A Caregivers Guide to Sensory Processing and Autism: Understanding How your Child Sees the World with Christine Adintori

In this episode, I'm taking you inside something that shapes every single moment of your child's experience but is so often overlooked: sensory processing. If your child melts down at toothbrushing, covers their ears at certain sounds, seeks out spinning objects, or seems not to notice when they're hungry or hurt, this episode will give you a whole new way to understand what's actually happening. I'm joined by Christine Adintori, occupational therapist and Senior Manager of Clinical Excellence at Cortica, to walk through what the science says about how autistic children take in and make sense of the world.

I walk you through the brain science behind the senses you've heard of and the ones you probably haven't (beyond the familiar five, there are three more, proprioception, vestibular, and interoception, that tell us where our body is in space, whether we're balanced, and what's happening inside us), and more importantly, what that means for how you can support your child every day. We get into why up to 97% of autistic individuals experience sensory differences, how those differences show up at every stage from infancy through adolescence, why sensory processing is now part of the diagnostic criteria for autism, and the single idea I want every parent to hold onto: all behavior is a response to sensory processing. When you ask what your child is experiencing, you get much closer to answering why they're doing what they're doing.

Christine also shares real stories from her work, including a child who couldn't tolerate toothbrushing until they found the right kind of input, and a little girl who went from avoiding the whiteboard entirely to writing with confidence, and what those breakthroughs teach us about seeing the whole child.