Mary Kostka explains how fluorescent lights trigger sensory-sensitive children, who may hear the flicker or see the changes. Dim overhead lights, use lamps instead, and try galaxy or aurora lights at home. In public, sunglasses and hats help, or make a cart tent for shade.
Foreign sensory heroes. Welcome to week three. And this is all about calming the environment. So taking care of the environmental triggers, which are often overlooked and often the simplest solution. The first one we're going to talk about here for day 15 is lighting. So in the pictures that you can see below on the left, you see fluorescent lighting, a very brightly lit living room. And fluorescent lighting is one of the biggest triggers for our sensory kids. Have you ever been by a fluorescent light that's going out and how irritating it is to be by it? That's how they feel all the time. They can, like hear it, they can see flickers. They're just so sensitive. They can see and hear things that we can't see with the lighting. And you can see over on the right side where it's more lamps. And in our clinic, when a child is starting to get dysregulated, starting to go into a meltdown or in a meltdown, the first thing that we do is turn down the lights. It immediately starts to calm down the nervous system. They can't help it. It's just neurologically, when the lights get darker, just like the sun's going down, our body starts to wind down a little bit. And so it's one of the first things that we'll do. A lot of kids, we'll never have the light, the bright lights on. We'll just have. Most of the time, our clinic's pretty dark. Most of the time the lights are off and there's lamps on. Or you can see on the bottom right. Like, the galaxy light is really well received by the kids. It's important to not get like a fast moving disco light kind of one, but more of a slow wave. Galaxy light looks more like aurora borealis. That works a lot better. And so just think about that. Think about the environment you're in. Sometimes you have to adapt because say you're in a big store and they have fluorescent lighting. So your child can wear sunglasses or a hat, or you can make a little, a little tent out of a coat or a blanket on the shopping cart. But just know that that is probably like the biggest trigger environmentally that we see with the kids. Okay, fill out your worksheet question and I'll see you in the next video.
