A Colorful View

Sing Happy Birthday? No You Won’t!

You spend all your time planning and coordinating their party. From the invites, to the cake design, from the new outfit all the way down to the matching shoes. Then their birthday is here, bring on the par-tay! You are more excited than your child, as you look at how everything came together. Then SPLAT like a pie in the face, that angelic happy face turns into a frowning face.

Happy birthday to you! Happy birth… “no no no,” Gio yells shaking his hands in the air at everyone to stop singing. He squeezes in between me and his dad while covering his ears. On the inside I’m like really Gio? This isn’t the reaction that I was expecting. I pick him up in my arms as we all continue singing. The rest of the time he has his face buried in my neck. After the song is over, I try to calm him by rubbing his back to assure him that it is going to be ok. I try to set him down, but his body is coiled around me tightly. I glance around the room and notice the uncomfortable looks from everyone. I give a side smirk then I pacify everyone by saying “he is just really shy.” I avoid any further eye contact as I announce that we are going to cut the cake. Once the party is over and everyone left, we try talking to him. We ask him why he got upset during the singing. All we get is a blank stare. We tell him that everyone was there to celebrate his birthday. We explain that singing that song is just a part of it, and we expected that he would get used to it.

REALITY CHECK…we realized that it wasn’t about the song, it was the noise level. We thought back on all the other times that he had reacted the same way. Why did we not realize this before? Whether it be singing, talking loudly, or cheering he didn’t like things that were loud. It was too much of a sensory overload for him. This occurred on his second birthday, so we hadn’t really started questioning his reactions at that point. I know some of you are reading this and thinking it’s a tradition to sing the birthday song. You might be thinking, oh well he needs to get over it. WRONG! I needed to get over it, because it wasn’t about me. Learn to pick and choose your battles like my mom always says. Singing the birthday song to my son is not a life necessity. It won’t cause him any harm if we don’t sing it. So, that is one battle that I decided not to fight. I encourage you to get to know and understand your child’s needs. Some of you might have a child like mine who sometimes can’t find the right words to verbally communicate with you. My son didn’t know how to say, “Mom, that noise is too loud it hurts my ears.” So I had to read his body language and figure it out for myself. Please pay attention, because knowing your sensory sensitive child’s triggers is important. Learning how to deal with them is even more important.

ALTERNATIVELY…we decided to tweak it a little bit and produced the same result, without him shutting down. On his third birthday we told everyone ahead of time that we would NOT be singing like last year, and only saying “Happy Birthday Gio!” one time. After that we would let him blow out his candles and that would be it and guess what it worked! He didn’t have a meltdown and he seemed to not mind us doing it that way. For his fourth birthday, to our surprise, he sang along with everyone.

Until next weeks post, I leave you with a quote.

“The more you’re loving and understanding, the more your kids will sing.” -Maxime Lagace