Sensory Help for a Toddler (Long - Wanted to be Detailed)

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I am currently going through the diagnosis process for autism. My daughter was the trigger for me looking into this seriously, as she started to have meltdowns in busy places. What started as a casual look, knowing that this could be a sign of autism, led to me discovering so much about myself that I'm now in the process of being diagnosed (or told that I'm mistaken).

My daughter is too young to give me cause for much concern right now, but I'm keeping a 'gentle' eye on the situation. As well as the meltdowns in public, which continue to this day, she has dramatic fears of almost anything that makes even a slightly irritating or loud noise and is now experiencing emotional meltdowns sometimes as well. She has a personality much like mine, but is a very social and happy child in general and (since I can't remember exactly how I behaved at her age) for now I'm treating it as her not having autism...BUT, I'm trying to respond as though she does - and it's working.

For public meltdowns I quickly remove her from the situation, get somewhere quiet, give her space, cuddle her if she needs it, and give her plenty of time to calm down. Her emotional meltdowns have started happening at night, when I put her to bed, and today they hit their worst yet. Whilst every other day she's been treading the fine line between tantrum and meltdown and I've not been sure either way, tonight it definitely was a meltdown. She was in the meltdown for 90 minutes before I had the following thought process:

"Meltdowns are sensory or emotional overloads. She's stimming, which means that she's trying to control this meltdown...but it's not working. There is nothing in this room to remove her from - it's a calm environment, so the issue is clearly emotional. But, since I can't remove her from any sensory stimuli, perhaps I need to bring in a more powerful sensory comfort to override what she's feeling..."

The only thing that I could think of, in that moment, was Vapour Rub. We had a tub in the house so I went and got it, let her dip her finger in and asked her to smell it. 90+ minutes of meltdown began to ease immediately. To get her significantly more calm, we had to let her play with the Vapour Rub, smelling it continuously, for 5-10 minutes. As you can imagine, it got everywhere. She was covered and at risk of getting it into her eyes and mouth, we were covered, her bed was getting covered, it was a greasy mess...but it worked. Once she'd calmed a little, we asked her if she'd take a bath to get clean and she agreed. The entire house smells of it now, but at least she's not covered in it. She still wasn't entirely calm, so my husband (who really isn't convinced by my concerns that she may have some of my traits, but realised that my theory had worked and was happy to work with me on it) then loaded up a YouTube video on his phone - kaleidoscope images, with accompanying gentle music. That calmed her the rest of the way and we eventually managed to ease her to bed dealing with the normal toddler rebellion, rather than a meltdown.

Now, clearly we can't give her a tub of Vapour Rub every evening. But we need something that works. YouTube on the phone is not a great long-term solution. We were thinking a long DVD that we could play for her, ideally lasting a minimum of an hour. We've researched and everyone has mentioned Biocursion being extremely good, and it looks along the lines of what we showed her on YouTube this evening, but I can't find the DVD for sale anywhere - the website has gone.

Does anyone know of a similar DVD, or perhaps another sensory stimulation tool that we can use for a toddler who's having a meltdown at the sheer prospect of having to sleep? It needs to be something calming, but sensory enough to pull her out of the meltdown...and not something that's going to decorate my house with minty fresh oil!

It seemed sensible to ask on here, to seek help from parents with experience of young children dealing with meltdowns.

Thanks, and sorry that it's a bit long.

First, that was a brilliant, truly inspired idea, using redirection! You seem to really have a good grasp on how sensory issues and meltdowns work. Especially the balancing of internal vs external stimulus. That is excellent! I have a feeling that you are going to become good at analyzing and preventing at least some of her meltdowns. And as she grows you'll be able to teach her to do the same for herself.

Sorry if this is a scattershot, I was up at four am today fixing a bandage on my child's arm and never fell back asleep. And of course I had gone to bed at midnight...

You might want to also look into / test out firm pressure. Sometimes an autistic child in a meltdown can calm down easier if they are firmly squeezed all over - think swaddling (which our oldest loved even as a newborn - now they like being wrapped in a small blanket). Or sit, have them sit in front of you and hug/squeeze them firmly with your arms and knees - ours calls that their 'safety cage' and will often request it if a meltdown is eminent.

We've done some pretty odd things to help our oldest through meltdowns (the younger is different). Sometimes my spouse and I joke that our kids are like the Borg - something will work once or twice and then they adapt to it and the effectiveness diminishes to nothing. But sometimes building behavior patterns really helps. For our family, it turns out that for bedtime we had to adopt a very regular pattern & counter-intuitively it included some stimulus. Specifically, every night when our oldest was young I'd take them out in the backyard and look at the stars, moon and planets for a bit in the cool air after everything else was done. To this day, over a decade later, they have to go outside before going to sleep. But it still works beautifully.

I wish I had advice about a DVD but we all have APD's (auditory processing disorder) of one sort or another and rarely if ever watch them. We've always read to our children, perhaps that serves a similar purpose. Oh, also - once the lights go out we use a device that plays a number of different "environmental" sounds (wind, rain, surf, etc) - that really helps, too.

update: I can't find the Biocursion DVD anywhere, either. however, there are a huge number of fractal generators available either as screensavers or stand alone applications. Add looped music and voila?

