The Understory

Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish

Spring 2026 | Issue 30

The Child Who Feels Everything: Highly Sensitive Kids, Neurodivergence,
and the Nervous System

For parents of children and teens who experience the world more intensely than most

Claire, a parent I work with, tells the story of her daughter Mara from the very beginning.

Mara was a few weeks old, with an ordinary newborn diaper rash. But when Claire went to clean her, Mara made a sound neither Claire nor her husband had ever heard from an infant: a sharp intake of breath, a holding, a suspension of everything. They looked at each other. They called 911.

A truck of firefighters came. They tracked snow and slush through our front door, down the hallway, all the way to her room, leaving a trail of mud and ice through our house. They examined her carefully. Their diagnosis: diaper rash. Desitin to the rescue.

Claire tells this story now with laughter. But she also tells it because it captures something true about parenting a highly sensitive child from the very beginning: the intensity of their experience can catch you completely off guard. The response seems out of proportion. You don’t yet have a framework for what you’re seeing. And so you call 911.

Most parents of highly sensitive children have their own version of this story. This newsletter is an attempt to give you the framework Claire didn’t have in that moment, and that so many parents are still looking for.

Part One

What Is a Highly Sensitive Person?

A trait, not a disorder

In the mid-1990s, psychologist Dr. Elaine Aron identified a trait she called Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS). She found it in roughly 15 to 20% of the population, present across cultures, across species, and across history. She called people with this trait Highly Sensitive Persons, or HSPs. And she was clear from the beginning: this is not a disorder. It is a trait.

She organized it around four characteristics, remembered by the acronym DOES:

What This Looks Like in Daily Life

If you are the parent of a highly sensitive child, you probably recognize some version of these:

•The clothing label that has to come out of every single shirt. Wool that is physically unbearable. Seams in socks that derail a morning.

•Tears that well up at certain music, seemingly out of nowhere, before the child can even name why.

•A profound connection to animals, an ability to sense what an animal needs or feels before the adults in the room have noticed anything.

•A child who wakes at night worrying about someone else: a friend who seemed sad, a grandparent who is aging, a news story overheard at dinner.

•Digestive sensitivity: dairy, gluten, certain foods that the body simply rejects.

•Sensitivity to crowds, to the emotional tone of a room, to facial expressions that flicker across someone’s face for half a second. This is as true in boys as in girls, though in girls it may be more expected or accepted. In boys, the same sensitivity is more likely to be missed, dismissed, or labeled as something else entirely.

•A child who cannot be rushed through a transition, no matter the social pressure, no matter who is waiting. Not defiance. Not laziness. A nervous system that simply cannot shift gears on demand.

•Questions that stop you mid-sentence: about death, about fairness, about why the world works the way it does. From a seven-year-old, at breakfast.

Mara had many of these. She still does, Claire says. The dairy sensitivity, the deep attunement to others, the ability to read Claire’s emotional state without a single word being spoken. She also had, when she was younger, an ability to perceive things beyond what most of us can see, a window into something more. She closed that window over time, as sensitive children often do, learning which parts of themselves the world could hold and which parts needed to be kept quiet. That closing is worth paying attention to. We will come back to it.

Orchids and Dandelions

Researchers Jay Belsky and W. Thomas Boyce developed what they called Differential Susceptibility Theory, and gave it a metaphor that has stayed with me since I first encountered it: orchids and dandelions.

Dandelion children are hardy. They grow in sidewalk cracks, in poor soil, in neglect. They are not unaffected by their environment, but they are resilient across a wide range of conditions. Most children, roughly, are dandelions.

Orchid children are different. In poor conditions, they wilt. The research is consistent on this: highly sensitive children in stressful, unpredictable, or unsupportive environments show the worst outcomes of any group. But in rich conditions, in warm, attuned, predictable environments, the same children show outcomes that exceed those of their dandelion peers. They do not just survive. They flourish extraordinarily.

The sensitivity that makes your child seem fragile is the same sensitivity that, in the right conditions, will make them extraordinary.

This matters for how we parent. Not as pressure, but as orientation. The question shifts from "how do I toughen my child up?" to "what conditions help my child flourish?" Those are very different questions, and they lead to very different places.

The Lookouts

We live in a culture that, until recently, has had very little patience for sensitivity. Hurry up. Toughen up. Don't overthink it. Stop being so emotional. Be productive. The implicit message, delivered a thousand times in a thousand small ways, is that the sensitive child is a problem to be managed.

But consider this: in the days before cities and screens and 24-hour safety, when a group of humans camped together in the dark, someone had to be on lookout. Someone had to notice what was out of the ordinary. What sound didn't belong. What shift in the air suggested threat. What subtle change in the environment meant the group needed to move.

That was the sensitive person. The one who felt everything. The one who noticed what others had already tuned out. The one who could not simply switch off their perception and sleep soundly. The group could not survive without them.

