Episode 65 - Sensory processing in babies

Welcome to Sense by Meg Forer, the podcast that's brought to you by Parent Sense, the app that takes guesswork out of parenting. If you're a new parent, then you are a good company. Your host Meg Forer is a well-known OT, infant specialist, and the author of eight parenting books. Each week, we're going to spend time with new mums and dads, just like you, to chat about the week's wins, the challenges, and the questions of the moment. Subscribe to the podcast, download the Parent Sense app, and catch Meg here every week to make the most of that first year of your little ones life. And now, meet your host. Welcome back mums and dads. It is my great pleasure to be joining you again here today on the Sense by Meg Forer podcast. Every week, we are joined either by a guest who is another expert or by an expert mum, a mum who is a seasoned mum dealing with her own little baby. Well, sometimes we're joined by somebody who interviews me, but today is going to be different. Today, I'm going to be chatting to you directly around a topic that's very close to my heart, and that probably is the topic that I might be most well known for, and it's certainly the one that I think drives an enormous amount of decision-making around parenting in general, and that is the topic of sensory processing, and specifically sensory processing in babies. Now, as parents, we all want to understand our babies. We want to help them thrive and really get the most out of them and do the best for them. And so by understanding how they process sensory information, it's an absolutely a key part in actually nurturing our little ones. So sensory processing is, as I said, super, super close to my heart. Today, we're going to be focusing on insights from our book, "Baby Sense", and if you're wanting to know more about what I'm talking about today, the places to go and look up about it are in the Baby Sense book, the Weening Sense book, and you can go and have a look at my Make Forer YouTube channel. And then we've actually got a sensory personality course, which is inside the parent-sense app, and that is probably the best place for you, because that course actually goes into a lot of depth around early infant sensory processing. So a little bit of background about me, for those of you who have not, are new to the podcast who haven't listened before. I'm an occupational therapist. I'm the mum of three. I founded a baby products company called Baby Sense many years ago, which I sold. I'm no longer involved there at all. I am the co-founder of Play Sense, where I am still involved, and of course the creator of the parent-sense app. But mostly, my biggest thing is that I'm just passionate about helping you to find solutions for your baby. So as you muddle your way through early parenting, and I do know that it's a bit of a muddle sometimes, because I'm in the mum of three, it's my pleasure and my privilege to come alongside you. So without further ado, after that introduction, let's get started, and let's have a look at what sensory processing is and how it works in babies. Now the human brain is absolutely fascinating in that we have sensory signals or sensory nerves that take in information into our brain, and then we have motor neurons or motor nerves that allow us to act on the world. But in between the sensory processing coming in and the smother output going out is this incredible processor, really the very best processor we have in the world, no computer quite matches a date, and that's our brain. Now our brain works in an incredible way. It takes some sensory information absolutely all the time. So as you are sitting there right now listening to this podcast, you're actually doing a whole lot of other things. You might be driving and actually able to focus on traffic light changing colours. You might be keeping an eye on your little ones as they play in a little pond of water, safely with you close by, and you're able to do all of this because you're taking in sensory information, you're integrating the information in your brain and then it creates an output or behaviour. And your current output or behaviour is actually concentration and attention span because you are attending to this auditory input that's coming in through the podcast as an example. Now this sensory information goes into the brain, it goes into a relay system in the brain called the phallamous and the phallamous sorts art and integrates information. So it takes information that we're hearing that we see and puts it together and creates a picture or the things that we're feeling on our clothes, the smells and the environment. So it takes in all of the sensory information that we take in through our eight senses. So I hear you asking eight senses, I thought there were five because of course we learnt about five when we were at school. So there are the typical senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing and then of course the three hidden senses which is the sense of the perception which is from our organs. So if my heart starts to be fast or if I feel hungry or if I've got reflex that's interoception from the inside of our body. We've got the vestibular system which is very linked to our auditory system. It's in the inner ear and it actually allows us to feel what direction we're moving in, how fast we're moving, whether or not we apply to upside down as an example, that's our vestibular system. And then our eighth system is our proprioceptive system which is arguably probably one of the most important although I don't think a loss of any of them would be fabulous for us. We all know that if you weren't sighted or you couldn't hear it would be a massive loss. Our sense of smell when it was disrupted by COVID was a real hassle. But really the sense of proprioception is super important. It comes from our