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The Torture of Touch
Raising a Child With Sensory Integration Dysfunction By Laurie Dove
Karen Lofgren knew she had her hands full when her daughter was born five years ago. This Middlesex County, Mass., mother spent at least three hours a night trying to soothe her sobbing infant.
"The more I rocked her and sang to her, the more she cried," Lofgren says. "When I left her alone in the swing with dim lights, she cried a lot less."
As Lofgren's child grew, so did her distaste for certain stimulation. Even the clothes the child wore bothered her to the extreme.
"As a toddler, she could strip herself naked even in her crib," Lofgren says. "We all thought it was cute and called her 'Baby Godiva.' She hated clothes, jackets, shoes, anything on her skin even in the winter."
Lofgren's daughter also reacted negatively to crowded places. She was easily overstimulated during routine trips to the grocery store or shopping mall.
"She was always 'exploding' emotionally for what we thought was no reason," Lofgren says. "She couldn't regulate her emotions. She was up or down and never in between. The slightest thing could set her off, and she'd end up in complete meltdown."
Lofgren says her daughter also had trouble speaking and was always distracted and hard to manage in group situations.
"I hardly had any nice pictures of her, much less with her siblings or cousins," she says. "She was always looking away or crying."
Lofgren's daughter always liked to run and climb and sit upside down. She had a high tolerance for pain. She was never afraid of heat or fire. She was never afraid of danger in general.
"It was almost like she had no 'sixth sense' about things," says Lofgren.
Now, Lofgren knows those difficult days of toddlerhood were more than simply raising an "active" child. They were signs of sensory integration dysfunction, commonly called DSI so as not to be confused with sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).