Sensory room provides welcoming space for neurodivergent children

My daughter, Noelle, is a wonderful seven-year-old who loves Pokemon, drawing, and hockey. Noelle is also autistic, and like many people who are autistic, church when done “as regular” can seem overwhelming or even at times unwelcoming.

What many of us consider to be a good Sunday service is often bright, flashy, loud, and filled with many different people all doing many different things. As we do church in Canada, it engages the senses—while for many this is wonderful, for neurodivergent children like Noelle, it can quickly become overstimulating. Conversely, if Noelle is feeling unregulated, and needs to run and shout, this is often behaviour that, if unexpected, can be seen as taboo.

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It is important for us as a congregation to show Noelle that she has a place here. But the question as to how we should do this was one best answered by experts. On this, we were fortunate, as our congregation has long had a good relationship with our local elementary school. The excellent staff of MacGregor Elementary, a number of whom attend our church and a number more of whom are close friends of those who do, have a lot of experience working with autistic children, including Noelle. As such, they were an obvious place to start. One of their big suggestions was to make a sensory room.

A sensory room, as the name implies, is an area that is set up to engage as many of the senses as possible, but in a way that puts the person using the room in control. A sensory room will typically have muted lighting and will be in a quiet area. In a sensory room, there are objects of differing colours and textures. They will also often have a cuddle swing, which is like a hammock, if you string both sides from a central point on the ceiling, causing it to lightly squish you if you climb in. While there are no set lists of what goes into a sensory room, if the items engage several different senses in different ways, all at the control of the user, they are likely good to be included.

The sensory room is simple enough to use. If Noelle is feeling overwhelmed, she can retreat into her own space where she can self-regulate by engaging the amenities at her own pace. Then, once she is feeling more regulated, she can rejoin the rest of the group as she is ready. We also included some over-ear hearing protectors for her to use in the sanctuary if she feels the need.

All in, the cost for the room was around $600, plus some steel that a congregant used to build a mount for the cuddle swing given the height of our roof. The area we chose was a quiet storage room in the back corner of our building, to help limit sound if Noelle needed quiet. After it was emptied, the swing hung, and the new sensory room items moved in, it was time to give it a try. Noelle loves this space.

The room has also found use apart from Sunday. We have a nursery school that operates in the building and makes frequent use of it. It has also been a draw for family gatherings where there has been need.

One Christmas when we were away on vacation, as a show of love for Noelle, one of our young adults hand-painted a beautiful tree branch as a surprise. Noelle loved it, and it brought tears of joy to our eyes as well.