This article examines how young people in a Swedish online forum and in blogs engage in discussions of one popularized psychological personality trait, the highly sensitive person (HSP), and how they draw on different positionings in discursive struggles around this category. The material is analysed with concepts from discursivepsychology and post-structuralist theory in order to investigate youths’ interactions.The first is a nuanced positioning, from which youths disclose the weaknesses and strengths of being highly sensitive. Some youths become deeply invested in this kind of positioning, hence forming a HSP subjectivity. This can be opposed using contrasting positionings, which objects to norms of biosociality connected to the HSP. Lastly, there are rather distanced and investigative approaches to the HSP category. We conclude that while young people are negotiating the HSP category, they are establishing an epistemological community.

This study analyses twelve children’s books that may be used to inform and educate both child-ren and adults about children’s experiences of having a neuropsychiatric diagnosis, or of being a highly sensitive person. From the perspective of poststructuralism, and through a problema-tization of concepts within the field of sociology of childhood, the study examines the subject formation of sensitive girls and dis/able-bodied childhoods. In the representations of the main characters the dis/abilities are mainly portrayed as abilities. Yet these stories also revolve around handling the children’s socially problematic behaviours and suffering. Children are seen as both competent and vulnerable agents – as beings and becomings. The article suggests that a subject formation that recurs in the books is an ideal child citizen. This type of competent child partici-pates in the decisions concerning her body and life, and demonstrates self-reflexivity, as well as a positive attitude towards interventions, which includes both engaging in therapy and openly disclosing the diagnosis. Through the process of identification, the girls become compliant to manage their behaviour and emotions according to the premise of the diagnoses, and on these terms, are redefining their personhood.

Discourse on the highly sensitive child as a mode of individual coming-into-being is transforming notions of good motherhood. Mothering a child is weighted with practical challenges, normative expectations, and moral implications, all of which can be accentuated when parenting a child that appears to differ from the average. How mothers address themselves to a highly sensitive child can reveal much about contemporary currents in family life. Through analysis of the online discussions in a Swedish forum, I examine mothers’ discourse regarding categorization of highly sensitive children, elaboration on the behaviors that constitute this category of protean individuality, and the negotiation of motherhood norms. Three themes are identified: the way in which participants established entitlement to the application of the highly sensitive child label through a process of “enlightenment” based on observing their children and scrutinizing their own childrearing practices; discourse on the “allure” of the highly sensitive child since it depicts the children as super-normal and themselves as mothers called to the custodianship of a “different child”; and finally, how the highly sensitive child label deflects the guilt and frustration linked with handling challenging behaviors, in tension with permitting the sensitive child’s self-determined development. The article suggests that the mothers’ discourse reflects the intensive mothering norms of child-centered parenting that prevail in Western countries such as Sweden. Through the lens of the highly sensitive child, however, motherhood acquires new anticipatory, considerate and susceptible norms, and strategies that constitute a highly sensitive parenting style.