Could my kid have synesthesia or is he just a weird kid?
Asked by
Seek (
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January 25th, 2017
My son, who is eight years old, sometimes says things that make me think he might be synesthetic. I’m not terribly well-versed in the phenomenon, but I’d like to see what you guys think.
When he feels (with his fingers) or looks closely at sandpaper, he says he feels nauseated, like he’s going to vomit. The first time he mentioned this was to years ago, and since then I’ve casually asked him to toss me a sanding block or help me clean up, and it’s always the same. He actually goes pale. This has happened occasionally with other similar textures, too, like bricks and cement.
Today, he said a drink of flat soda tasted “pink” to him. That’s new… It’s the first time he’s ever compared flavor to color, to me. I asked for clarification and he said when he drank it all he could think was pink.
Anyone familiar? Should I be buying books on synesthesia? Is my kid just weird?
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6 Answers
He’s also extremely averse to playing in the dirt, digging in the sand at the beach, stuff like that.
@Seek I do not know anything about this “synesthesia” but I know more than a lot about Sensory Processing Disorder as my youngest was diagnosed with it after years of fighting with him thinking he too was weird or merely a bad kid.
I offer this because my son HATED to wear the clothes we would dress him in…when we dressed him and left the room we would come back and find him in just his snuggies. At meal time it was a colossal battle as he would refuse the normal food we tried to feed him. Upon his diagnosis, we came to find out he couldn’t stand the seams, textures and how they felt against his skin and he would only wear fleece sweats. The food on the other hand was not that he didn’t like the food…it was the way it felt in his mouth that would send him over the edge if we insisted he eat it. He too would freak out if he got dirt or spilled anything on him. He basically sees, feels, hears and tastes things at a much higher level than normal people. His senses were and still are on high alert and often overload.
There is a book called The Out-of-Sync Child that saved out sanity and helped us help our son through some difficult tumultuous years. I hope you find some answers.
Rockso has a similar issue. He feels sick when he feels certain textures. And really loves others. He must have been about 7 when we were down in Oslo and there was a granite monument of some sort. He was hopping around and we were waiting on getting picked up with my wheelchair bound MIL and I looked over and saw him with his pants down, rubbing his bare bottom on the smooth granite. Yeah. Weird kid.
My son was also a kid with Sensory Processing Disorder. He would not eat certain foods because of the texture. He hated swings.
We had an Occupational Therapist that recognized what was going on, and after three years of OT from age 4 to 7, he had overcome much of it.
To this day, though, he can’t stand carbonated beverages, the fizz in his mouth drives him crazy.
A lot of people have it but to a lesser degree than is clinically recognized. My wife has a thing with temperature, indoor lights make her feel “hot” even when there is no measurable heat from them. She gets “cold” when tasting certain foods. It started to happen after a traumatic experience for her. Myself, I can see musical notes in color but at nowhere near the degree that the clinical synesthetics do. I strongly suspect that we all have partially crossed sensory lines but most of us just never notice.
My daughter tells me she knows the gender of numbers, and that she knows which ones are nice and which ones are not. She is in her teens.
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