A small comment can echo for days.

Something happened at school. A passing remark, a friend who picked someone else first. By dinner you have heard about it again, and again the next morning.

You have probably been told this is oversensitivity. That your child needs to toughen up, let it go, stop making so much of nothing.

It is not nothing. The same nervous system that holds onto a small unkindness is the one that notices you are tired before you have said so. The feeling runs deep in both directions.

Naming the pattern changes what you do with it. You stop trying to make your child less sensitive, and start giving the sensitivity somewhere to go.