Children with autism often have difficulty expressing their emotions because they cannot communicate directly but instead express them through behavior. However, not everyone is able to understand the messages that children want to convey. This can lead to sensory disorders in children with autism.

In this article, we will learn about sensory disorders in children with autism, the causes and symptoms of this condition. At the same time, we will provide methods to help children with autism improve their sensory disorders and useful advice for parents to help their children integrate into life.

Learn about sensory disorders

Sensory disorders, also known as “Sensory Processing Disorder” (SPD). This is a condition in which the brain and nervous system have difficulty processing or integrating stimuli from the environment.

For example, when we touch hot water, we usually automatically pull our hand back because the heat of the water stimulates the sensory nerves to send signals to the brain, the brain then processes and responds saying “hot water can burn”, thereby causing us to pull our hand back immediately. However, in people with sensory disorders, the signal sent to the brain may be slower or not fully sent to the brain, so the brain cannot process or respond properly, leading to not pulling our hand back in time. Or conversely, they may overreact, be too sensitive to stimuli from the environment such as the noise of a vacuum cleaner, even though it is very small but enough to cause discomfort.

In simpler terms, sensory disorders are a condition in which the brain has difficulty receiving and responding properly to information from the senses.

Sensory disorders when the brain has difficulty receiving and responding to information

Classification of sensory disorders

Sensory disorders are often divided into two basic types: high sensory threshold and low sensory threshold. Each person will have their own sensory threshold and the inability to maintain balance in this sensory threshold can cause limitations in receiving and processing information from the senses.

• High sensory threshold: In this case, higher levels of stimulation are needed than normal children. They may have difficulty sensing the surrounding environment or show “indifference” to stimuli. In simpler terms, children need higher levels of stimulation to perceive.
• Low sensory threshold: On the contrary, when children fall into a state of excessively low sensory threshold, they become oversensitive to sensory stimuli. This can make children feel scared, anxious or even exhibit uncontrolled behaviors.

Causes of Sensory Dysfunction

The exact cause of the disorder is not yet known. However, the midbrain and brainstem regions of the central nervous system are the site of early information processing. These brain regions are involved in coordination, arousal, attention, and autonomic function. Sensory information passes through these centers and is transmitted to areas of the brain responsible for emotion, memory, and higher-level cognitive functions. Damage to any part of the brain involved in multilevel processing can make it difficult to process stimuli adequately.

Brain damage associated with sensory disturbances

What are sensory disorders in children with autism?

Symptoms of sensory disorders in children with autism

Most children with autism are at high risk of developing sensory disorders. Notably, nearly half of these children face different types of sensory disorders, causing great impacts on their daily lives.

Children with autism often have limitations in language, communication, social interaction and repetitive, self-limiting or uncontrollable behaviors. These manifestations begin in early childhood and last throughout adulthood, and may even last a lifetime.

Therefore, children with autism often encounter many other complex disorders, especially problems related to brain and nervous system activity that lead to sensory disorders in children with autism.

When experiencing sensory disorders, children with autism often feel uncomfortable, or disconnected, and even feel unsafe with their surroundings. Sensory disorders in children with autism can lead to many negative, unusual behaviors such as licking furniture, putting objects in the mouth, being overly sensitive to sounds, screaming constantly, or naughty, uncontrolled climbing behavior.

Children with autism are often at high risk of sensory disorders.

Common Sensory Disorders in Autistic Children

While normal people use senses such as vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, vestibular, and proprioception to interact with their environment, autistic children often do not use all of these senses due to sensory disorders. Instead, autistic children often express themselves through different behaviors such as biting, grasping, screaming, or refusing to eat strange foods.

Sensory disorders in autistic children can be classified based on the following senses:

• Auditory processing disorder: Children with autism are often hypersensitive to sounds, even the smallest ones can make them feel uncomfortable and will avoid these sounds by covering their ears, screaming, or making other sounds such as grinding their teeth.
• Visual processing disorder: Children with autism often avoid visual stimuli such as blurring or covering their eyes when seeing light. Your child may also have searching behaviors such as looking at lights, turning on light switches, or spinning a wheel and staring at it.
• Tactile processing disorder: Your child has difficulty touching/grasping or touching areas of the body. Your child may not like to hug others or eat foods with unfamiliar ingredients.
• Property processing disorder: Your child has difficulty sensing the position of the body or body parts.
• Vestibular processing disorder: Your child will have difficulty maintaining balance or spatial orientation and may show this by avoiding movement, lying in one place, or running around constantly.

Symptoms of sensory disorders in children with autism depend on the affected senses.

Measures to help improve sensory disorders in autistic children

Supporting the improvement of sensory disorders in autistic children requires appropriate intervention, depending on each specific type of sensory disorder. Families need to pay attention, care and accompany children in this process to help them overcome difficulties. Some ways that can be applied include:

• Create a healthy and suitable living environment for children’s vision. Use colored filters to increase the perception of light or limit the light in the bedroom if the child is sensitive to vision.
• Increase the time to talk and share verbally so that children can perceive and feel information more clearly through hearing. Limit outside noise or use earplugs if necessary.
• Create a daily routine for children to feel more clearly about familiar scents, choose suitable scents and avoid negative scents for children.
• Perform gentle massage exercises to increase children’s sense of touch with the surrounding environment.
• Limit activities with strong impacts so that children feel comfortable and relaxed.
  Support children to participate in motor activities to improve balance and spatial awareness.
• Apply measures to hug from behind or use hands to hold the child’s body close. Limit obstacles in the living space so that children can move more easily.

Hopefully, you have had useful information about sensory disorders in autistic children. This condition needs to be supported and overcome from an early stage to minimize negative impacts on children’s lives. However, providing support measures depends on the age and individual reactions of each child, so parents need to consider carefully and consult a specialist to find the appropriate solution.