3 year old very frightened of noise.

So my partner and I have a three and a half year old. He is a reasonably smart kid (he can read already which I think is about average for his age. I thought he was just memorising his storybooks but when I'm playing games and words come on screen he reads them aloud)and although has the odd meltdown like most his age is very friendly.He is really really freaked out by noise. He will put his hands over his ears if he anticipates noise and has a horrible rash on one of his ears due to a tendency to pull on his earlobe when he is stressed and in a noisy environment. Now when I say freaked out let me give you three occasions that he puts his hands over his ears.Hand dryers are his mortal enemy. Motorbike noises (to the point where he will put his hand over his ears when he sees men with helmets on even if they're nowhere near a bike). At church today he completely lost it and had a meltdown because someone was playing a violin.Now I know from my research that a lot of kids have issues at this age with noise so I'm not bemoaning that he's weird. I myself at this age was scared of everything everywhere so he's way braver than I was and I turned out fairly happy!Just wondering if anyone wanted to share their experiences of this and maybe had any ideas of why some children are like this?Maybe even some advice for helping him deal with it? (I'm aware the advice might be just don't worry he'll grow out of it) I just wanted to see if there was something because I feel really bad for him when he gets that scared over it. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2gwknkS