Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello everyone - I wonder if you can help? My daughter who is nearly 4 has not been diagnosed with Autism (yet - due to see paediatrician in the next few weeks) but she's just started Nursery School and seems to be getting very distressed by some of the video/cartoon teaching aids and nursery rhymes they show on screen - she cries, putting her hands over her ears and wanting it to stop. She has not done this before at home but now does both here at home (for some teaching aids we have looked up online) and at school - have any of you come across this before? She cannot explain what is upsetting her (not good enough at language yet), and her reading ability is markedly better than those of her age. I would be grateful if anyone would let me know if they've witnessed similar - we are trying to help her as much as we can... x
Have you considered hearing hypersensitivity possibly, as digital sound can be anything from flat and tinny, to edgy and grating, and for some it can actually be immensely agonising. Children's voices are often features of nursery rhymes and are by nature high pitched.
Perhaps see if earplugs will do the job ~ they come in different foam densities for different environmental purposes so as to allow hearing of particular things to lesser or greater degrees, such as speaking with someone next to you rather than having to hear so much all the hustle and bustle going on around and about.
There is also a possibility perhaps that visual hypersensitivity could be an issue involving synaethesia, whereby one sense ~ when it gets overloaded ~ is compensated for by another sense to process the diverted sensory data load. This is why autistic children are described as 'exhibiting paradoxical behaviours' when they cover there eyes instead of their ears or vice versa.