Vestibular Sensitivities: The Overlooked Issue Affecting Reading, Balance, and Anxiety

 

Hey, in today’s episode, we are going to be talking all about vestibular sensitivities. Ooh, this is a big one because it is often overlooked and it can be a major factor that affects all sorts of areas of development more than any other one of our senses. The vestibular sensitivity is so important because we often see challenges with reading, with balance and anxiety, just to name a few.

Those are some of the, some of the really big consequences of having a vestibular sensitivity, and so I think it’s so important that you know that there is a. Child respecting way to help minimize this sensitivity to even truly have it go away. We’re gonna talk about that, how to do that through a neuro affirming lens.

‘Cause we never wanna force kids to get over their sensitivities or, reduce them based on our own experience. Sometimes understanding our child’s sensitivity or a kid in our life seems confusing because it’s not our experience. But that is really what neurodiversity is so much about, is that, that child that has that vestibular sensitivity.

Their brain is wired in a different way, and so their experience is quite, literally very different than the typical person. So we have a lot to get into today because this is a, this is a important topic and I wanna make sure that at the end of this episode that you understand why we need to pay attention to this sensitivity.

I want you to know the signs for it so that you can see it in yourself or in your child. I want you to know what might be pulling the strings and causing this vestibular sensitivity in the first place. And I wanna share an example of, oh man, just a really awesome 4-year-old that I am watching. Okay.

Worked through this vestibular sensitivity in real time. It’s so, it’s so awesome to see. So I’m gonna share a little bit about that as well. So let’s get started with just making sure that we’re all on the same page about what exactly the vestibular sense is. The vestibular sense, again, is one of our hidden senses.

And we can’t see it. So we often don’t learn about it in kindergarten, but it is massively important to our development to basically everything that we do. If you’ve ever had car sickness, if you have ever had a thrill on a roller coaster, if you have had vertigo, then you very much have had an awareness of your vestibular system at work or not.

At work. Okay. Because the vestibular system is responsible for how we perceive motion, our movement, our brain has to be able to make sense of that and to keep our body. Upright and moving in. Despite of that, like when we are in a car, there’s kind of this odd experience happening that we take for granted and that we are sitting still, but our eyes are perceiving the movement around us as if we were kind of propelling ourselves forward, but we’re not.

We’re just sitting passively in the car. So. Our vestibular system is responsible for making sense of that sensation that we are experiencing now. The vestibular sense is located deep in our inner ear. We talked about this in the sensory processing episode way back in episode three. I say way back.

We’re on episode 11 here, but gosh, we’ve, we’ve been covering a lot and I want to remind you. That it is closely tied to the visual sense. So basically the nerve that is taking the input from our inner ear is the same as our visual nerve. And so the, you’re gonna see a lot of overlap here as we go throughout this episode as to why, when there’s vestibular challenges.

And again, I just talked about the motion sickness piece. That there is this, this visual component to our movement. Right. And that makes sense, right? Because our vision is also helping us understand how we’re moving and where we are in our environment. But our vestibular sense is so cool because it is three little.

Basically kind of, they look like seashells in there. They’re little semi-circular canals is what they’re called. And they have just a little bit of fluid inside of them. And then there’s all these tiny little baby hairs that line these semi-circular canals that are deep inside of our inner ear. And when we tip our head in a certain direction, if you’re watching on YouTube right now, like if I’m tilting my head to the right here.

There are hairs that are getting wet in there and they are taking that information and sending it to my brain to say, oh, I’m tipping my head here. I’m not about to fall over. I’m not gonna totally lose my balance. That’s my vestibular system at work. You know, sometimes we see kids that have. Vestibular seeking tendencies.

They love to spin. They love to swing. They love to move. They cannot get enough of that vestibular input. Okay? They love it. They’re looking for it. But on the other side of the spectrum, we can see kids have vestibular sensitivities, and it’s really interesting to me because again, this. Has probably the largest effect over all eight senses of having a sensitivity in this area on like that.

