5 Back to School Tips for Kids and Teens With Misophonia

For children and teens with misophonia, as well as their parents, living with misophonia is a challenging reality—this is further made harder by misophonia being often misunderstood by teachers, counsellors, and many other professionals. As a lesser-known disorder, kids and teens with misophonia have challenges that are often specific to their needs but not quite understood from an advocacy and accommodation standpoint. The following tips are meant to help kids and teens with misophonia cope with their challenging condition where otherwise normal sounds, such as chewing, whistling, sneezing, and pen-clicking, as well as others, cause an aversive reaction.

1. Be prepared to discuss misophonia and accommodations

While it can be daunting to access resources for misophonia, an important part of coping with misophonia at school is having a system in place to ensure that there is a plan for when misophonic moments happen. A specific accommodation plan may need to be developed by your child’s clinician, and while misophonia has no diagnostic code, other sensory impairments and anxieties often overlap and co-occur. Accommodating these co-occurring emotional responses is imperative to coping with misophonia.

2. Be prepared for the moment by arming your child/teen with tools

Being prepared for the moment — the inevitability that there will be triggering moments at school — means having tools that can be easily accessed by the child/teen. Tools like noise-cancelling headphones, earplugs, sensory-grips, and weighted lap pads can be helpful for both the triggering sounds and managing the physiological reaction to misophonia. These tools may be added as part of misophonia accommodations.

3. Bring information with you while discussing misophonia with teachers and practitioners

For teachers and clinicians looking to learn more about misophonia, it can be a challenging task to become educated on the needs of the child/teen with misophonia. The International Misophonia Foundation, a registered non-profit, offers free downloadable guides for parents, clinicians, and teachers who wish to learn more about the condition.

4. Offer a calming space at home

While the school environment is one that has a lot of things that cannot be controlled, the home environment offers far more opportunities for a sensory-safe space. Utilizing things like relaxing items and scents, and engaging in activities while not experiencing a misophonic moment, can help alleviate overall stress levels and thus help your child/teen cope better.

5. Provide a safe space for listening

For those with misophonia, especially younger children and teens, there can be a lot of shame and misunderstanding around why their bodies are causing this fight-or-flight reaction to sounds. In fact, adults also may have this feeling. Parents of teens and children with misophonia can provide reassurance that their child is not crazy, that they understand the severity of misophonia for the child, and that while the world may not understand, their immediate loved ones do.

Coping with misophonia at school is multi-faceted and changes depending on the individual’s triggers, learning needs, severity of responses, and other limitations such as classroom sizes, type of study, etc. For parents looking to help accommodate their children with misophonia in the school environment, this can often lead to friction. By going into the classroom with a dedicated plan, parents can mitigate as much of this distress as possible.