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My Highly Sensitive Child on Vacation
There is only one thing more challenging in the journey of parenting a highly sensitive child: Parenting a sensitive child on a “holiday.”
A holiday, as I recall, is meant to be relaxing and re-energising. There is no fixed wake up time, no fixed bedtime, no fixed mealtime… On holiday, you see what the day or weather brings, and you make plans accordingly.
Warning: This is recipe for disaster for a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) who thrives on routine and predictability (so much so, that one of my daughter’s favourite pastimes is drawing pictogram schedules of the day).
For our winter break, we planned to return “home” to India for a month. It was an intense undertaking as we’d not been back since we “fled” from the coronavirus in 2020 to come to The Netherlands (see Back to the Future).
We started our journey in a rather polluted New Delhi, where we entered straight into an Indian wedding. I was hesitant about this for several reasons:
- People were hugging and kissing to no end — even though Delta’s fast and furious cousin, Omicron, had entered the city.
- We were all highly jet lagged
- It was COLD which meant one dreaded word to my highly sensitive daughter: PANTYHOSE.
