By K. Sayford-Wilson

For some families, Halloween takes some extra planning. For those of us who have children with special needs, Halloween can be a little more “tricky.” Many of us have children with some severe sensory problems who respond to the ghoulish and frightful images of Halloween with more extreme reactions than typical children do, and aren’t as easily calmed by the rational explanations that adults tend to give. My husband and I had spent the month of October working to calm our youngest child regarding even the happy smiling ghost images of Casper and his friends, and it took a week for her to accept that the cartoon characters of SpongeBob and his pals in their Halloween garb would not hurt her. We finally got her to accept “happy smiling pumpkins” and kept repeating “no ghosts” many times each day.

So Halloween, with its “scare you out of your wits” traditions, presented a major challenge for us as parents. Our youngest child has sensory integration problems with developmental delays and also a speech disorder called developmental apraxia. These challenges limit her ability to process information, so the way in which she understands information is different from the way other children would understand information. Telling a typical child that a scary, angry-looking skeleton half-buried in the ground is only plastic might work. Telling a special needs child with sensory integration problems and a speech disorder that it is plastic and will not hurt her - may not make any sense to her. The child may not be able to handle the sensory overload and may just run away (ours did).

Imagine you are overly tired from an 18-hour day at work, everyone talking at you, making demands on you all day, no time to rest, bright lights, loud noises, constantly in motion. By the end of the day, you’re exhausted and you just want to go into a quiet room and not be bothered. We imagine that may be how children with sensory integration problems feel. If you also have a speech disorder and can’t tell people what is bothering you, why you’re upset, it’s even more frustrating.

Combine that with being scared and overwhelmed on Halloween, and you’ve got one terrified, freaked-out child.

On Halloween, we avoided all houses with any scary decorations or music - and avoided all people in scary costumes. When our child started whining about “go home,” we honored her request. We wanted her to experience the fun of Halloween - and she did - but without the scariness that Halloween can also bring. Our oldest child spent Halloween at a trusted friend’s house, so as not to be ‘limited’ by our youngest child’s challenges.  It’s a fine line to walk sometimes when caring for a child with special needs, but we’re always finding ways to let her live a more ‘normal’ life while still testing her limits and pushing her to try new things. •

K. Sayford-Wilson is a freelance writer who is involved with a special needs children’s program, her children’s schools, and early intervention agencies, and she advocates for special needs kids in Philadelphia.

Image credit eNil via Flickr