Welcome to our "Letters to Jenna" series.
The following letter and response is being published here with full permission from the customer.
Hi Jenna
PLEASE HELP! My 6-year-old Autistic & ADHD daughter has a lot of meltdowns and violent outbursts. She struggles with transitions between activities at home and school, getting in and out of the car, and staying seated long enough to eat food or do something quiet like reading, painting, or settling for bed.
I’ve had a few people mention that a small weighted blanket might be something to get for her. Can you tell me more about it and how it might help?
There’s so much information, I don’t know where to start… and my whole family is very stressed and fighting about this. I feel like I’m doing the wrong thing all the time.
Regards,
Lorissa
Hi Lorissa
Thank you for writing in. I’m absolutely happy to share learnings from my own experience as well as research and courses I have done.
My AuDHD daughter is 12 now, and I have trialled many sensory products with her over the years. She also struggled a lot with transitions and self-regulation, especially when there was any demand or pressure to behave a certain way, or when there was change happening, or a new place or strangers.
At these times, when she was particularly heightened, she would regress, not be able to complete simple tasks or requests, and would become hyperactive, controlling and/or clingy. Most importantly, the ‘sensory overwhelm’ would hit her quickly and that’s when she needed all the help she could get with making her brain feel safe (more on this later).
One of the earliest products her Occupational Therapist tried during sessions was a Weighted Lap Blanket either on her back when she was lying down on her tummy (to calm down after doing swinging and crashing in the sensory gym) or on her lap and shoulders when she needed to sit for a while and do some ‘desk work’. The effect was obvious! She was suddenly able to sit calmly and even listen to instructions from her OT!
The reason it helped is because weighted blankets provide ‘deep pressure touch’ that her brain REALLY needed in order to know where her body was in space (a common issue for neurodivergent brains).
The way I describe it… is that when she was in ‘sensory overwhelm’, her brain was at a point where it could no longer integrate the sensory information coming in (like sound, smell and sight), therefore it didn’t know whether a bear was about to attack or not… so it conveniently popped her body into a fight, flight or freeze state… just in case! This looked like her over-reacting to sensory input (like touch), covering her ears, yelling out, being hyperactivity, being very clingy and withdrawn, or being aggressive and physically violent.
By quickly reducing as much sensory input as possible (it was best to take her to a quiet space with low visual clutter and stop speaking to her) and flooding her brain with the nice strong proprioceptive input (eg. joint compression) that it needed in order to feel safe… then the ‘thinking’ part of her brain was able to slowly come back online and realise that she wasn’t in a ‘life or death’ situation.
Imagine trying to communicate directly with the primitive part of her brain (that’s probably saying “BUT WE MIGHT DIE!”… like Grug in the Croods movie) by giving her the heavy weight it needs, so it can be like “ahhhhh, okay, that’s where your body is, that helps… thanks!”. I think of it like the reassuring feeling of the ‘sleep pile’ in the Croods movie 😊
This helped her at the shops (a very sensory ‘dense’ environment), in the car (to reduce outbursts at her sister), and of course at school. Interestingly, my Mum also started draping a weighted lap blanket across my daughter’s hips and tummy at bedtime, and it helped her fall to sleep very fast! Yay!
In good news, there has been a surge in medical studies in the last few years, and most of them indicate the beneficial impact of weighted blankets. This confirms what we in the neurodivergent community have already been saying for a long time… that weighted blankets decrease anxiety, improve sleep quality, improve daily function and improve concentration in those of us, and our kids with ADHD, Autism and SPD.
I hope this answers your question. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, or would like some links to research or parent courses on this topic.
Jenna xo
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I’ll never forget those early days of Occupational Therapy with our strong movement seeking daughter Chloe. I loved going into the sessions with her, trying to remain quiet and just observe (this was tricky at times due to my ADHD… lol).
I loved watching and listening to her OT Deb as she helped Chloe explore her sensory systems and explain why she loves certain things, like why heavy weighted blankets make her brain feel safe.
For my daughter the school environment can be very noisy and overloading at times. As she has auditory hypersensitivity, wet weather lunches and events (like sports days, incursions, and assemblies) can easily put her into auditory overload.
'Auditory Overload' is when the brain becomes so overwhelmed by the amount of sound information it needs to process, that it cannot focus on other things it's supposed to be doing, cannot predict what will happen next because it cannot process the sensory info for the moment), so therefore cannot keep us safe, and if it stays there long enough pops us automatically into a 'fight flight freeze' response which can look like anxiety, shallow breathing, grumpiness, faster heart rate, trouble completing a task already started, trouble remembering the steps of doing a simple task, and needing to leave the room quickly etc.