The world still can't. The sensitive souls among us are the ones who notice what is being missed, who feel what others have learned to numb, who ask the questions no one else thought to ask. They are the artists, the healers, the advocates, the people who walk into a room and immediately know something is wrong and have the courage to name it.

The culture is beginning to recognize this. The neurodiversity movement, the growing research on emotional intelligence, the shift in how the most innovative organizations recruit and build teams, all of it is moving toward a recognition that the people who feel and perceive and process deeply are not liabilities. They are assets. Not in spite of their sensitivity. Because of it.

Your child is not behind. Your child is a lookout. The question is whether we can build a world that knows how to work with them.

Part Two

HSP and Neurodivergence

Where the lines blur, and where they matter

Here is a question parents often arrive at, sometimes after years: is my child highly sensitive, or is something else going on? And the honest answer is: it can be both. In fact, in my clinical experience working with children with dyslexia, almost all of them fell into the HSP category as well. Sensitivity and learning differences travel together more often than most people realize.

Lily: The Singer Who Couldn't Get Moving

Lily was seven or eight when I first worked with her. She had ADD, the inattentive kind, and she also had a gift for singing that stopped rooms. She could feel what animals were experiencing before anyone else had noticed the animal was distressed. She was deeply, extraordinarily attuned to everyone around her.

And she could not get going. There is no gentler way to put it. On a camping trip, a whole group of parents and children stood waiting while Lily got ready to leave. It took a very long time. Not because she didn't care about the people waiting. She cared enormously. But her nervous system could not be hurried through the transition of leaving one place and entering another. Her ADD made initiating hard. Her sensitivity made the shift itself hard. And her awareness of everyone's impatience made it harder still.

What looked like inconsiderate behavior from the outside was, from the inside, a nervous system doing everything it could. Lily is a good example of something important: the overlap between HSP and ADD is real, and it shows up differently than either condition alone. The sensitivity amplifies the ADD. The ADD amplifies the overwhelm.

Noah and His Brother: Two Boys, One Womb

Noah was a twin. His brother was rough-and-tumble: physical, loud, impulsive, the kind of boy who runs into things and bounces back laughing. His family later came to understand that his brother had ADHD, the hyperactive-impulsive presentation, the kind that is hard to miss.

Noah was easier to miss. He was quiet. Kind. A little sad, often tired. He could feel other people's emotions the way some people feel weather changes, as something physical, arriving in his body before his mind had named it. He pondered big ideas: about the ethics of how children get assessed and labeled, about the philosophical questions that came up in his gaming, about the nature of consciousness and fairness and what we owe each other.

He also had ADD, the inattentive kind. But because he wasn't running into walls, because he sat still and seemed to be paying attention, his particular way of moving through the world got less attention. Same family. Same womb. Radically different nervous systems. This is the thing about sensitivity: it is not a product of parenting. It is wiring. And it presents differently in every child.

Where HSP and Neurodivergence Overlap

HSP and neurodivergent children share a number of experiences:

•Sensory overload in loud, bright, or chaotic environments•Difficulty with transitions and new environments•Strong emotional reactions that seem disproportionate from the outside•Deep attunement to the emotional tone of a room•Strong values and a fierce sense of justice, often from a very young age

Where They Diverge

For HSPs, sensory sensitivity is a temperament trait. It is part of how they are wired, but it does not come bundled with the broader neurodevelopmental profile that autism or ADHD involves. For autistic children, sensory differences are part of a wider pattern that also affects social communication, executive function, and the ways the brain organizes experience. For children with ADHD, the core challenge is executive function: regulating attention, managing impulse, initiating tasks.

The complication is masking. Many autistic children, especially girls, learn very early to camouflage their autistic traits in order to fit in. They study social rules. They practice facial expressions. They perform neurotypicality at tremendous cost to themselves. By the time they reach a clinician, they may look like a highly sensitive, anxious child rather than an autistic one. The HSP label can fit well enough that no one looks further. And then the child grows up without the specific supports and understanding that would have helped.

A note on anxiety

The line between HSP, anxiety disorder, and anxious attachment is genuinely blurry, and I say this as someone who has spent years thinking about it in the children and families I work with. A highly sensitive child is more vulnerable to anxiety because they process threat more deeply. But not every anxious sensitive child has an anxiety disorder. And not every anxious attachment pattern is rooted in HSP. These distinctions matter for treatment. They do not always resolve cleanly from the outside.

When to Seek a Neuropsychological Evaluation

Environmental adjustments and attuned parenting go a long way for HSP children. But there are signs that suggest something more specific may be going on and that a full neuropsychological evaluation is warranted:

•Your child holds it together at school and falls apart at home, consistently. This school-home gap is a significant clinical signal.

•Persistent difficulty starting tasks, organizing, or shifting attention, beyond what sensitivity alone explains.

•Social communication that feels qualitatively different, not just shy or sensitive but genuinely at sea in reading or participating in the unwritten rules of peer interaction.

•Anxiety or depression that is worsening rather than responding to environmental support.

