Christopher, one of the first children to enjoy a Generation 2 zPods® bed, sits peacefully at the edge of his bed. Christopher’s mother used to have to wait outside the bedroom at night in case her son eloped, but now she has a hard time getting him out of the bed.
your sensory-challenged child, and there’s a strong chance that someone there will hand you a “sensory bag” with headphones, marble fidgets, noodle fidgets, tangle fidgets, and an official KultureCity VIP ID card. This kind of treatment may very well be for your child the same as someone offering you personally a full-body massage to get you nice and relaxed so you can enjoy a movie at the theater. Certainly, there’s more for us to understand about creating a more welcome space for all our loved ones who don’t take to the whole touch, taste, smell, hear, and see thing the way the rest of us do. But the growing awareness of SPD and the increasing options for accommodating it are encouraging. WHY SPD MATTERS AT NIGHTTIME If ever there’s a setting in which you’d like not to feel like you’re constantly having an out-of-body experience, it’s in the room where you sleep in at night. However, SPD doesn’t nec-
essarily let up just because your child and you are exhausted, which is why sleep issues are quite common among SPD-af- fected populations. There’s a lot of good advice out there for helping your child sleep better. Make sure that you and your child have a consis- tent bedtime routine with bedtime itself being the same every night. Turn off all screens in the leadup to bedtime. Keep your child’s room clean and distraction-free (or have him or her do it—good luck!). See that the room is dark at night (though a nightlight may be essential for certain children). Maintain the right temperature (different from child to child but critical) in your child’s room. Eliminate noise to the extent possible, in- cluding using noise-canceling headphones if your child will permit it. Make space between dinner and bedtime so that the body has time to digest food properly. (Incidentally, the name of the sense that detects digestion, hunger, and other inner- body sensations is called “interoception”—an oft-neglected
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