So globally impacts all of development, all areas of a child’s life when there is gravitational insecurity, which is another name for vestibular sensitivity. And we just don’t talk about it that much. It feels still like a bit of a kind of quote unquote OT term to me. And so I hope that, I hope that this podcast starts to break that down a little bit because vestibular sensitivity is showing up either in car sickness.

Okay, so that’s motion sickness, right? Motion sickness. We’re not perceiving.

How our body is moving, how our body is not moving while things are moving around us. Okay. So we can get car sickness and, this is relatively common response. You can actually improve, car sickness by working on certain activities, for you or for your child. That’s that’s totally true. But there’s another aspect of vestibular sensitivity, which is what I just mentioned, which is the gravitational insecurity.

In this piece, this specific type of sensitivity under the vestibular sense is really the one that we see having such a global impact. So, this sensitivity is all about kids. Not feeling secure when their feet leave the ground. That sounds like such a weird thing, and I think that this is part of the reason that it’s like, we don’t talk about it the way we talk about clothing sensitivities or, sensitive to sounds or sensitive to lights saying, oh, like my kid is afraid to have their feet lean to the ground.

We don’t even really realize it at first because it’s, it can be very subtle. When a child is not wanting their feet to leave the ground, but we have some very clear examples of the way that this is gonna show up in life. And I, I wanna be clear here that I see a range of kids that struggle with gravitational insecurity, that, and it can be mild or it can be very severe.

So here are some signs that you, that you might see, and I’ll kind of give some examples of like the mild or the severe range, right? So if your child right now, or did when they were younger. So if you’re listening and you have a tween or a teen, you are probably not gonna see this example, but they avoid slides at the pro playground.

They likely will not even attempt to climb. And if we think about it, this makes sense because if their vestibular sense is not processing that information well, it makes them feel like they are falling. It’s the same feeling that the average person might have trying to walk across a tightrope. You’re gonna feel very unsteady.

You’re going to feel like you’re going to fall. That is what it can feel like. Like you’re standing on the edge of Abu building when you’re just on the second rung of a ladder to go down a slide.

Certainly being at the top of a slide. So even if you can get your child up there, you’re at a type of playground, you know where it’s like a slow climbing kind of thing. You get to the top of the slide and they are panicking. That is definitely a sign of a vestibular sensitivity related specifically to this gravitational insecurity.

Let me just say one more time very clearly that gravity, that vestibular sensitivities are kind of broken down into two areas. Motion sickness and gravitational insecurity. We’re really honing in on gravitational insecurity today. And so all of these examples are related to that. Another example, your child avoids swinging, right?

Their feet come off the ground. Now, a mild example of this might be your child may tolerate swinging in a seated position if they can get their feet to the ground. A severe example would be that they cry and absolutely refuse to go anywhere near a swing if your child hates roughhousing. Now, there’s a couple things that could be going on there, like obviously there’s a lot of touching.

There’s a lot of pressure. So other senses start to get involved with roughhousing, but with roughhousing, again, we typically see this with younger kids and sometimes again, even with teens and tweens that, you know, being jostled around, lifted up. Or sometimes if you have a young child and you know you have that fun uncle or dad, and they like, not that moms can’t do those too, but you tend, you tend to see it, you tend to see it from the fun uncle that they like pick them up and they flip them upside down.

The kid totally panics, almost like meltdown fright. That is a gravitational insecurity. They don’t wanna have piggyback rides. They don’t wanna go be carried on shoulders. They feel very unsteady, very unsure. And again, a little bit of that is kind of in the realm of typical, but generally speaking, children’s brains.

Are set up to have these experiences because they help improve vestibular processing. They help make sense of it, and it basically is improving this pathway in the brain to be able to take in vestibular input well and process it. We’re gonna get to why that is so important, but I wanna just go a layer deeper here.

