The Highly Sensitive Parent

The surprising, opposite-of-a-horror-story tale of a highly sensitive parent

Jun 27, 2023

This is a follow-up to The Highly Sensitive Writer…a little series celebrating sensitivity!

FYI: This is a post about parenting. If that topic isn’t for you—skip it! If you are experiencing infertility, this might be a better read.

Y’all I have something to admit: I don’t write about parenting as much as I had planned because I mostly find it really awesome and generally fun and not too challenging. Ugh. These qualities do not tend to make for great, insightful writing. Where’s the hardship?! Where’s the struggle?! Where’s the dramatic tension?! But recently I was talking to my friend/editor/Substack guru

Erin Shetron

and I confided this information, and she said, “oh my god, everyone these days is opening up about the difficulties of parenting, and that’s great, but we’ve swung so far in that direction that all you hear today are the horror stories!”

Which made me think: maybe I could share something like the opposite of a horror story. Not to say the horror stories don’t happen to me—only yesterday my toddler screamed and periodically threw his body onto the floor for a full forty-five minutes after not being allowed to drink directly from a Spindrift can (even Spindrift in a sippy cup could not quell the storm). Or there was that time I spent twenty hours alone in the ER with my son because of an apple chunk in his airway that turned out to not exist. But these are not the dominating experiences of parenting for me. What dominates is a sense of fun and ease, and as a highly sensitive person (HSP), this is surprising. Shouldn’t I be overwhelmed by the extreme amount of stimuli a toddler provides? Shouldn’t I be exhausted and barely holding it together most of the time? Shouldn’t I be constantly afraid for his safety—don’t they say that once you have a child you’ve mortgaged your heart for the rest of your life?

So here are some thoughts about the ways being sensitive has actually helped me parent with more ease. Now, I cannot write this without making all the requisite disclaimers: I have a generally healthy child, I only have one child, I’ve only been a parent for twenty-one months, I have childcare five days a week, I have a highly involved husband who also loves parenting, I have a flexible work schedule. These are all really important factors that shape my experience. But I am also an HSP with a history of anxiety and depression and a moderate pessimist to boot, which suggests I might struggle a bit more than I am with this. Of course I am not claiming I have the whole thing figured out, all done, see you in eighteen years (it appears that even the French don’t know what they’re doing). But let me share some factors that I think has created this bit of magic for me at this point in time.

I do not read parenting advice online

This was not a conscious decision, but rather a habit built from managing my high sensitivity over time—as a rule I mostly stay away from the internet, and I make any interactions with it very intentional. The fact is, before my conversation with Erin, I wasn’t aware that people are sharing parenting horror stories in spades online. Similarly, I am mostly not aware of the current trends and tactics and tips and tricks. I do not regularly see videos of perfect mommies feeding baby the perfect milk brand using the perfect straw that will not damage baby’s teeth (is this a thing? I think I bought a baby cup once and the packaging said the straw was good for teeth…). I also do not take in loads of conflicting information about how to parent best, sowing confusion and setting a bar that I could absolutely never reach.

Instead, I let information trickle to me through conversations with friends and older parents whom I admire. I have read some sections of a few (literally three) books on parenting that came recommended from said admired parents. From this information, I have been able to form some personal ideas about what style of parent I want to be, but also I basically have no idea about what the internet would say about my approach (YOU GAVE YOUR TODDLER SPINDRIFT?!? DON’T YOU KNOW CARBONATION LEACHES CALCIUM FROM BONES?!? Just imagining here).

I lean hard into my intuition and EQ

So, like, if I’m not getting answers from the internet, how do I make real-time decisions about how to act and what to do?! Toddlers generate new surprises at a shocking rate. I think that eliminating the enormous influx of information on “how to parent correctly” has left space for me to actually tune in to what just feels right. This is something that HSPs are particularly skilled at doing, as I wrote about here. So he’s biting my arm again: what reaction, based on all my twenty-one months of experiences with and observations about this child, and all my thirty-five years of living as a human person, seems good to me? I have tried putting him in another room and said “we need to take some space.” I tried saying firmly “WE NEVER BITE PEOPLE.” Do I want feedback from you on these approaches? No, I absolutely do not.

The feedback I get is from him and me! I get to try something like a “time out” and see how he responds, and see how I feel. If all the various opinions on time outs were swirling in my head, and if I were ruminating on all the ways I could be damaging him for life—(and I do have an inkling about the level of criticism this could generate in certain circles)—then I would not be as free to do my thang. And generally, I trust that my thang will not damage him because I’m highly attuned to his needs and reactions, and I believe that I’ll be able to tell if things start going south.

It was not crying or picky eating or tantrums that scared the living bejeezus out of me…Not sleeping was the number one most scary thing to me about having a kid. So I decided to invest in it.

I (mostly) do not try to pack tons of things into small amounts of time

Look, anyone who is highly sensitive and/or has experienced any kind of chronic illness or pain has honed this skill: do less. It’s so hard, because there are so many great things to do, and our culture is very doing-centric, but forced slowness and forced doing less is one of the gifts and curses of these mental and physical states. I have found that my time with my toddler tends to be joyful if all I’m doing is being with him. It tends to be stressful if I’m also simultaneously trying to make a grocery list and prepare for a trip. With this learning in mind, I try to reserve 5-6:30 pm each day for exclusive mom-kid time, spanning the time I pick him up from daycare to the time my husband gets home for dinner (that sounded so fifties…except he cooks dinner most nights because he’s rad). This highlights the importance of childcare and partnership in my story—for a parent who has the kiddos all day, this type of unitasking wouldn’t be possible. For me, it makes the whole thing fall into place.

