Hi folks,
Sorry for the long post.
We have twins who are 4. One of the twins has always required a lot more attention. She had digestion issues when she was a baby, and now has really bad eczema. The eczema makes her really uncomfortable, but it has slowly gotten better since trying different treatments and identifying food triggers. It really impacts her sleep and during flairups she is completely miserable.
She is social and very caring, and she is well developed verbally and physically. She has excellent fine motor skills and behaves very well at nursery. But she can't sleep by herself, she is an extremely picky eater, and she has very extreme meltdowns over very minor issues. Her meltdowns are intense and sometimes unpredictable - lots of uncontrolled screaming. We have attributed this behaviour to her health issues, but we just returned from a beach holiday that has made us think she maybe has sensory processing disorder. There was a lot of heat, smells, crowds, saltwater, etc... and she was melting down a lot. We did a lot of reading about child behaviour, and she seems to tick a lot of the boxes for sensory processing disorder. We have never heard of this before.
-HATES having her teeth brushed - she has to spit every couple of seconds because she doesn't like the toothpaste in her mouth.
-very difficult to feed as noted - she will not try new foods and there is a very small range of what she will eat (Thankfully it is mostly healthy stuff).
-really wants an adult next to her when she sleeps, and needs to rub her hand on our arm when falling asleep.
-freaks out when a little bit wet.
-freaks out when clothes don't feel right (e.g. slightly tangled socks)
-has unpredictable and INTENSE tantrums
-Does not handle routine changes well.
-dislikes bad smells more than other kids
All that being said, she is an angel most of the time. We are in the UK and have discussed this with the health visitor who observed her behaviour and she didn't think there was cause for concern given that she is social and developed as expected. The health visitor, like us, has thought her behaviours are probably caused by her bad eczema and digestion issues.
Does anybody else have children with similar behaviours? We are wanting to understand what we should do next. In the UK it is hard to access specialised medical experts (usually a really long wait list), but we are looking into private child psychologists too.
Any thoughts and advice would be very welcome. As noted, we have never thought this might be the issue until now.