Because this may be a result of sensory processing. And of course we see this very commonly with kids that we know have sensory processing challenges like kids with a diagnosis of autism or A DHD or sensory processing disorder. But I definitely see this in kids that have none of those diagnoses. Okay.

So it’s important for us not to rule it out. It’s important for us. As parents or if you’re a therapist listening here to always consider these signs and that they are sometimes subtle, they are sometimes very subtle, and sometimes kids will do one type of activity that seems like, oh, like they must be fine with vestibular input, but not others, for instance.

At our sensory summer camp, we had a kiddo a couple of years ago that had gravitational insecurity, and it’s the first day, so I didn’t know this yet. We have an obstacle course set up and one of the steps in the obstacle course is to. Climb up, kind of like a step stool and leap off into a giant crash pad.

Okay. There’s like mats on the floor, everything. I saw him hesitate a little bit. Now that could be happening for a variety of reasons. It might have been like he was not sure how to climb up. This is a new experience. He’s not sure how it’s gonna go. He didn’t hesitate long and he leapt off and jumped right into it.

Had a huge smile on his face. Then a couple of steps later in the obstacle course. I had a large yoga ball, and so I went to put him on the ball and, he looked a little unsure. But again, this is all new. It’s the first day of camp, so I’m again, like trying to kind of just watch what’s going on here. As I roll him back slowly, he leans forward all the way and puts his belly flat on the ball.

He puts his arms out. So I am, I’m now a little bit more suspicious that there’s some gravitational in security. What he’s trying to do is lower himself, super close to the ground. Okay, now he’s not freaking, he’s not panicking. And here’s the other thing. I can also see that he has some poor core strength.

So I’m still kind of observing. I am using kind of my, my OT lens to try to figure out, okay, is this, this, this definitely looks a little bit more like gravitational security. He definitely has some lower tone, some low, core strength. Is that, is that what this is about? Like, is he not able to hold himself up?

Then we had a large trampoline, like the, like the trampolines you see in people’s backyards. Okay. So we were, we had stations, we had a couple of kids going into the trampoline every time, and there was a, you know, a three or four step ladder to go in. He was able to climb that as soon as he felt that the trampoline had some give to it.

He saw the springs at the side, and it’s off of the ground about three feet. He panicked, started to cry and ran away, and so that was clearly. Now I’m, I’m kind of seeing these, these pieces come together. This is clearly gravitational insecurity at this point. He also, as we soon learned, later that day, he would also not go anywhere near a swing on the first day.

It was amazing to see his progress throughout the week and him taking kind of small steps out of his comfort zone. But if I had not, if I had not been careful, if I had just said, well, he’s able to climb this little ladder. Well, he jumped off of that so he doesn’t have gravitational security, that that was not an accurate picture.

So please hear me, that this is not a black and white situation. Kids are often, kids want to often do these things. They see their peers doing them, they look fun. So they will sometimes push themselves out. Of their comfort zone. They will basically start doing their own therapy to kind of help their brain get used to some of these things, but they will reach a stopping point.

This, this kiddo was six or seven years old and was, was not able to really push himself any further into experiencing a trampoline or a swing. So please know that it’s not, it’s not a clear black and white situation now. This, as I said, can be a result of just how their sensory processing is wired. But underneath sensory processing developmentally are primitive reflexes.

So we talked about this, back in lesson two. And primitive reflexes are those things that are supposed to go away by two. And if they don’t and they keep firing, they can mess with the way development. Unfolds. They can give kids and adults lots of challenges if they are still firing. We call those retained primitive reflexes, but we’re looking for, for those reflexes to go away, to integrate, to go dormant.

There are two reflexes that can be the cause of this kind of heightened sense of gravitational insecurity. The big one here is the marow reflex. And this makes sense because this reflex in infancy, like when a baby has this reflex, when they’re supposed to, it’s called the startle reflex. That’s that’s its kind of nickname, and it is a response to when a child is scared.