In order to make space for unitasking, I try not to plan too many things and I leave a lot of time for preparation. More often than not, we wake up with no plans on a Saturday or Sunday. If I’m going on a week-long trip with my toddler on Friday, I probably start the packing process on Tuesday. Things need to be found in backs of closets, or washed, or picked up at the store. Clothes will have gone missing, the white noise machine will be out of batteries. This is related to the concept of giving life maintenance tasks the time they actually take, which I wrote about here. In any case, my approach here isn’t a moral statement about the value of housework but rather the way I can stay happy and energetic as the parent of a toddler.

This is all very top of mind right now because I really shat the bed on this whole thing this month. Our family had four big events planned in June alone: two trips to see family, a week-long out of town conference for my husband, and a project in the woods, and damn, trying to squeeze it all in has made every aspect of the month way less enjoyable for me. I have had more moments of peak stress, tiredness, losing my cool, and periods of generalized mild sickness. When my husband got COVID mid-month and had to isolate, it felt like everything was crashing down—we hadn’t left space for the totally normal human experience of getting sick. I knew going into the month that it was set up badly, structurally, but we didn’t feel like anything could be cut. Lesson learned, again. And again, and again.

In the area that mattered most to me, I invested and prioritized myself

Sleep. It is the single biggest factor that I know the makes the ultimate difference between me being a loving, present person and a complete monster. Therefore, the experience of getting pregnant and having strangers on the street stop to tell me to “get ready to never sleep again!” was…horrifying. Not sleeping was the number one most scary thing to me about having a kid.

So, I decided to invest in it. Babies and toddlers are their own people and cannot be programmed, and I knew some of this would be up to genes and fate, but I was determined to do everything in my god-given power to enable myself to sleep vis-a-vis my child sleeping. And consistent with my aforementioned approach of staying away from the internet, I hired a sleep expert for $500 to handhold us through the process of sleep training our baby at the earliest possible time. Could I have gotten the information for free on the internet? Yes, but there is that pesky problem with the internet: wayyyy too many opinions. I did not want to hear about the potential connection between sleep training and insecure attachment later in life or whatever, what I wanted was the most viable, most well-proven approach for getting babies to go to sleep and stay asleep, whatever that was, so long as it struck me as generally fine for the baby. And, frankly, even if there were some downsides for my baby, as long as they seemed relatively minor, I was willing to do it anyways because of the vast, vast upside for me and by proxy also for everyone in my family.

The sleep training worked like a goddamn miracle, and that $500, which felt exorbitant at the time, now feels like one of the best investments of my life. It was not crying or picky eating or tantrums that scared the living bejeezus out of me, and I didn’t hire a bench of experts to ensure I did each meaningful early life transition perfectly, that would be so stressful. What scared me was the idea of not sleeping for years, and so I focused there.

I have a really clear sense of my thresholds of tolerance

Another gift of high sensitivity is that once you learn about your own personal thresholds you become highly adept at managing them (see above: sleep). On this recent comment thread, a number of HSPs talked about the time in their life when they realized that watching scary or sad movies was a materially different experience for them than for other people, something far more intense that left their nervous systems frayed and required a lot of recovery time. Most of us seem to have made the same call: avoid scary movies. This type of self knowledge, I’ve found, is super valuable when parenting a toddler. For me there exists a clear line—one too many hours of childcare, one too many screams, one too many peas thrown on the floor—after which everything deteriorates very fast. In the best cases, when I feel myself approaching this line, I can notice it, vocalize it, and ideally remove myself from the situation for ten or fifteen minutes to reset. If there is no one else around, I have been experimenting with telling my toddler that mommy is going to sit for few minutes and asking him to go get a book in the other room. This approach is hit or miss right now, but I like the direction it’s going. Again, I have no idea if this tactic is age-appropriate, if it is recommended, if it is criticized, if people would call me neglectful or resourceful, and I don’t need to know.

So there it is! Not a horror story. I particularly hope that some of the prospective parents out there will find this encouraging. I found the general vibe around pregnancy surprisingly negative, with all those admonishments about sleep. Even now, each milestone seems to be met with a warning, “just wait until he can walk!,” “just wait until he can argue with you!”

Nah. Don’t listen. Your experience will be your experience. It will have hard parts and easy parts. Things other people find hard might not be hard for you, and vice versa. You might be like “fuck this whole thing it’s awful.” Or, like me, you might be like “huh, this is actually sometimes easy and fun.”

COMING THURSDAY: The third and final installment of my story about being a highly sensitive woman trying to raise millions in Silicon Valley. People are calling it “edge of the seat stuff,” “fascinating,” and “a wild ride!” Catch up on Part I and Part II of Faking it in the Valley (both under 15 mins).

I’d love to know…

If you’re someone who is highly sensitive like me, I’m sure many things in life have been surprisingly difficult compared to your peers. What things have been surprisingly easy or have come surprisingly naturally?
Is there an area of your life you prefer to keep away from conventional wisdom? Where do you find yourself trusting your intuition above the various opinions out there?
If you’re a highly sensitive parent, how have you been able to find pockets of time for decompression, especially when you’re starting to get overstimulated?

I’ll meet you in the comments! (Albeit a little more slowly this time, I’m currently on the second of the aforementioned trips to see family, whew!)