The main takeaway from our latest chat is that the best way to support your PDA child isn’t about fancy strategies; it’s all about how we respond to them. Seriously, your reactions can make a world of difference in their well-being. If you’ve ever felt like you’re walking on eggshells, you're definitely not alone, and we’re here to help you navigate those tricky moments. We dive into how understanding your own nervous system can help you connect better with your child, and trust me, it’s a game changer. So, grab a comfy seat and let’s unpack how we can shift our approach to create calmer, more connected home lives!

Links referenced in this episode:

• chantalhewitt.com/pda

Supporting a child with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) is less about having the perfect strategy and more about how we, as parents, respond to their needs. The conversation dives into the importance of emotional regulation and connection. It emphasizes that our responses can either escalate a situation or help calm it down. The host shares personal experiences of feeling overwhelmed and walking on eggshells, highlighting the need for parents to focus on their own regulation first. The discussion also touches on the collective challenges of parenting a PDA child, like the chaos during after-school transitions. By understanding that a child's behaviors are communication rather than defiance, parents can adopt a more empathetic approach that fosters trust and connection. The episode wraps up with practical advice for responding to meltdowns and the significance of creating a supportive home environment, encouraging listeners to prioritize their own emotional wellbeing while navigating the complexities of PDA parenting.

Takeaways:

• The most effective way to support a PDA child is through your own responses, not strategies.
• Understanding how your nervous system affects your child's behavior is crucial for effective parenting.
• Transition times can be particularly challenging, so creating a calm environment is essential.
• Validating your child's feelings before trying to solve their problems helps strengthen your connection.
• Instead of focusing on compliance, prioritize your emotional regulation to foster a supportive home.
• Recognize that your child's behavior is a communication of their needs, not just defiance.

The number one way to support your PDA child isn't a strategy that you give to them.

It is how you respond.

So I will say that again, it is about you, not about the strategy that you give to them.

That definitely has a place and it is definitely so important.

But right now, if you are in the thick of parenting or figuring out how to support your PDA child, teen or young adult, how you respond is the biggest lever that you have in supporting them and in providing them successful foundations in order to come out of burnout, in order to understand how PDA is for them, how to support education, how to support your home life, to go from that walking on eggshells every single moment of the day to or most moments of the day where you are triggered, where everyone is dysregulated, to actually having calm moments at home, a more connected home life, and a path forward that is helpful and a path forward that actually makes sense for your child's nervous system.

Welcome to the Attuned Spectrum podcast.

I'm Chantal Hewitt, an RDHD mum, experienced educator, and autism support coach who understands your path because I also walk it daily.

This is your space for real conversations that empower your autistic child, yourself and.

Your family to thrive.

So that, number one way to support your PDA child, your teen, or your young adult is not a strategy.

However, I know that you have come to this podcast looking for strategies.

I will say that the best strategy of all is understanding that your response matters and it makes the biggest difference in your child's wellbeing, your regulation and the language that you use, how you carry yourself when you do need to respond to your child.

That is what we need to focus on first, not compliance.

To be honest, we don't need to focus on compliance because that is not helpful here.

It's not helpful anywhere.

But at the moment, what we're talking about is a nervous system difference.

When we parent from a place of trying to ensure compliance, what we are actually doing is are trying to manipulate the situation.

And I know that that word manipulation has a kind of a bad reputation, but that is essentially what it is.

We have been taught a lot of the times that that traditional parenting or the parenting that will support our child has to do with having them follow exactly what we need them to do, attend the school that we have chosen for them, hang out with this person that we have agreed for them to hang out with.

And I'm not saying that these things aren't needed at times.

Yes, you need rules.

Yes, we need boundaries.

That is the whole point of raising children as they grow to be regulated and responsible adults.

However, I believe that we need to pull back on the compliance mentality because it isn't helpful, especially with our PDA child.

It does the exact opposite and pushes them further into burnout.

I do want to share a moment of my own dysregulation that escalated a situation that I am not proud of.

But it was before I understood this missing piece.

I constantly was walking on eggshells.

I was so anxious all of the time, even leading up to, you know, the car ride as I was about to pick my child up from school, because I knew what was happening or what would be happening the moment that I got there.

And then I knew what would happen in the aftermath of when he was released from school and when we would venture to the car trying to find a snack that he needed to actually getting in the car, getting home and just watching those eggshells continue to be stepped upon and stepped upon until he fell asleep and then we would do it again the next day.