•Reading, writing, or processing that lags significantly behind the child's evident intelligence and verbal ability.

A school evaluation is a starting point, but it is not the same as a full clinical neuropsychological assessment. If questions remain unanswered, a licensed psychologist with training in neurodevelopmental conditions is the next step. A diagnosis does not limit a child. It opens doors: to accommodations, to self-understanding, and to support that is specific rather than generic.

Part Three

Befriending the Nervous System

What parents can do, and why it starts with themselves

Ingrid and Felix

Ingrid grew up in Norway, in a family and culture where emotional restraint was not coldness but dignity. You did not burden others with your feelings. You got on with things. You were capable and self-sufficient, and you showed it by not needing much.

She brought all of that with her when she became a mother. She works as a paralegal, deadline-driven and detail-oriented, not much room in the workday for feelings. And then she comes home to Felix.

Felix is eight. He plays soccer, and he comes home from practice sometimes in genuine distress, not because he played badly but because he noticed a teammate being left out, or because the energy of the group was too much, or because the coach raised his voice and it landed in Felix's body like a physical impact. One afternoon he declared that soccer was unbearable. Not the sport itself but the whole emotional environment of it.

Ingrid does not know what to do with this. Part of her wants to say: toughen up. This is what the world is like. Another part of her recognizes, dimly, that something she suppressed in herself is showing up fully formed in her son, and that it makes her uncomfortable in ways she cannot quite name. And a third part is simply tired, having held herself together all day at work, and does not have much left to give.

Ingrid is not a bad mother. She is a mother whose own nervous system was shaped by a very particular set of experiences and cultural expectations, and who is now being asked to co-regulate with a child whose nervous system works completely differently from everything she was taught. That is a real and significant challenge. And it is not solved by strategies alone.

What Co-Regulation Actually Means

Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, offers one of the most useful frameworks for understanding what happens when a sensitive child's nervous system is overwhelmed. When children feel safe and connected, they operate from what Porges calls the social engagement system: calm, curious, able to think and communicate and learn. When they feel threatened or overwhelmed, that system goes offline. Fight, flight, or shutdown takes over. And no strategy, no matter how well-designed, reaches a child whose nervous system is in survival mode.

Co-regulation is the process by which one nervous system helps another find its way back to safety. A regulated parent, one whose own nervous system is not in survival mode, can be a genuine resource for a dysregulated child. Not by having the right words. By having the right physiological state. The body communicates this directly, through tone of voice, through the relaxation or tension of the face, through the quality of presence.

This is why the work starts with the parent. Not as blame, but as biology. Ingrid cannot give Felix what she has not yet learned to give herself.

A Note from My Own Experience

I am an HSP myself. I spent much of my early life trying to overcome it, building armor against it, learning to function in a world that did not have a great deal of patience for the way I experienced things. And when I have watched sensitive children in my work, including children whose parents are HSP themselves, I have seen that same flinch. A part of the parent wanting to protect the child from what they know sensitivity can cost. A part of them trying, sometimes, to toughen the child up.

Those parts have good reasons. They are trying to protect the child the only way they know how, using the tools that were built to protect the parent. That is not a failure. That is a very human response.

But the work of becoming the parent a sensitive child needs is, in large part, the work of befriending your own sensitivity first. Of recognizing that the armor was necessary then and may not be necessary now. Of learning that you can feel things fully and survive them. Claire is doing that work. When a parent does it, something shifts in how the child experiences them. Sensitive children feel it. They always do.

This Summer

Beyond Behavior: The Regulation Roadmap

This summer's course was built for parents like Ingrid. And for parents like me. For anyone who has a sensitive child and is reckoning with what that asks of them, not just in strategies but in their own nervous system, their own history, their own capacity to be present in the hard moments.

The course brings together three frameworks: Mindful Self-Compassion, Polyvagal Theory, and Internal Family Systems. Together they help you understand what is happening in your nervous system and in your child's, and how to become the steady, attuned presence that an orchid child needs to flourish.

The sensitivity that feels like a burden right now is the same sensitivity that, in the right conditions, makes these children extraordinary. The conditions begin with you.

Coming up next: We return to Belle. She has her GED. She has tried two jobs and come home twice. The diploma question is behind her. Now the question is: what supports exist in New Mexico for neurodivergent young adults who need a path from the couch to work? It turns out there are more than most families know.

Getting Clearer on Your Child's and Family's Situation

If reading this brought something into focus that has been blurry for years, that clarity deserves a real conversation. In a free 30-minute consultation we think through what your particular child needs and what support might actually look like: for them, for you, or for both. The question parents most often arrive with is: will this actually help? The honest answer is: it depends on what we find in that first conversation. Which is exactly why it's free.

With compassion, Janine

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"Whether you're just beginning to explore neurodivergence, feeling overwhelmed by the journey, or ready to build a sustainable path forward—you don't have to navigate this alone. Together, we'll turn today's challenges into catalysts for transformation."

With warmth and hope,

Janine Johnston
Founder, ARCC Coaching