The Sensory Chat team think about what sensory processing does, and how everyone has an individual combination of preferences and dislikes in their own sensory profile. We consider how this relates to how we as parents might set up the routines and activities of the day, and what happens when there is a mismatch between the sensory preferences of different family members. As always, we share practical ideas about to recognise where sensory differences are affecting family relationships, and how to recognise your own sensory style. Transcript Transcript Speaker: Hello and welcome to this episode of Sensory Chat, the podcast for parents and others interested in all things sensory integration. Speaker: Hello, I'm Amy Stevens and I'm calling in from Salisbury in the southwest of England. I'm a speech and language therapist and an advanced practitioner in Ayres Sensory Integration. Speaker: Hello, I am Emer Broderick, and I am an occupational therapist based in London in the UK. I am also an advanced practitioner in Ayres Sensory Integration. Speaker: Hi. I'm Emma Snowdon and I am a children's physiotherapist and I'm also an advanced practitioner in sensory integration. Speaker: Hi, my name's Angela. I am an occupational therapist based in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm also an advanced sensory integration practitioner. Speaker: Hello, I'm Lelanie Brewer. I'm a children's occupational therapist and academic and researcher based in Bahrain. Speaker: This morning, we're going to start exploring the idea of a little bit of myth-busting, basically, about what sensory integration, sensory processing is. When we talk about sensory processing difficulties, sensory processing challenges, you might accidentally come away with the idea that sensory processing is a problem. If you've got sensory processing stuff, there's something going a bit adrift, but actually, that's not really the case, and we're going to explore a little more widely about what sensory processing more generally means. Speaker: If we think about sensory processing, what it is, essentially, it's just how we take in all the information from all the senses that we have, and how our brain processes that and comes up with a response to that information. It's happening constantly throughout the day. Just a reminder to people about the senses we're talking about, we're talking about the five common senses, you know, what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste, and what we touch, and also some of our more internal senses. Our sense of balance, our vestibular sense, we call it, knowing our head position and what position, our sense of movement. Then we have our body awareness, knowing what our body is doing in space. We call that our proprioceptive sense. Then we also have an interoceptive sense, which is picking up on those internal cues, things like hunger, earth, bowel and bladder cues, prompting us if we need to eat, if we need to drink, if we need to go to the bathroom. Our body's constantly taking in all this information from the environment from our body and processing it. It's a really complicated system and there's lots of things going on. We all process this information slightly differently, and how we process it can impact our response to it, and this is what we see every day in ourselves and in the people we support and work with. Speaker: Our sensory preferences influence us in ways that we don't even realise every day from the moment we wake up, how hot or how cold is your shower? What clothes am I going to choose to wear today? What am I going to eat for breakfast? How do I get ready? Those are subconscious decisions that are actually informed by our sensory preferences and it also affects our choices in nature and everything we do. Speaker: I think it goes even deeper than that, doesn't it, Lelanie? It influences our greater choices in terms of what we're going to do. I often say when I have children that I'm working with the proprioceptive seekers or vestibular seekers that really need to move their body a lot. These aren't the type of kids that are going to end up in an office job sitting down, and if they are, they're going to also probably be very active, and as soon as they finish work, they're going to go off on a 10-mile bike ride or go for a run. I think our own sense and preferences really influence everything about our lives and what we choose to do and how we choose to work and how we choose our leisure time as well. We don't often think about that in terms of ourselves as adults or parents we work with when we start considering our own sensory preferences. It not only helps us to understand our children better, but it helps us to understand why we might have difficulties interacting with our children and potentially meeting their needs if they're different to our own needs. Speaker: Absolutely. It's not until something disrupts the norm that we start worrying about it. When I used to see quite ...
