Go Your Own Way
10 Places to Begin When Parenting a PDA Child
There is a point, I think, when many parents of Autistic and PDA children realise that trying harder to make family life look like everybody else's isn't necessarily helping anyone. I know I reached that point. As an Autistic ADHD PDA parent to 4 multi-neurodivergent children two of whom have a PDA profile, it has not been an easy road we have travelled together but it is well worn now almost 20 years after I became a mother.
Parenting a PDA child can ask us to rethink many of the assumptions we once held about parenting. It isn't necessarily because we were doing something wrong. Many of us simply began with the parenting map we had been given. Children get dressed in the morning. Meals happen at certain times. Teeth are brushed before bed. Children go to school. Homework gets completed. Family activities are joined. Adults make decisions and children gradually learn to follow them.
Then PDA enters the picture and that map may no longer take us where our child needs to go. For a PDA child, pressure can exist in places we don't immediately recognise. It can be contained within an instruction, but also within a routine, expectation, deadline, another person's anticipation, a loss of autonomy or simply knowing that something is supposed to happen. Something the child wants to do can become difficult once it begins to feel expected.
I have learned this repeatedly through parenting my own sons. Things I once thought needed a better routine, greater consistency or another solution sometimes needed something completely different from me. I needed to question the expectation itself.
So if you are beginning to understand your child through a PDA lens, you don't need another list of techniques for getting them to do things. You need somewhere to start.
1. Start With What Is Hardest Right Now
You do not have to change your entire family life at once. Begin with one part of everyday life that repeatedly becomes difficult. It might be getting ready, school, eating, leaving the house, personal care, bedtime or something completely different. Start in one area and consider the broader context. Starting in one area means you do not overwhelm yourself (because let us be honest this is a tricky road you find yourself on now), you are doing the best you can but need to pace yourself also.
2. Question the “Should”
PDA parenting has made me question an extraordinary number of things I once thought my children should be doing. They should eat at the table. They should be able to dress themselves. They should complete homework. They should join the family activity. They should say hello. They should manage something today because they managed it yesterday. When you notice yourself thinking should, pause and consider where that expectation came from. Some expectations are important, but others are habits, social conventions or inherited ideas about what children of a particular age are supposed to do. Not every expectation deserves the pressure it creates.
3. Find What Actually Matters
Sometimes something needs to happen, but the conventional way of doing it does not. If nourishment is the need, eating at the table may not be. If caring for the body is important, the entire personal-care routine may not have to happen in one particular way. If learning is the goal, completing every element of a worksheet may not be necessary. This distinction has been enormously important in our family. When I separate the actual need from all the expectations that have become attached to it, there is often far more room for flexibility than I initially realised.
4. Look for Where Autonomy Has Become Squeezed
For a PDA child, autonomy is not simply an optional extra that we offer after everything else has been decided. Look at the situation that is becoming difficult and consider how much meaningful influence your child actually has within it. Can they change their mind, stop, do it differently, influence the timing, ask somebody to help or suggest another way? Sometimes we think we are providing autonomy because we have offered two choices, while both choices still lead to an outcome we have already decided must happen. Supporting autonomy can sometimes require us to reconsider the plan itself rather than simply giving the child more control within our plan.
5. Consider What Has Come Before
What looks like a small expectation may be arriving after a child has already navigated a great deal. Available capacity can change across a day and from one day to another. I have seen this countless times with my own children. Something that was accessible yesterday may be completely inaccessible today. Rather than seeing that as inconsistency, I have learned to treat it as information. Yesterday's capacity does not create an obligation for today.
6. Allow Support to Change With Capacity
We place enormous value on children becoming increasingly independent, but needing support is not wrong or a sign of failure. There are times when my sons can do something themselves and other times when they need considerably more from me. Sometimes I do something for them, sometimes we do it together, sometimes I begin and they continue, and sometimes the most useful thing I can do is simply remain nearby. Support can expand and contract as capacity changes. The goal does not have to be proving how little help a child needs. It can be ensuring they have enough support to participate while retaining dignity, autonomy, and agency.
7. Consider the Relationship Around the Expectation
With PDA, the words we use are only part of what communicates pressure. Who is asking matters. Tone matters. Trust matters. Power matters. Whether the child feels able to disagree matters. An apparently gentle request can still carry considerable pressure when the adult is waiting for a particular answer or has already decided what successful participation must look like. Sometimes we need to stop looking for better wording and examine what is happening within the relationship, including our own expectations and the amount of freedom the child actually experiences.
8. Let Plans Change
A plan is not a contract. A PDA child may be excited about something when it is discussed and find it inaccessible when the time arrives. They might ask to go somewhere and then be unable to leave the car. They may choose an activity and later want nothing to do with it. They are allowed to change their mind. I have learned that responding to the child who is actually in front of me is far more useful than holding them to a decision they made when their capacity or circumstances were different. Sometimes the outing becomes the drive, sometimes we stop halfway through, sometimes we try again another day, and sometimes we decide it was not important after all.
9. Notice What Is Already Working
Supporting a PDA child does not always require introducing something new. Some of our most useful information can come from noticing the moments when life already feels easier. Consider where your child seems most comfortable, who they are with, how much autonomy they have, whether they can leave, what the sensory environment is like and what is not being expected of them. Perhaps conversation happens more naturally in the car, participation increases when nobody is watching, or something becomes accessible when there is no requirement to finish. These moments are not accidental details. They can tell us something important about the conditions under which our child has greater access to themselves and the world around them.
10. Give Your Family Permission to Go Its Own Way
This can be one of the hardest parts because doing things differently often attracts opinions. Flexibility can be mistaken for permissiveness. Providing more support can be interpreted as creating dependence. Reducing an expectation can be described as giving in. I have had to become increasingly comfortable with the reality that people outside our family may not always understand the decisions I make for my children. They see individual moments, while we live the whole story. Our family life does not need to demonstrate successful parenting to somebody looking in from outside. It needs to work for the people who actually live within it.
Where Do You Start?
If understanding PDA has left you questioning many of the things you previously thought you needed to do as a parent, you do not have to change everything tomorrow. Choose one place where life repeatedly becomes difficult and start there. Become curious about what is happening around it. Question what matters, consider where autonomy has become restricted, look at your child's capacity today and think about what you could change before asking your child to change.
There is no perfect PDA parenting formula, and I do not think we should replace one rigid parenting model with another. Our children are individuals, our families are different and capacity changes.
The aim is not to become better at getting a PDA child to follow the path we have chosen for them.
Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to go our own way together.