muscles and joints. It gives us a sense of where our body is in space but it's also one of our most regulating sensory inputs. So as it comes into our brain it helps us to regulate our state and our mood and so on. So we've got these eight senses that move through our brain and at any given moment everything is coming in. But of course we're not attending to everything and that's because our brain decides that certain information that is coming in is just quite simply not important. So for instance, my brain has decided that these codes on my back are not important. I can't feel them at all anymore. But if this top that I've got on had it one of those little nylon level steps somewhere in it that irritated my skin, I would then immediately orientate towards it. And so our brain is incredible and its ability to be able to filter up what's not important and to truly attend to what is important. So of course this is happening at any given moment in anybody's brain and including of course your baby's brain. Now it is really, really important that the baby's brain is able to filter out an important and irrelevant information. Like for instance, as I've described the codes on my back that I've already filtered out, the same has to happen for your baby. They have to filter out the codes that they're wearing. So examples of how baby's filter out an important information. Often babies will actually be able to filter out noise and particularly in the early days and those first two weeks what we call the honeymoon period when your baby was super little, they're often able to kind of sleep through anything. And maybe even your older baby is able to do it that you can have them actually sleep in a pram in the room that you're in with all the noise going on. So babies are able to filter out noises as an example. They are able to filter out the codes on the back. And when your baby's very little and this certainly happened for me, my baby would, after taking out of the bath she would scream because it was a change of temperature going from the warm bath into the cold air. And then as I put on her baby girl, she would also be crying. She didn't like the sensation of getting dressed. But as she got used to it, she could filter it out and she was able to then settle. So this ability to kind of filter out an important information is super important. It's also important for instance when your baby's breastfeeding. If your baby's lying at the breast and somebody walks into the room and speaks to you, they can continue to feed or you speak on your phone, they continue to feed. And that's because they're filtering out all the auditory information. So filtering out sensory information is very, very important for adults and for children. Of course, it's also important that we don't filter out everything because sensory information is really, really important. So some sensory information that goes on in our world is so important that we need to have a very quick and swift response to it. So an example of that was when you, if you put your hand down flat on a hot stove, that's any instant reaction and it's so fast, it moves through the brain so quickly and it does, it changes our alertness level. So it makes us really for flight and flight. So we get a fright, we might scream and then obviously put our hand away. And that's super important, it's protective. So what happens when we need to pay attention to important urgency sensory information is that it raises our alertness level or our state. It's also called our razor level and it prepares us to be able to do something to action. Other sensory information isn't urgent and important like that, but it is just important. So for instance, tasting a flavor as an example, when your baby first starts to eat button at as an example, they're able to taste the button at and they kind of like the taste and then they go ahead with it or they might initially actually pull a face and decide they don't like it and then eventually go on with it. So it's quite important that when relevant information is actually introduced to our sensory systems that we are aware of it and we can listen to it and we have the appropriate level of alertness. So that appropriate level of alertness is kind of the key. So the appropriate level of alertness when your hands placed on a hot stove is like, "Hi, alert, like whoa, you know, I've got to do something about this." Whereas the appropriate level of alertness when I'm tasting button at or the fourth or fifth time is, "Hmm, this is yummy, I can keep going in, but I'm not going to be like in flight or flight, I'm going to just be able to tolerate it nicely." And so our brain is incredible, it's super magical at being able to determine, "Is this an important, can I ignore it? Is this super important? Do I need a high level of alertness to it? Or is this something that I just need to take into consideration?" Like for instance, my voice right now is you listening to it and have an appropriate level of arousal. So I hope you can see that in this personal introductory section that sensory processing is innate in all of us. It's really super important for developing the state of arousal with which we go to interact with the world. And it's really important that we filter out sensory information as well as that we are alerted. So we need to be able to move quite seamlessly between filtering things out and responding as a principle. So let's start to talk about how this process of filtering sensory information impacts our baby's development and their little personalities. We know that each of us process sensory information slightly differently. So you and your partner and you and your children process it differently. Some of us are much more alert. My three children are completely different. And some of us are much more what we call dormant. We don't necessarily