Thanks so much for your reply, Edenthiel. It really helps to hear that you think I did well. I feel like I'm learning about her and myself at the same time, and it's a lot to take on board but we'll get there. As I'm sure you understand perfectly, I'd do anything for her and I just want to learn so that whatever the future holds - whether she's autistic or NT - I can help her through it. And ultimately right now the label doesn't matter either way - she's having the meltdowns and we have to work through them. If she's NT and having meltdowns, the approach still needs to be the same I think. And at least I'm learning to identify what's what - at first it was hard to tell the difference between a big tantrum and a meltdown and I was so fearful of rewarding a tantrum by letting her get her own way, but the differences between the two are becoming a lot clearer to me now so I guess there are things I'll learn in time.

I might incorporate going outside, but my concern is that one of her fears is pigeon noises and we have a pigeon nest nearby - maybe that's not the kind of stimulation she needs right before bed. Pigeons either lead to her clinging on to me and begging for cuddles, or dropping to the floor face-down and lying completely still for a while.

I'll definitely try your approach about firm touch. She does beg for cuddles a lot when she's going into a meltdown, but even when I'm hugging her she's still shouting 'cuddle!' as though she's not registering that I'm actually hugging her, so I will try a more firm 'all over' pressure, and the 'safety cage' idea, to see if those are more helpful to her.

And a nature sounds CD might be useful too, thank you. Husband is looking into creating something like the Biocursion DVD since we can't find one, but we'll see if his skills extend far enough!

Really appreciate your response.

Maybe you could rub a little of the Vapour Rub into a handkerchief or small blanket, and she could smell that. It would be much less messy, and the tub would last much longer. You could just add a little more whenever she was feeling stressed, and wash the cloth now and then when it gets icky.

First of all, children naturally respond to stimuli differently from adults. Inside the brains of autistic children, everything just feels more intense. That being said, whether you view it as a "feature" or a "bug," it's pretty much up to you. To me, children are entitled to behave like children, and that's that.

Secondly, whatever you do at the moment of meltdowns or sensory problems is pretty much irrelevant. You won't solve these issues: they will keep coming back and coming back, unless you do something totally unexpected: I solve my children's meltdowns and sensory issues not when they are experiencing these issue, but when they are happy and NOT experiencing these issues.

We focus too much on the negative side of our children (behaviors) and forget to develop them (skills). That's the main mistake of our approach to autism in these 73 years since Leo Kanner's first paper on child autism.

So the question is never: "what should I do when my child experiences these negative issues?" but rather "what should I do when my child isn't experiencing these negative issues?"

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When my children were younger (from age 2 through age 4, for about 3 years), they were non-verbal. I used to do nightly "picture-aided talk" with them, at bedtime. Each night I'd go through what has bothered them during daytime, draw pictures for them, explain to them what happened. That helps to remove their resentments from each day. Mind you, they did not understand my words, back then, but they could see I was trying to communicate with them. That was all what was needed.

Sensory issues are removed, permanently, by starting from moments of happiness. I remember the first time I took my daughter to a children's game-and-food place (Chuck-E-Cheese's), she was so startled by all the lights and noise and I had to take her out in less than 5 minutes. Second time she was there, it was because one of her classmates had a birthday party there. To my surprise, all of a sudden she had no problems any more. Similarly, in her first Halloween's trick-or-treating, she got spooked at the first house and that was it. The next year, they had trick-or-treating during daytime in school to nearby business offices, that was fun for her. So in the evening when we went out again in our neighborhood, she was fine. She still got spooked at the very last house when a skull suddenly talked to her, but this time she laughed it off. Lesson: starting point should always be fun, your starting point should be your children's happy moments. Your starting point should be what your children are already familiar with.

Some other things are not as obvious. My son refused to switch to a larger car seat (booster seat) when he was 5.5 years old. He also had problems with any kind of head gear, especially paper hats that they made at school. To make a long story short, these problems were solved at his 6th birthday. He was happy. However, if you trace back at what helped him to get rid of these problem, it all can be trace back to his passion for elevators, and to how I started to teach him skills by using hand-drawn, simple stick-figure video clips.



It's not like you can solve your children's booster seat problems by starting to make video clips for them, or by taking them to elevator rides. Those things have to be done ahead of time. When you focus too much on your children's sensory/behavior issues, you forget to develop those very skills that will eventually get rid of all of their problems. That's our mistake in these last 73 years of child autism.

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My daughter today is more social than many of her neuro-typical friends. My son is also starting to be social. Look at his latest drawing and you can tell. Yesterday my son used this story to do a presentation in his class (I printed out a paper copy of his drawing, and trained him in the morning during his breakfast with the video clip, before school). The teachers were particularly impressed at his Mac'n'Cheese Dispenser. (Yeap, the drawing, coloring, the story idea, all the imagination came from my son.)

https://youtu.be/lR5akzf8CqI


Mind you, I never focused on the social development of my children. When they were younger, I only focused on developing their visual-manual skills. My children are genuinely happy, today. My daughter will be allowed to read WrongPlanet starting from her next (9th) birthday. Can you say the same thing about the messages you post about your children? Have you been treating your children as equal-rights, fellow human beings?

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Look at the "Connected Development Graph" one more time, pause, and think.

These children are totally fine. They are totally problem free.

For failing to develop our children in these last 73 years, for focusing too much only on their sensory/behavior issues, we've ruined the lives of millions of children.

The children are not sick nor intellectually disabled. We are.