Playground Perils
The divide between information overload and information deficit is particularly easy to see at the playground. Watch your child as he plays. What sort of activities does he like? What does he avoid? Do you have to coax him to participate, or follow him around for fear he'll hurt himself? Does he quake at the site of the top of the slide or push other children away in his eagerness to dash to the top? Playgrounds are great places to observe your child's particular sensory strengths and weaknesses. In some cases, it can also be a good site for some fun, impromptu therapy.
Swinging and Spinning
Depending on your child's vestibular processing profile, hitting the swings at the playground may be a fearful experience or an absolutely joyous one. Many children who need strong vestibular input to feel at home in their bodies crave swinging, and they can do it for long periods of time with complete concentration. If this is your child, taking him out for a good swinging session will be a great way to calm him before a potentially trying activity or help him unwind after one.
Other children, however, may find swinging intensely stressful. They may be terrified by being tipped backward as they swing upward or forward as they swing back down. Your child may constantly feel that she's falling or being hurtled to the ground in a hurtful way.
An occupational therapist may work with your child to gently introduce swinging on a flat platform or inner tube. Since there's rarely a reason why your child has to swing, other than your feeling that it's just something a kid's supposed to do, don't push it if it upsets your child.
If you have something important to talk to your child about, try doing it during or after a strenuous session that involves lots of good hard vestibular input. He may not seem to be paying attention to you, but he will receive and retain the information much better if his balance and movement needs are being met.
The same holds true for playground merry-go-rounds, those flat round platforms that can be pushed until they're spinning quickly. That dizzying experience may feel great for some kids, scary for others. If your child falls into the latter category, don't assume that making her face her fear and try it, again and again, will solve the problem.
Occupational therapy with a sensory integration approach that targets vestibular-proprioceptive input may help the problem and make the motion more tolerable. All forcing the activity will do is make your child miserable, embarrass her in front of her playmates, and convince her that she needs to manage all her sensory needs because you cannot be trusted. No little ride is worth that.
Ups and Downs
A child who overreacts to information from his vestibular system may react to your invitation to climb to the top of a slide as though you'd asked him to step out of the window of a skyscraper and slide down the side. Heights seem higher to him, ladders more precarious, and slides full of more swoops and whoops than his sensitive system can stand. He may resist all efforts to get him to the top, or, once there and faced with such a scary drop, he may remain frozen. What seems silly and harmless to you feels hazardous and harmful to him. Pushing, pulling, and threatening is only likely to raise his stress level and make him hang on harder.
If your child likes spinning, try buying a spinning disk he can sit on, spin on, and get some of that good sensation at home any time he needs it. You may be able to find one at your local toy store, or you can order a Dizzy Disc from an occupational therapy catalog like Sensory Comfort.
No such fear is felt by the child with an underreactive vestibular system. He'll be the kid standing up on the top of the slide, flying down head first, or hanging off the side. With his vestibular system giving out no particular information about how high, how far, and how fast he's going, jumping around ten feet up isn't much different than jumping around on the ground. Whooshing down the slide gives his system a nice feeling of gravity that he doesn't often get. Landing hard, on his feet or on his hands, gives a nice earthbound jolt.
You'll note similar reactions — fearfulness or fearlessness — on any playground equipment that involves heights. Your oversensitive child may resist crawling to the top of the jungle gym, hanging from ladder bars, or soaring to the top of the teeter-totter. She may find a safe activity like a sandbox or a low platform with a steering wheel or games and stick to that. Your undersensitive child will use the top bar on the jungle gym as a balance beam, hang upside-down from the bars, and work the teeter-totter so hard she thumps other kids off of it. She may get such a rush from those activities that she resists leaving and begs for more.
Instant Therapy
Giving the vestibular system lots of strong information may help it work better and learn more. For your oversensitive child, try to find small, nonthreatening ways to expand his comfort with movement. Hold him on the swing, or put him in one for a smaller child that has a seat belt. Find a park with a low slide and hold him all the way up and down. Hold his hand or shoulders while he walks on a balance beam. Without forcing your child to do anything he's uncomfortable with, try to slowly expand that comfort zone.
