Ming @ Agents of Speech explains why children cover their ears: frustration and avoidance when overwhelmed. Forcing sound exposure backfires, triggering biting, hitting, and screaming. Instead, introduce sensory input slowly to raise their tolerance without escalation.
Escaping. When you see a child who doesn't want to work anymore, they will cover the years and run off. Sometimes when you call their name, they get mad, and then they cover the years, they get frustrated. So it's two things. Number one is frustration. Number two is are they trying to escape from a situation? When they're trying to escape from a situation, it will look like they are distressed, they're frustrated, and they're using this as a means of telling you that they don't want to hear they had enough. Let's talk about what you can do. The first thing is always to prevent it. Prevention is do not flood your child. What I mean by flooding. So a lot of parents think, oh, just because your child cannot take certain sounds stimuli too much, you decide to train them by flooding. That sensation, what's going to happen is going to create more frustration with your kid, and it's going to actually heighten their defense mechanism. That's where you see a lot of biting, like hitting, running away, screaming happens. You don't want that. You really do not want that. So what I did, how the parents did, was to introduce these stimuli, slowly increasing the threshold slowly, slowly, slowly.
