Family support for children experiencing sensory difficulties

Online Sensory Processing Workshop

Does your child get upset by certain sensations (noise, smells, touch etc)? Do they fidget, squirm or constantly touch things? Do they struggle to concentrate or are they easily distracted? Do they struggle to engage in everyday activities because of this? If so they may have difficulty processing sensory information.

If your family answered YES to this, you are invited to attend the online Sensory Processing Workshop, hosted by the NHS Western Isles Children’s Occupational Therapy team on Tuesday 7th September from 6pm-8pm.

Open to local families the workshop aims to help families with children who have difficulty processing sensory information by giving them an understanding of their child’s sensory needs and why their children may be reacting in a certain way. It will offer families resources and strategies they can use to help their children cope better to engage in their daily lives.

Careen Matheson Laird, NHS Western Isles Children’s Occupational Therapist, said “Everybody experiences the world around them in different ways. Sometimes how your brain understands information from your senses can make it difficult to join in with everyday activities. Our senses give us information about ourselves and the world around us, so we can go about our day-to-day lives.”

These senses include vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, vestibular (helping with balance and movement), proprioception (telling your body where it is without looking), and interoception (internal messages like hunger, temperature, pain).

Careen added, “We use these senses all of the time. Without our senses, we would struggle to interact with the world. We receive information via our senses and then our brain figures out what to do with this information. For some people these messages from the brain gets a bit muddled up making it difficult to attend to everyday tasks. Some people can get too much information and so get overwhelmed and some people get too little information so struggle to respond appropriately. We would encourage families to take advantage of this free Workshop to help to understand their child’s sensory needs.”

The workshop was previously held in March and proved to be very popular, receiving lots of positive feedback from parents and carers alike, which included the following comments:

“I went to it because of one child but came out thinking of several at the nursery and have strategies I have already used to try to support them”

“I found it all interesting but particularly about sensory not necessarily being linked to ASD. Also that every child is different and that us as parents need to be detectives. All really great."

“All of this workshop was enlightening, and you didn't speak too fast or too slow!”

“I liked the part about the senses and integrating different coping strategies in creative ways. deep pressure information was interesting”

The September workshop is open to any local parent, grandparent, carer, etc. living within the Western Isles, and will be hosted through Microsoft Teams.

To register or for further information, please email OT.westernisles@nhs.scot by no later than 2nd September.