Spirituality
As a person who may be naturally, inherently gentle and sensitive, your child also may possess an innate sense of spirituality. This doesn't necessarily refer to being religious, but rather spiritual in having a deep appreciation for the beauty in everything and everyone around him. These are the children who are drawn to the tiny details in nature.
Fact
A 2003 research project conducted by Tanisha Rose, a psychology student at Lincoln University in Philadelphia, examined the stress levels among parents of children with autism. One of Rose's four hypotheses was that as the importance of religion increased, the level of stress experienced by parents would decrease — a factor largely neglected in past stress studies. Rose's study indicated that parents with elevated stress shared a lack of positive religious practices.
Your child's heightened sensitivity may also predispose him to being finely attuned to his environment. He may sense things that others do not — or cannot — readily perceive. If you see this in your child, you've likely seen it from a very early age. Your child may have had powerful dreams, intuitions, or premonitions that proved accurate, or other experiences of a spiritual nature that some would call uncanny coincidences. There are simply some aspects of the human experience that traditional science cannot measure and quantify, like love or faith.
It is important to assume several responsibilities if your child has such heightened sensitivities:
Accept it as a natural extension of who he is.
Do not arbitrarily dismiss it or make your child feel in any way unfit or afraid to discuss his sensitivities.
Do not sensationalize it by exaggerating it, blowing it out of proportion, or openly sharing it with others without your child's knowledge (remember disclosure?).
Keep it confidential except to reveal information to those who can be trusted to understand unconditionally.
Remember that intermittent experiences do not a mental illness make. Review the mental health chapter again if you have concerns; common mental health diagnoses are determined by groupings of symptoms, not by sporadic, unexplainable instances.
Accept what your child tells you to be the truth as he knows it.
As your child enters adolescence and adulthood, his sense of spirituality and commitment of faith to a higher authority may be the very thing that pulls him through rough times. Having these values instilled in him early on in life could prove to be his single most important resource.
