Kya flaps her hands. I should probably say that up front, because if you’ve ever seen her do it in a supermarket or a park, you might have noticed. Other people certainly do. I’ve seen the looks – the sideways glances, the nudges, the well-meaning but slightly awkward smiles. Some people stare. Some people look away. Most just don’t know what they’re seeing.
What they’re seeing is called stimming – short for self-stimulatory behaviour. And once you understand what it actually is, you stop wanting to fix it and start wanting to protect it.
For Kya, the hand flapping usually means one of two things: she’s either really happy or really overwhelmed. Sometimes both at the same time. It’s her body’s way of processing what her brain can’t put into words. Think of it like a pressure valve. When the world gets too loud, too bright, too much – or when something makes her so excited she could burst – the flapping lets some of that energy out. It regulates her. Grounds her. Brings her back to a place where she feels steady.
She jumps too. Not at things – just on the spot. Up and down, up and down, sometimes for minutes at a time. Her whole body needs to move. It’s like her muscles are asking for input that the rest of the world isn’t giving her. The bouncing fills that gap. It tells her body where it is in space, gives her that deep pressure feedback that helps everything feel right again.
We didn’t always understand this. Early on, we’d gently try to stop the flapping – hold her hands, redirect her, distract her. We thought we were helping. We weren’t. We were taking away the one tool she had to cope, and wondering why things got worse.
The gym ball changed everything. We were in John Lewis one afternoon – Kya was getting restless, starting to bounce on her toes, flapping a bit – and a lady nearby started chatting to us. She could see what was going on. She didn’t stare, didn’t look uncomfortable. She just said, “Have you tried a big gym ball? My grandson’s the same. It’s been a game-changer.”
We bought one that week. One of those big, bright exercise balls you see in gyms. Kya took one look at it, climbed on, and that was it. She bounced on that thing for an hour straight. Eyes closed, gentle rhythm, completely in her own world. When she got off, she was the calmest I’d seen her all day. Settled. Regulated. Like someone had turned the volume down on everything that had been too loud.
She’s on it all the time now. First thing in the morning, after school, before bed. It’s become part of her routine the way brushing your teeth is part of yours. Except instead of cleaning teeth, she’s recalibrating her entire nervous system. Not bad for a fifteen-quid ball from the sports aisle.
Stimming isn’t something Kya does because something’s wrong. It’s something she does to make things right.
Then there’s the rewinding. This one took me the longest to understand. Kya will find a clip of a cartoon – sometimes just three or four seconds of it – and play it again. And again. And again. The same snippet, the same line, the same little moment, over and over. She’ll do the same with phrases too – repeat a sentence she’s heard, sometimes from a show, sometimes from something I’ve said, just looping it quietly like a song stuck on repeat.
It’s called echolalia, and for a while I thought it meant she was stuck. That her brain had got caught on something and couldn’t move on. But it’s actually the opposite. She’s processing. Each replay is her brain turning the sound over, examining it, feeling the shape of it, finding comfort in the predictability. She knows exactly what’s coming next, and in a world that’s full of surprises she can’t control, that certainty is like a warm blanket.
It’s sensory regulation, just like the flapping and the bouncing – but through sound instead of movement. The repetition soothes her. The familiar words and voices create a safe little pocket of calm in whatever chaos is going on around her. It’s not that she’s zoning out. She’s tuning in – to the one thing that makes sense.
I think about that lady in John Lewis sometimes. A total stranger who saw a dad with a bouncing, flapping child and didn’t judge, didn’t pity, didn’t look away. She just shared something useful and moved on. Five minutes of her day. Years of difference to ours.
Kya’s on the gym ball right now, actually, while I write this. Bouncing gently, eyes half-closed, humming something from Peppa Pig. She’s not broken. She’s not struggling. She’s regulating. And she’s absolutely fine.
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