It was exhausting.

It was so hard when nobody understood and I froze often because I was quite dysregulated and I was overwhelmed and I was triggered.

And I know that I'm not the only parent who has done this because it is hard.

And the second that we do something, a lot of the times we go, why did I do that?

I wish I could have done it differently.

But I'm here to give you that confidence and that reassurance that you can do it differently.

It's does take time and it does take practice, but you can handle your own regulation.

In order to co regulate with your PDA child who whose nervous system needs yours, it mirrors yours to find safety, to know how to react, to be productive in teaching them or modeling those regulation skills to them.

I think for a PDA parent there are so many times of the day that are hard.

So this is my and my hardest part of the day.

And that was that after school, until bedtime, the struggle to get dinner on the table, to regulate myself, to support my son's regulation, to get home, to get from the school to the car, to feeding them.

Gosh, it was hard.

And I know that that after school meltdown that parents experience is not just in their heads.

And if you are parenting a PDA child, it is explosive or it can be so explosive.

And I am here to tell you that you are not alone in that.

And it is not necessarily you like, yes, the approach can definitely change, but I would Say that you may actually be focusing on the wrong priority when you are trying to change your approach.

You are probably looking for a strategy to fix things or to, you know, a strategy to implement that will make a difference.

But before any strategy can actually stick, your child's nervous system needs your nerve nervous system to be regulated or regulated enough to meet them where they're at.

Acknowledge that the behavior that you are seeing is communication and it is not a choice.

It is a nervous system response to the accumulation of demand load throughout the day.

Perhaps they were masking all day long and you are their safe place.

And unfortunately what that also means is that they trust you so much to explode in front of you and it can last a very long time.

It can look like panic, it can feel like a never ending cycle that you just try and try to survive.

Before I go any further, if that 4pm after school car ride meltdown, if that is a familiar scene in your house, I've actually put together a free guide with the exact language that I use and that I support parents to use to support that specific moment.

Grab it at chantalhewitt.com forward/pda.

And don't worry, I'll mention it at the end too and I will add it into the show notes of this episode.

So this walking on eggshells, this dysregulation for me.

So what would happen and what a lot of parents tell me that they experience and I can relate to because this was me too.

I would have researched how to connect with my child, how to use the next strategy.

I'd use all my knowledge and training that I actually had in this age group with autistic children.

And because I wasn't aware that my son was PDA or exactly how to support his nervous system, which by the way is completely different than what teachers are taught and also from what regular autism strategies or traditional autism strategies tell you is helpful for a demand avoidant or autonomy seeking nervous system.

So instead of responding, I would react.

I would become so overwhelmed by.

For me, I had a lot of, I have a lot of sensory sensitivity that I wasn't aware of either.

So the noise was too much.

The yelling triggered trauma from my own childhood.

The.

And by yelling I mean, you know, my children arguing or the, the noise level or the clutter in the home or just things that were the environment.

It was so overstimulating.

And because I wasn't able to regulate the environment around me, let alone how I was thinking, let alone my, my own reactions, I just went from Zero to a hundred, very quickly.

And I would yell.

I would say things that I didn't mean.

I wouldn't even know where they would come from.

But when I really think about it and reflect, the reason why I did that was because in my head, if I yelled, I would be louder than them.

Not necessarily to have power, control, but I guess, yeah, control.

Because I needed to stop what was happening.

And I'm not talking, by the way, about your child runs into the road and you have to yell to get them to stop.

That is different.

That is safety.

What I'm talking about is supporting those really challenging PDA behaviors.

The anxiety, the meltdown.

I just wanted it to stop because it was uncomfortable for me because I couldn't regulate my own nervous system when my son was dysregulated.

And it's really hard to do that.

So your child's nervous system, it reads your body and your cues and your own levels of overwhelm before it reads anything that you say.

It's that tension.

You know the saying, you walk into a room and you can cut the tension with a knife.

I don't know about you, but I can feel when there's tension in our home.

And it was nonstop.

So some examples here, some before and afters, just to give you an idea of what I mean by how we can regulate ourselves and not necessarily giving you tools to regulate, because I think that is a much deeper conversation.

But something that is helpful when we are regulated is having the right language.

Because even if we feel in the moment that being louder or speaking faster or being right in their face and saying it so they can focus, it actually does the complete opposite of what we're hoping that it will do.

It doesn't get them to listen.

