The Highly Sensitive Parent: Be Brilliant in Your Role, Even When the World Overwhelms You

by Elaine N. Aron

Some of you looked forward very much to being a parent and have chosen to have more than one child. You may have even chosen to study child development or work in the field of child care. Others of you were more ambivalent. Perhaps you leaned toward becoming a parent in order not to miss the experience, or even to please a partner. But rearing children may not be your true calling.

Drudgery is the work HSPs especially dread. For some people, as long as they are paid and can count on using their money for some fun or the family when the day is done, that is good enough, even if the hours go slowly due to repetitive work or not enough work to do. That’s drudgery. It has no meaning in itself, and it’s deadly to HSPs.

“All change is loss, and all loss must be mourned.”

The researchers found that almost nothing a parent did would help during a tantrum, although the vast majority tried. It may be that the more anxious you are to try to stop it, the more you will signal that your child can prevail.

All HSPs find social interactions especially stimulating because in any social interaction, we are processing deeply what is being said and what we want to say back while feeling empathy, whether we want to or not. Then we are also noticing all the subtleties in what is going on around the interaction, within the interaction, and in the other person. All of this means that social stimulation is the source of probably the majority of the stimulation we deal with in life, and therefore the source of much of our feeling overstimulated.