The Highly Sensitive Child: Helping Our Children Thrive When the World Overwhelms Them - Softcover

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Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, workshop leader, researcher, and highly sensitive person herself. She is the author of The Highly Sensitive Person, The Highly Sensitive Person in Love, and The Highly Sensitive Person’s Workbook. She divides her time between San Francisco and New York.

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"The bestselling author and psychologist whose books have topped 240,000 copies in print now addresses the trait of "high sensitivity" in children-and offers a breakthrough parenting guidebook for highly sensitive children and their caregivers.
With the publication of "The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron became the first person to identify the inborn trait of "high sensitivity" and to show how it affects the lives of those who possess it. Up to 20 percent of the population is born highly sensitive, and now in "The Highly Sensitive Child, Aron shifts her focus to highly sensitive children, who share the same characteristics as highly sensitive adults and thus face unique challenges as they grow up.
Rooted in Aron's years of experience as a psychotherapist and her original research on child temperament, "The Highly Sensitive Child shows how HSCs are born deeply reflective, sensitive to the subtle, and easily overwhelmed. These qualities can make for smart, conscientious, creative children, but with the wrong parenting or schooling, they can become unusually shy or timid, or begin acting out. Few parents and teachers understand where this behavior comes from-and as a result, HSCs are often mislabeled as overly inhibited, fearful, or "fussy,"or classified as "problem children" (and in some cases, misdiagnosed with disorders such as Attention Deficit Disorder). But raised with proper understanding and care, HSCs are no more prone to these problems than nonsensitive children and can grow up to be happy, healthy, well-adjusted adults.
In this pioneering work, parents will find helpful self-tests and case studies to help them understand their HSC, along with thorough adviceon:
- The challenges of raising an highly sensitive child
- The four keys to successfully parenting an HSC
- How to soothe highly sensitive infants
- Helping sensitive children survive in a not-so-sensitive world
- Making school and friendships enjoyable

With chapters addressing the needs of specific age groups, from newborns through teens," The Highly Sensitive Child delivers warmhearted, timely information for parents, teachers, and the sensitive children in their lives.

Aus dem Klappentext

The bestselling author and psychologist whose books have topped 240,000 copies in print now addresses the trait of high sensitivity in children and offers a breakthrough parenting guidebook for highly sensitive children and their caregivers. With the publication of The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron became the first person to identify the inborn trait of high sensitivity and to show how it affects the lives of those who possess it. Up to 20 percent of the population is born highly sensitive, and now in The Highly Sensitive Child, Aron shifts her focus to highly sensitive children, who share the same characteristics as highly sensitive adults and thus face unique challenges as they grow up.

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Chapter One

Sensitivity

A Better Light on "Shy" and "Fussy" Children

This chapter helps you decide if you have a highly sensitive child and explores the trait thoroughly. It also provides more knowledge about all of your child's inherited temperament traits. Our goal will be to free you of any misconceptions you may have heard about sensitive children. Finally, we will distinguish high sensitivity from actual disorders (which it is not).

Well, if he were my child, he'd eat what was set before him."

"Your daughter is so quiet--have you considered seeing a doctor about that?"

"He is so mature, so wise for his age. But he seems to think too much. Don't you worry that he isn't more happy and carefree?

"Jodie's feelings are so easily hurt. And she cries for other kids, too, when they are teased or hurt. And during the sad parts of stories. We don't know what to do for her."

"In my kindergarten class, everyone participates in group time, but your son refuses. Is he this stubborn at home?"

Are these sorts of comments familiar to you? They are to the parents I interviewed for this book. They had heard all sorts of well-intentioned comments like these from in-laws, teachers, other parents, and even mental health professionals. If you've received such comments, it is almost surely a sign that you are the parent of a highly sensitive child (HSC). And, of course, they are troubling, because you're hearing that something is odd or wrong with your child, yet you find your child marvelously aware, caring, and sensitive. Furthermore, you know that if you followed the well-intentioned advice, like forcing your child to eat foods he dislikes, socialize when he does not feel like it, or taking him to a psychiatrist, your child would suffer. On the other hand, if you follow the lead of your child, he thrives. Yet the comments keep coming, so you wonder if you're a bad parent and if your child's behavior is your fault. I have heard this same story over and over.