notice everything that's going on. So this difference in our threshold determines our four different sensory personalities. So if you can imagine that we break this threshold into two camps. The first camp is the what we call a low three-should so if you have a low three-should for sensory information, you are highly sensitive. So you have people who everything that goes on in the world is perceived is noted and there's an action taken on it because they have a low three-should. So they tend to be our more sensitive people and we'll talk about the sensory personalities just now. But the other three-should, the second three-should is a very high three-should. So children and adults even who have a high three-should mean that a lot can be going on in their world before they actually notice what's going on. So a lot of noise, a lot of smells, a lot of movement, and they don't really respond to the really notice it. So there you've got your high three-should and your low three-should. Now within these high three-should and low three-should scenarios, you get two personalities each. So if you've got a very low three-should for sensory information, that is somebody who is much more sensitive, that ends up in two different types of sensory personality. The sensory sensitive and the slow tool map. So your sensory sensitive obviously is much more sensitive to everything that's going on. And they tend to react to the world as if it was a hot plate all the time. So everything feels like an emergency. Everything feels like it could be dangerous. And they tend to be a lot more fussy as babies. So that's your first sensory personality. It's your most sensitive sensory personalities. And they tend to be a lot more sensitive to everything that's going on. And a lot more fussy. They tend to not be fabulous feeders in the beginning. So they really are your more tricky little ones. Then you've got your slow tool map little ones. Now your slow tool map also has a low three-should. And they were also sensitive initially, but they work out that actually not everything is a hot plate. Not everything is an emergency. And so they manage to actually filter out sensory information after a while. And they warm up to situations. So initially they might over respond to things. But once they've warmed up, they tend to engage quite happily on a sensory level. So those are your first two sensory personalities. On the other side, which is your very high three-should for sensory information. In other words, a lot goes on without you noticing it. You've got two sensory personalities. The one is your settled or serene personality or dormant. So let's go on. They don't even notice a super laid back. And your other one is your social butterfly. Now your social butterfly also has a high three-should. But when they know that there might be something interesting going on, they tend to seek it out. So they seek sensory information and they seek social engagement. Because it really feeds their needs, feeds their little engine. So these four sensory personalities really do determine a baby's development. We tend to see that babies who are more sensitive and slow to warm up tend to be a little bit more precocious in terms of their milestones. In other words, they achieve their milestones like the earlier. Because a lot of sensory information has gone in. And so they're able to develop the muscle tone, engage with their world, pick up the language, that type of thing. So they tend to potentially be a little bit more precocious. But if you're a more high three-should child, who's more dormant, a lot's going on and they haven't even noticed. So they might have slightly lower tone, they might have slightly later language, just because they are just a whole lot more laid back. So that is an example of how this process of sensory information really can impact a baby's development. Now you might be wondering if we have these different personalities. Why is it that some babies do filter more and some babies do filter less? And what does that happen? And there's some kind of key drivers for that. One of them is our genetics. So very often if you've got a more sensitive parent, one of the kidneys will be more sensitive as well. Or if you've got a sensory seeker, like I do, my husband, one of my children is like that as well. So very often it is so much genetic. But there's also situations that can actually push you into a higher or lower sensory threshold. So an example is a prem baby, you know, premature babies are born into a very different world. They don't have that soothing room space for the last, say, eight weeks of pregnancy. And so they tend to be a little bit more sensitive. And so we see the sensitive profile a lot more in our little ones. We've had either been born Primo also those that have been ill and have had lots of noxious input in the first few months of their life. So if there's been a lot of like healed pricks and needles and things like that, babies tend to be a lot more sensitive. And that's because I mean, you can imagine just if you think about you after cesarean sectional when you've got a meager. Like your sensory sensitivity for everything is on alert. You're much more sensitive to everything just because of pain. So pain is one of the things that can also drive our filter up or down. And then stress also does it months and dads, you know, I don't know about you, but I certainly found the first few weeks of of being a new mom was fairly stressful. I was kind of pushed out of my comfort zone. And when in that stress space, my sensory threshold then got lower as well. So I became more sensitive. I anyway have a low sensory threshold and I do tend to be more slow to warm up. That's my sensory profile, but it became even more so. So I needed even more control and more order just after my babies were born because I was out