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Understanding Sensory Processing
Understanding Sensory Processing & Your Child’s Nervous System
Our brains are continuously receiving, organizing, and responding to sensory information from both outside of and inside of our bodies. This is the process by which we make sense of our world and our place in it. And it is a profoundly important lens when working to understand ourselves and our children.
Our sensory systems include:
Vision — how we process everything we are seeing
Auditory processing — how we process everything we are hearing
Tactile processing — how we process the boundary between our body and the rest of the world
Gustatory processing — how we process taste
Olfactory processing — how we process smell
Vestibular processing — how we relate to movement, balance, and gravity
Proprioceptive processing — how we process information from our muscles and joints that tell us where our body is in space and what it is doing
Interoceptive processing — our awareness of internal body sensations like hunger, thirst, breathing, toileting signals, emotions, and fatigue
Sensory integration is the brain’s ability to organize all of this information so that we can feel comfortable in our bodies, navigate our daily lives, and respond to our environment in ways that feel adaptive.
When children have sensory processing differences, they may experience the world as overwhelming, unpredictable, or exhausting. They are not choosing to be difficult, rather they are often working harder than we realize to process and respond to what is happening around them and within them.
At Sprout, we help children and families understand these differences and access strategies that support greater comfort, confidence, and participation.
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