The Operating Manual for Your Child

No wonder you worry that you may be doing something wrong. You have no one to help you. You have probably noticed that most parenting books focus on "problem behaviors"--restlessness, distractibility, "wildness," and aggression. Your child is probably anything but a problem in these senses. You're struggling with issues that the books don't talk about so much--eating problems, shyness, nightmares, worrying, and intense emotions that are not directed so much at others as they are simply outbursts. The usual advice that you eliminate unwanted behaviors through "consequences" (punishment) often does not work--your child seems crushed by punishment or even criticism.

In this book you will receive advice, but only for sensitive children and from parents of sensitive children, myself included, plus specialists in this trait. And our first advice is not to believe people when they imply there is something wrong with your child, and do not let your child believe it either. Nor are your child's differences your fault. Of course parenting can always be improved, and this book will "improve" you more than others, because, again, it is written entirely with your "different" child in mind. But forget the idea that the problem is some basic flaw in parent or child.

"Discovering" High Sensitivity

According to my own scientific research and professional experience as well as that of many others who have studied this trait under different, less accurate labels, your child has a normal variation in innate human temperament. She is one of the 15 to 20 percent born highly sensitive--far too many for them all to be "abnormal." Furthermore, the same percentage of sensitive individuals is found in every species that has been studied, as far as I know. With evolution behind it, there must be a good reason for the trait's presence. We will get to that in a moment, but first, a little bit about this "discovery."

I began studying high sensitivity in 1991, after another psychologist commented to me that I was highly sensitive. I was curious personally, not planning to write a book or even to try to tell anyone about my findings. In my community and the university where I was teaching, I merely asked to interview people who were "highly sensitive to physical or emotionally evocative stimuli" or "highly introverted." At first I thought sensitivity might really be the same as introversion, which is the tendency to prefer to have one or two close friends with whom one can talk deeply, and not to be in large groups or meet strangers. Extroverts, on the other hand, like large gatherings, have many friends but usually talk less intimately with them, and enjoy meeting new people. It turned out that introversion was not the same as high sensitivity: Although 70 percent of highly sensitive people (HSP) are introverts, a tendency that is probably part of their strategy to reduce stimulation, 30 percent are extroverts. So I knew I had uncovered something new.

Why would a highly sensitive person be extroverted? According to my interviews, they were often raised in close, loving communities--in one case even a commune. For them, groups of people were familiar and meant safety. Others seemed to have been trained to be outgoing by their families--it was imperative, and as good HSPs they tried to do what was expected of them. One woman recalled the day and hour she decided to become an extrovert. She had lost her best and only friend and decided then and there not to depend anymore on having just one friend.

Since discovering that the trait of sensitivity is not the same as introversion, I have found other evidence that sensitive people are also not inherently shy or "neurotic"--that is, anxious and depressed. All of these descriptors are secondary, noninnate traits found in some sensitive people as well as in many who are not sensitive.

When I made my request to interview sensitive people, I was swamped with volunteers, and finally spoke individually with forty men and women of all ages and walks of life, for three hours each. They really wanted to talk about this--the term and why it meant so much to them the moment they heard it. (Many adults purchase The Highly Sensitive Person simply because they recognized themselves in the title, and likewise you may have bought this book because you recognized your child in its title.)

After discerning the many details of sensitivity from these interviews, I was able to create a long questionnaire about it, and later a shorter one (see pages 88-89), and have since given these to thousands of individuals. The 20 percent or so who are highly sensitive usually immediately grasp the concept as describing them. The nonsensitive 80 percent or so truly do not "get it" and some answer "no" to every item. I found the same results through a random phone survey. Sensitive people really are different.

Since then I have written and taught on the subject extensively, and soon saw the need for a book on raising highly sensitive children. There were too many sad stories from adults about their difficult childhoods, in which well-meaning parents caused tremendous pain because they did not know how to raise a sensitive child. So I interviewed parents and children, and from those talks developed a questionnaire that was given to over a hundred parents of all types of children. That survey, when honed down to the questions that best distinguish HSCs from non-HSCs, became the parent's questionnaire at the end of the Introduction.

What Is High Sensitivity?

Highly sensitive individuals are those born with a tendency to notice more in their environment and...