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Noise issues. Help!

harrysmum

My son is 6 and in a fantastic mainstream school.  His teacher has told me that over the last few weeks he has become very anxious at any new sounds even things like a chair being moved set him off.  She's spending more and more time every day showing him where the noise is from and calming him down.  He's started being like this at home now too.  It was a problem we had before (about 3 years ago) but he seemed to be a lot better.  Any ideas on why the issue has arisen again or any ideas on how we can lessen his anxiety?  Thanks.

  • Just to add to what longman's already said - With sensory issues in general, it does seem that although you can become somewhat "acclimatised", they haven't really gone away - but tend to recur when your resources are depleted. Whether that's due to the cumulative effect of other stressors & demands, or sometimes physical health problems.

    It's as if selectively "filtering out" these inputs is an active process, which it takes a certain amount of energy to perform.

     

  • Thank you for your response.  I have discussed with the teacher any underlying anxiety issues there may be.  We are both going to monitor the situation closely to try and discover what may be upsetting Harry.  Hopefully it will be something we can identify.  Thanks again for your input.

  • It might be worth looking to see the cumulative effect of different factors rather than isolating single events. A chair scraping may be only one extra pressure in a life patterned by other anxieties and other background noise.

    The problem is that able people perceive a stress reaction or meltdown as a direct response to something that has just happened. But imagine if you have had a very stressful day, and a sudden noise or annoyance is just the last straw, and you express that annoyance.

    Now imagine if your capacity to cope with stress had a narrower bandwidth (borrowing from Digby Tantam's ideas) - less space in which to manage stress, and your sensory acuity was markedly increased, so sounds appear louder, smells appear stronger, and visual experiences are more crowded and vivid. You would perhaps blow up sooner and more often.

    You need to look at what anxieties he is carrying around with him, what other things are going on when a chair squeaks (and also whether classmates are teasing or ridiculing his sensitivity, even discretely, which can greatly exacerbate the situation).  Bear in mind too that children's TV nowadays really pushes fitting in and having friends, much more than it ever did, and being different is much more emphasised than it used to be.