When the baby gets scared. Usually that’s a loud noise. Or if a baby feels like they’re falling. That reflex automatically triggers. So if that reflex didn’t go away, it makes a whole lot of sense that that child is scared to take their feet off the ground, that they kind of have this sense that they’re gonna fall because that reflex is still firing, trying to protect it when it’s not supposed to.

Trying to protect that child. Now also it’s possible that the TLR, the tonic labyrinthine reflex can also be a player, but the first one I’m always looking at is Marrow first. And so if I then test a child, there’s kind of testing positions you can put a kid in. And you say, oh my gosh, I think that they have this, this reflex going on, because I just saw a really clear response.

I put them in this movement pattern and their, the way their body moved showed me that this reflex is still firing. Well then we’re gonna do move like certain types of movements, play activities that we can use to help that reflex go away. This is the same thing with the sensory processing. There are certain movements and activities that we can do very, very slowly to help the brain start to get used to movement.

Now the question that comes up, uh, and I did touch on this in that sensory episode as well in episode three. It shouldn’t we just support it? Isn’t it neuro affirming to just say, oh my gosh, they do have a sensory sensitivity. Don’t, like, don’t even talk to them about the swing. Don’t, they don’t like the slide, they don’t like roughhousing.

They don’t, they don’t want their feet off the ground. Like just don’t do those things. Well, yes, obviously, number one, with that kiddo at camp, we did not force him to get on the trampoline. We weren’t like, Hey, you need to come get on here. No, but we were mindful. Every other day that week with the things that he was comfortable with, we were telling more.

We were giving him more movement. We were also incorporating Morrow activities to help him start to integrate that reflex so it wasn’t firing as strongly.

But if we just say, oh my gosh, they have a sensory sensitivity. This is how their brain is wired. We have to 100% respect this and not help their brain build a new connection so that this isn’t so severe. There are really, really big consequences to that. Number one, as I’d already mentioned. That over time sensitivities tend to become more severe because the brain is always on alert and trying to protect itself.

So it’s like, oh, no, no, no, no. I don’t like that anymore either. And like, you know, months later, nope, I don’t like that now either because I’m too scared. Like that, that is the protective area of the brain, the fight or flight center of the brain that is working there to protect, to protect itself. But the, but even, gosh, so importantly, when we’re talking about gravitational insecurity, it is linked to major developmental areas that have such a significant impact on a child’s life.

For instance, balance, coordination, motor planning, and all gross motor skills. If a child has a lot of gravitational insecurity, they are gonna struggle with all of those things. That is going to have a social impact on their life, an enjoyment as like effect on their life. It also plays a role in attention because if the vestibular system is not processing information well, which it needs to literally do every second of our waking hours, there is a part of the brain that is going to monitoring that.

And kids with gravitational insecurity, we tend to also see attention struggles with. There is also a huge role in what we call postural control. Sort of like core strength, but it’s way more than core strength. It’s not just about getting the muscle strong in the stomach and back. That’s a little bit of it, but we’re really talking about on a neurological basis, the the signal that the brain is sending to kind of help a child sit upright, to basically give the information to those muscles so that they’re stimulated.

There’s something broken there in the connection, and so that input isn’t going well. So we often see these kiddos with vestibular sensitivities again, particularly gravitational security. Really we’re talking about gravitational insecurities. It’s not always a link with motion sickness is that they often struggle to kind of sit upright.

They may double use it a lot. They slouch or lean on things all of the time. And lastly, the most pervasive way that this affects a child is that it puts kids constantly in a state. Of fight or flight or anxiety, imagine how it would feel to never really feel secure or every time that you have to move.

Some kids have such severe gravitational insecurity that it’s difficult for them to even like step up over a curb. Now that’s really severe, but I have seen that level of severity before for, so if we are not addressing gravitational insecurity at all. These challenges are likely what a, a child is living with and trying to manage.