of my depth and I was a little bit stressed. And after my third, I've had a cesar as well. So I was in pain. So that all of those things can contribute to our sensory profile. So obviously getting to know your baby and understanding it profile is important. It's one of the things that can really help you to connect with your baby. And a lot of what is early parenting is actually connecting with our baby, learning to read their signals, understanding their state, being able to adjust our own parenting behaviors to what our little ones need. But it's a big, big piece and it's a field called reflective parenting and reflective parenting is that kind of ability to read your baby signals and to know what's going on for your baby. And in that way, adjust your parenting style to them. So reflective parenting is very powerful. It really is amazing. There's, I mean, if you want to know more about it, it is an area of research you should look up. It's super interesting. But parents with high reflective function tend to have little ones who are more emotionally stable, tend to have little ones who have less adolescent delinquency. In fact, they've even tied it to less drug addictions. So there's a lot of reasons why long term we want to have given our babies the base of good reflective function early on. So one of the ways we can develop good reflective function and learning to understand our babies is to understanding the sensory personality and I mentioned it earlier on in the podcast, but if you haven't done my sensory personality course, it is really, really worthwhile doing it because the sensory personality course will help you to understand which of the sensory personalities your baby fits into and then in the app we actually give you a toolkit for if your baby is sensory sensitive. This is how you must manage feeding sleep, paid time or whatever. So we give you strategies for each of those personalities. So pop on over and download the parents sense app and inside the courses section, you'll be able to do the course on sensory personality. This episode is brought to us by parents sense, the all in one baby and parenting app that help you make the most of your babies first year. Don't you wish someone would just tell you everything you need to know about caring for your baby, when to feed them, how to win them and why they won't sleep? Parents sense app is like having a baby expert on your phone guiding you to parent with confidence, get a flexible routine, daily tips and advice personalised for you and your little one. Download parents sense app null from your app store and take the guesswork out of parenting. So I thought now what we would do is we just get into a little bit of the practicalities and how sensory processing impacts things like feeding sleep and development and just have a look at the different areas of impact that can be seen. So understanding that sensory personality or sensory processing affects our baby's personality and interaction, it's kind of logical that it's also going to affect something like their feeding and if you just think about feeding feeding is a super sensory laden activity, I mean particularly breastfeeding so breastfeeding. You've got to be skin to skin against somebody you've got to then feel where they're nipple is with your mouth you've then got to have the smell of their breasts and their body and potentially their underarms and whatever you closest to right up against you. There's a lot of touch and a lot of smells and then of course the taste of the milk and then the sounds of the parent as they hold you as well. So you can just see in that little vignette is exactly how sensory laden feeding is. Now buckle feeding is also full of different sensory information obviously the temperature of the milk changes and the flavor there's also the holding and so on and then obviously when you start solids it's a sensory assault because all you've been used to is like bland milk and now suddenly you've got all these flavors textures and temperatures that are new and colors on your plate so you know feeding is a very sensory laden activity in a baby's life. Now what we find with feeding is that babies who are more sensitive they do tend to have some difficulties with feeding for instance they might struggle with the sensation of the nipple inside their mouth and so one of the things that often happens there is that the little one just doesn't take to brace feeding easily they backlit the brace they don't like the being in such close proximity and sometimes these very sensory sensory little ones actually do better on a bottle. do better on a bottle. because it's a little bit less sensory invasive and in my practice I saw some little ones who fed best when they were lying on their own in their own space out of their mom's arms and we fed that way. Now of course this is absolutely not a reason to go and give a brace feeding if that's what your method of feeding that you've chosen but I think for parents who sometimes have ended up butle feeding it's nice to know that actually maybe this wasn't something that came from you but actually something that came from your baby that they just really weren't necessarily ever going to take to to brace feeding. On the other hand once they've taken to the nipple these little ones can often get stuck on the nipple in other words they never ever want to move on to any other form of nipples so going from skin and onto a rubber or latex teeth really bothers them so they don't love moving between braced and bottle whereas your little ones who less sensitive are quite happy to move between braced and bottle and whatever they don't mind. Another area of challenge that can sometimes come up is obviously your weaning the weaning journey can be absolutely fraught with our sensory sensitive little ones because there's a new color to deal with