also, Marga founded the Bayside SPD Professional Interest Group, which educates and raises awareness for Sensory Processing Disorder. As a way to give back to her community, Marga also developed a franchise of day care centres in South Africa to encourage optimal development in young children.

Marga regularly provides seminars, workshops and training for therapists and teachers, in person and online through her company CoordiKids.

www.CoordiKids.com Marga is also author of two books, entitled “Sensible Stimulation: The Key to Your Child’s Development During the First Three Years of Life” and “The Sensory Motor Skills: Functional Implications: Stories about fantastic children with sensory motor processing issues.”