And sometimes we see these gravitational insecurity challenges early in life. Like we, we start to notice them at two or three, or we think that they’re, it’s odd or quirky. Like it’s so odd. Like they know they hate being turned upside down or, yeah, they don’t really like the swing and we’re, we don’t realize that, you know, there’s all of this.

Going on in the brain and that it’s going to have all of these implications throughout their development as they reach school age and, and really we start to see these skills unfold between them. But kids with gravitational insecurity often struggle with reading because remember that vestibular sense is so closely tied to our visual sense.

So kids have a hard time. Bringing their eyes together, which is needed for reading. Okay? The eyes have to work clearly together and in sync with each other. That’s called convergence. Bringing them together, eye tracking, being able to move across a page. This makes reading really hard, not fluid. It also makes it hard to copy something from the board or the projector to look up and then look down.

So it’s so important that we, number one, acknowledge that there’s some gravitational insecurity or that’s that’s a challenge that this child has. Number two, how do we support them Right now, we are not gonna just flip them upside down in rough housing and give them a traumatic experience, but how can we slowly begin to help them?

Start to process this vestibular information that it’s receiving all the time in a more fluid way so that it doesn’t have this ripple effect across their entire development. So that they are not struggling with this constant sense of anxiety all the time because they feel ungrounded. They feel like they’re on the edge of a building all the time, like they’re about to fall, or they don’t have coordination to like be able to move the way that they need to.

That doesn’t feel great. Unfortunately, many kids don’t articulate this because it is the experience that they have always known. They don’t know anything different. But we see the result of that often in what we would call their quote unquote behaviors, that a kid might be aggressive, that they are struggling with big emotions.

Yeah. Being in a constant state of anxiety is going to do that. Oh, I wanna share this story of one of our connection Hive members. We work on re like all these reflexes in there, like we have all these activities. We work on sensory processing and this grandma that is, and we have a few grandmas also inside of the connection hive, which is awesome, that are just supporting their families and.

She also gets on our support calls very often, that we have every month, and her, her granddaughter has significant gravitational insecurity. She almost certainly has the Morrow reflex still retained. She does have an autism diagnosis and she has some developmental delays and so. This is, I am right, like literally right now.

I just got this message from this grandma yesterday. She kind of po she posted it in our community the day after the, the support call. And I was yet again amazed. Because this is the second update that I’ve had, with her in the month because we have talked through, okay, what, what needs to happen.

So she’s doing some of the Moro exercises. Very, very slowly with her. She has a really low tolerance for them, I think mostly just because it’s hard for her to tolerate and we want to be, doing this in a way that is never forceful, and is a way that is building connection. And so we’ve also talked a lot about that with her granddaughter and.

Kind of using an approach of doing, doing the things that her granddaughter likes to do, and then spending a few time, a few minutes trying some of these activities together. So this grandma has been so patient, uh, so I wanna, I’m saying that because she is setting some foundation for the progress that she has seen just in those activities.

With all of the snow that, much of the northern half of this country has, has seen over the last few months, they have tried to take her sled riding and she always gets off of it immediately and runs away. This grandma learned in the connection hive that, oh, this is gravitational insecurity. This isn’t, this isn’t just her attention here.

This isn’t her like, not wanting to do or understand an activity. This is scary for her being on this sled, even though she’s close to the ground and even though the sleds had large sides on them. So we had talked about what would help break down, start breaking down this gravitational security. And again, very interestingly, her granddaughter will get on a swing in a seated position.

So again, sometimes kids will do this. It does not mean that there’s no gravitational insecurity. So they started working there. They forgot about the sled and started taking baby steps, working on having her sit on this swing swinging and then moving into different positions on the swing, which is going to challenge her vestibular processing, but doing it slowly and just doing a little bit each day, starting with a movement that she was comfortable with so that she felt safe and secure.