there's a new temperature of food and there's obviously the texture so they might end up gagging a lot. So we tend to see that with feeding it really can be impacted by sensory processing. Of course your little one with the low threesome is often very happy to either switch between bottle and braced when they move on to solids they love it and one of the challenges you might find with them is they actually start to go of milk very quickly because milk is boring you know so why would I want to stay on a milk diet I want to rather have this brightly colored carrot the tastes of cumin or whatever it flavors you put in it so you can really use their sensory personality to advance and improve their solids journey as well and if you want more information on that the book weaning sense goes into a huge amount of detail on exactly that topic. So there you can see a snapshot of how sensory processing really does impact feeding as well. Now of course sensory processing can also affect sleep patterns it can pair a roll in whether or not your baby falls asleep with ease and with them are they stay asleep so for example little ones who are sensitive to touch might be easily disturbed by the feeling of their coats or blankets against their skin and very often for these babies they're the ones who kick their blankets off don't lack any coverings on them. So one of the nice strategies that I like to use with more sensory sensitive babies for sleep is first of all if they little is to swaddle them because that deep pressure of swaddling is much more containing than light touch of blankets so let me give you some logic here because you're probably thinking that's the same thing you've got a blanket and why would it be any different. So it works on two different systems so when you have a little light blanket over yourself or sheet over yourself every time you move you can just picture yourself kind of moving under the sheet or the sheet moving over you and as you do that it triggers what is called your touch system so you're like touch system usually but your touch system and your touch system actually moves to the brain in what's called the entire lateral tract of the spinal column up to the brain and it's quite a lyrting which is why I can wake you up. Whereas swaddling is totally different so swaddling is much deeper it's like a deep containment that kind of holds a baby in a position and when a baby moves it starts to move against the swaddle in and the resistance it's much more like being in the womb. Now that is not so much touch as pressure and our pressure receptors move up a different column after the brain called the dorsal column and that is much more regulating and helps babies to sleep better so swaddling can really help with the babies who super sensitive to blankets as an example. The other thing with sleep is that obviously babies might be working very easily if there's noise in the environment and so one of the strategies if we like to use with little ones is to use white noise because white noise what will mask out other sounds in the environment so instead of hearing the dog bark two houses away they're just hearing the white noise in their room playing in the background so white noise is an example of how to improve sleep and then finally how does sensory processing effect development so babies overall development is impacted through sensory processing because it allows them to learn from and make sense of the world around them but babies who have difficulty processing sensory information often do struggle with certain developmental milestones so for example if a baby is happy sensitive to touch they might avoid certain textures and sensations for instance if they put onto their tummy that's quite a you know it's an all-body touch experience and if you're rolling it's an even more all-body touch experience and if you're crawling you're pushing up on your hands and your hands are having to take that experience and so they might be babies to actually avoid rolling and crawling us as examples and if your baby is high post-sensitivity sensory information maybe not all the sensory information is going in and so that their developmental milestones might be not delayed but a little bit slower so sensory processing does affect babies overall development and the achievement of milestones so I hope this has given you a little bit of a snapshot as I mentioned if you're wanting more information do go and get my book baby sense there's also a lovely book written by a PhD in Chicago called Lisa Elliott and her book is what's going on in there it's a great book that talks about sensory processing and then of course there's the sensory personality course which is inside the app so do go and have a look at that so in summary today we have explored how sensory processing works in babies and how it impacts their development we have learned that every baby is completely unique and that their sensory experiences are different according to their sensory thresholds we've also spoken about how important it is to get to know your individual baby because when you do that you then develop reflect a function and by knowing more about your baby you're able to connect with them better so there are a number of reasons why you do want to advance the study of knowledge within your own mind so we've talked about it we've talked about some practical tips and I really appreciate you joining me here today I hope that you found it useful if you've enjoyed today's podcast please do go and rate the podcast and do share it with your friends I certainly is something that has changed my parenting journey as I've gone along thank you everybody and I will see you back again next week thanks to everyone who joined us we will see you the same time next week until then download parent sensor and take the guesswork out of parenting first