Sensory Integration Education

If your child has sensory issues around clothing or struggles with balance, body awareness or fine motor skills, they may find the daily activity of getting dressed in the morning quite challenging. This can lead to frustration, delays and emotional upset: for you and them. So how do you help your child with sensory differences to get dressed?

How Do Sensory Issues Affect Getting Dressed?

Sensory integration (or sensory processing) refers to processes in the brain and body that allow us to take the signals from our senses, make sense of those signals and respond appropriately. Sensory integration is essential in everything we need to do daily, such as getting dressed, eating, moving around, socialising, learning and working.

Individual differences in the way we process sensory information have the potential to make it difficult for individuals to do certain things or take part in certain activities. 

Getting Ready to Get Dressed

Before even thinking about clothing preferences involving texture, weight, fastenings, seams and labels, consider your child’s state when you expect them to get dressed. Does your child bounce out of bed early full of energy, or are they still sleepy when coaxed from their slumber? How ‘ready’ they are to get dressed will have a big impact on the success of the activity. They need to be calm enough to control their movements but also alert enough to manage the tasks of dressing themselves.

Let’s recognise that waking up in the morning, getting dressed and potentially going somewhere, such as school or nursery, is a big transition for children. So before even starting the dressing sequence, it can be helpful to prepare your child. A simple way that parents can learn to help regulate their child’s nervous system so they feel ready to get dressed is by using deep-pressure input. Sounds confusing? Deep pressure input can be achieved by big bear hugs or with massage: either performed by the child to themselves or by the parent, depending on the child’s preference. 

Use Deep Pressure Input To Dress With Less Stress

Jessica Kirton, Occupational Therapist and Advanced Sensory Integration Practitioner, shares ideas on how to use deep-pressure input to help your child with sensory processing differences to feel more calm and comfortable when dressing:

“Lots of sensory systems come into play in the daily act of getting dressed, including the touch system to register textures, our sense of body awareness to understand where our body parts are in space and the balance system which helps us avoid falling over whilst dressing. 

“Dressing can be challenging for children who are very sensitive to touch, for obvious reasons. But it can also be very challenging for children who are under-responsive to touch - so they may not register that their clothing is twisted or that their shoes are on the wrong feet. 

“Deep-pressure input is a great sensory strategy for helping children feel in a more ready state to get dressed. Deep-pressure input can come from the parent hugging the child or the child squeezing themselves in a self-hug. Your child may find it regulating to feel pressure from heavy blankets or cushions. It’s important to respect your individual child’s preferences.

“Deep-pressure massage can help both an under-responsive and an over-responsive child to dress with less stress. Massage also helps to calm the whole body and to get your child ready for dressing so that they are less bothered by other sensory input as it relaxes that nervous system.

“You can use massage with your child before they even start dressing. This can also help your child’s skin to be less sensitive to fabrics, as it calms the tactile system. When administering massage with your child, ensure you use firm, even pressure, keeping your hands along the body, and pushing down across each body part.

“An active child may not be able to sit through a whole body massage but even doing just parts, for example, the arms, can still be beneficial. 

“Communication is really important when administering massage. Using language that your child can understand, talk them through the massage, telling them what you’re doing. This is also a great way to teach them about their body and heighten their awareness of what they are feeling. The bonus of doing this is that better body knowledge helps with movement and coordination when it comes to getting dressed. 

“So why does massage work in this situation? Massage provides proprioceptive input which can help regulate our child’s sensory system. Massage calms the body by reducing the tension in the muscles - tension that could have been heightened by anxiety about getting dressed. Additionally, the rhythmic and predictable movements of massage are helpful for both calming your child and preparing them for a challenging task.”

More Sensory Strategies to Help Your Child With Sensory Differences to Get Dressed

You can learn more evidence-based strategies in Jessica’s on-demand, online course Sensory Strategies for Parents and Carers. This includes 2-hours of content and downloadable resources, covering:

• 5 Sensory Strategies to Dress Without Distress
• 7 Sensory Strategies to Manage Toileting Troubles
• 8 Sensory Strategies to Manage After School Meltdowns
• 5 Sensory Strategies to Create a Sensory Friendly Sleeping Environment

It’s aimed at parents of children up to 10 or 11 years old, but the suggestions can easily be adapted to suit older children. 

This section on dressing without distress covers:

• Using deep pressure strategies to calm and organise the nervous system
• A modern twist on age-old wrapping and swaddling techniques
• How to incorporate proprioceptive muscle and joint input safely and manageably for dressing
• Strategies to support balance and postural challenges
• Why using a mirror can help children to cope with the challenge of dressing more easily

Find out more about this amazing value Sensory Strategies for Parents and Carers course.

Further Resources That May Help Your Child With Sensory Differences to Get Dressed

For sensory clothing online shops, as well as professionals and suppliers of sensory toys and equipment, check out the Everything Sensory Directory.

For some tips relating to helping pre-schoolers dress in the morning, listen to the free Sensory Chat podcast Getting Dressed: A Sensory Perspective. Here, four international therapists draw on their personal and professional experience to chat over what difficulties your toddler could be experiencing around clothing and dressing along with some practical tips to try.

Many of us experience changes in mood as the sunlight hours and temperature changes with each season but for people with difficulties with sensory integration or processing (and co-existing diagnoses such as autism), the transition from one season to the next can present particular challenges.