I could not believe it, how quickly they saw results. In just a few days, she was able to get on the sled, wrote it for like, I think 20 minutes, even went down a small hill, not even just being pulled. Okay, now we’re challenging the vestibular sense even more. She was clearly enjoying it. She was clearly enjoying it.

Now this little girl does have a lot of other sensory sensitivities. She has texture sensitivities, and, so grandma’s doing some things to work on that too. So, needless to say, bath time is also really hard. And this is the update that I literally just got yesterday and I just, again, this is, it’s, it’s, I’m watching it unfold in real time as she shares these, as she shares these updates.

But she did something really brilliant. Uh, as well here that I wanna share. So, bath time, obviously there’s a lot of texture stuff going on, you know, like you are using a washcloth or soap. And if a kid is, has sensitivities to their touch or tactile system, they might hate bath time because of that. The water itself is a texture.

A lot of kids really struggle with the scrubbing of the hair, of soap getting in their eyes, or the smell of the soap. But another area again, that is so often overlooked is the vestibular sensitivity. So Grandma realized that this was an element among all the texture stuff and the tactile stuff that she did not like getting in the tub.

She’s sitting in a big tub. She doesn’t feel secure, and when she has a tip her head back to get her hair washed, she likely feels totally insecure because of she doesn’t know where her body is. That’s actually another important sign is if a child avoids tipping backwards to get a diaper change to rinse out their hair again, you’re just gonna see this in in smaller kids.

You, if you really watch, you will see it in older kids with how they kind of approach sitting down the ground or like laying in their bed at night, but they could feel very insecure and that can be a huge sign of this vestibular sensitivity. So grandma already knew this also about the bathtime, and so she, at, at four, she still fits in one of those little bumbo seats.

The Bumbo seat was a support, it helped her make, make her feel more secure. Okay, so this isn’t about building her vestibular processing. This is an example of really supporting the vestibular need. They didn’t fill up the whole tub. Instead they were, you know, kind of using a bucket and letting the faucet run.

She, the bath times were able to, they were able to get through them. They were able to get through them with that bumbo seat, but with the work that she’s been doing and working on the texture sensitivities, she just had a bath for the first time in a very long time without crying and getting upset and even enjoying it.

This is what’s possible when we combine using supports and. Helping the brain make new connections so that that sensory processing, so that retained reflex that might not be, that is either firing or the sensory processing that’s not working very efficiently, that we are helping to build those new connections.

I want you to know that that is possible for your child or the child that you’re supporting. And if you see these gravitational insecurities, you see these challenges. You have a tween or a teen or an 8-year-old or a 5-year-old that you’re like, oh my gosh, like I did see those things when they were little.

They do have struggles with reading. They do have struggles with anxiety and maybe some motor things. Again, it might not be every one of those things that they have trouble with, but if you’re seeing those correlations, I just want you to know that whatever age your child is. They can build these new connections in their brain and that they are capable, they are capable of doing, of doing this work.

And I, and I, and what I mean by doing this work is the work of building those brain connections and, and with the supports. Okay. So it’s, it’s so often a combination of these two things. That leads to really neuro affirming support and help for our kids. It has been so, so good to be with you. I can’t wait, to be back next time.

We have so many more exciting new topics coming. We’re gonna be talking a lot about executive functioning, coming up and making plans for some nutrition and picky eating and parent regulation coming, in the months to come as well. I’m so grateful that you are here if you haven’t yet. Hit subscribe so you never miss a new episode.

Share it with a friend. If you are thinking of a kid right now that you know has some of these challenges going on, send this episode the their way because we just don’t talk about this often enough. And if you’re looking for more help. For parents that lives in the connection Hive. You can get in monthly.

Get the personal support. Learn the tools to break down these sensitivities. We have an entire guide in there. We have the activities and for therapists. You can learn all of this inside of our therapist All Access membership. Both links are in the show notes. It’s been so good to be with you all today.

See you next time.