Our Story

My name is Tania Collins, I’m a mother of two Beautiful girls that both seek different needs from me and the youngest has been diagnosed with sensory seeking disorder (SPD) she has parts of being over-responsiveness & under responsiveness on certain spectrums with her Body awareness -Proprioceptive Processing. This sounds like a lot but let me take you on this journey of our beautiful wild little Kayla.

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Sensory Haven was untimely birthed out of a place of we realised extremely fast that the way we would raise Kayla would look hugely different to how we did things with Lara our oldest. This was one of the hardest as we had to change our habits as parents and how we were raised to help our baby girl control herself, she was not naughty or defiant towards us she just did not know how to control herself while still trying to understand her body as it changes from a toddler to a little girl. We had to inform the grandparents, aunts, friends & teachers during each development stage on how to handle her and making sure that we would all be on the same page.

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Once you stop and slow the process down and start to observe your child its life changing for you and your child and the people around you and sometimes that is all it is, its US as the parents just needing to stop and slow it down and watch our children a little bit more… Parenting will look unconventional, and people will judge but dealing with a sensory seeking child the need for doing it differently is what will help them and that’s ultimately all I care about.

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Kayla is 7years now and we were able to diagnose SPD from a young age of 2.5 years and by 3 years we started seeing a significant change so next step we started doing occupational therapy.

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If I look back, we already had signs from a young age, my gut feeling would always be, wow her tantrums are intense, her strength is intense, her voice is intense it was all very intense… if I knew what I know today about sensory seeking children, I would have noticed it sooner and understood her better.  other signs where she loved to swing (I mean she would swing for 15 – 20 minutes and go back on it after an hour again asking us to keep pushing her) and Ice – lots of ice (these are two common forms of sensory kids trying to self-regulate themselves swinging is for her proprioception and the ice is the crunch and calming to self-regulate herself and would sit in a mountain of teddies while eating it)

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This journey has not been easy and learning how to adapt to new ways during her development years has had its challenging moments, but during this time I have had the most incredible people come along side me and support me, my family, friends, teachers & occupational therapists.

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I would love to take you on this journey if you have this gut feeling and needing some tools to help yourself as a parent with a child with any behaviour issues, sensory issues specifically in sensory seeking disorder or just seeing your child develop differently especially during covid time and you feeling overwhelmed, I would love to share some of my tips and but most of all put you into contact with the correct people that specialize in this field.

So as Sensory Haven starts unfolding you will see a Haven of tools and products and places to help you as the Parent, child, grandparent, teachers and all the occupations that are specialize in this field on a platform.

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I can’t wait to share more of what’s to come.

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Much love to you all