It might scare them, and it might have them stop, and they might comply, maybe for a moment, maybe a couple times.

But that's not the goal.

We want to regulate ourselves so we can help our child regulate, and we can build that trust and build that connection with them.

So an example of what this would look like before in my languaging would be, you know, we need to get home.

Come on.

Like, you know, there's food in the car.

I know you're hungry.

Let's get home.

And in my head, I'm going, gosh, there's people around looking.

My son's sitting on the ground right now.

He's in full shutdown.

Why didn't I bring the snacks with me?

Why didn't I know what he needed?

And just these spirals in My head.

So my delivery was rushed, I was tense.

I probably looked, like, really intense from other people.

But then I switched my mindset once I was able to regulate myself to, okay, we've got time, you know, just reminding myself that this can be slow.

We don't need to rush.

And if your child has capacity and they're able to hear those things from you, then maybe it's helpful to say those things to them as well.

Delivered slowly so they can actually feel like they have the lead, that you are there to support them, but that you are not throwing them out of their skull and into the car.

Of course, sometimes, you know, you might have somewhere that you need to be.

But as much as possible, can we shift our response?

Instead of reacting, can we respond?

Can we take a moment to pause?

Whether it is a deep breath, whether it is 10 deep breaths, whether it's just turning around and just taking a minute, can we do that?

So then we can approach the situation.

Our dysregulated child, our anxious child who is having a meltdown or shutdown or possibly running away.

Maybe he's in, he's fighting, he's flighting, he's.

He's all of the big nervous system responses that we know happen when our child is dysregulated.

Can we instead collect ourselves?

So we pause, can we check in on what we need?

Like, yes, our children are safe.

Great.

What do we need in that situation?

Is it.

Is what I'm about to say a helpful response?

And am I looking at what's going on right now as defiance, as them not listening, as them doing something that's pissing me off?

Or can I see this as a nervous system in fight or flight or freeze?

Or are they fawning?

Are they kind of masking to fit in or to comply?

Once I have that information, then I'm able to change my response instead of it's time to go, let's grab our shoes, grab our bag, let's put our seatbelts on, all that jazz.

Can it instead be telling ourselves, reminding ourselves that we can say one thing, then we can give some silence, we can give some space.

I will say that so much of this working is dependent on the rest of your environment and your time commitments.

So something really helpful is also to shift the way, if possible, how your afternoons look.

How can you create more space?

How can you support transitions in a better way to give your child a bigger heads up, more time, more time to process, more time to know what's coming next?

And of course, things do Change and there will be upset, there will be a meltdown.

So for example here, if plans change, if you do need to rush from school to the car to getting home, if that is messy, instead of we have to go, things change, we just have to be okay with it.

You know, like coming from that space of okay, now I'm rushed as a parent, okay, while we still have to maybe follow through with that of the we need to go now.

Like this is what we have to do.

Even if it's well planned.

So, you know, even if there's transition support, even if they know what to expect, can we validate before solving the problem?

So they can hear that, you know, that their reaction, if they're in a space to hearing, they may not be.

But if we have to say something, could it be, I know this isn't what you expected or that was really hard.

You don't have to over explain.

Sometimes validating is helpful.

Not saying it works all the time, but the practice of validating supports your connection and that trust that your child has with you.

And it will get easier over time.

What I'm getting at here, that we need to work on, we don't need to.

You don't need to do anything.

But if you're listening to this episode, it's what I would recommend if you are struggling, if you're going, hey, I need help here, please know it's not you.

Like, it's not your intention.

It's not your lack of effort or understanding of how important having a regulated child is or supporting PDA is.

It's the map that you were given.

You literally have the wrong roadmap for understanding how to be a great, good, effective parent to your PDA child, a supportive one who actually understands pda.

This isn't personal.

Like, this isn't that you don't have the intention to do amazing things for your child and to support them.

Because I know that you've probably been trying over and over again so many different strategies and you're exhausted and it's hard.

So it's not your lack of effort, it's not your lack of intention to support them.

It is the actual map of what you need to do first is wrong.

It is not.

Do this strategy, support yourself later and it won't matter and the child will just do it.

That might work for some children, but not for PDA ones.

And even then I think that that isn't the best approach.

If I'm being honest.

Connection and relationships are the foundation.

Your nervous system is that foundation.

To support your child's nervous system that does need to come first.

So when you understand this change, like actually understand it and live it and practice it, what it gives you is less bracing, less shakiness, more confidence, feeling more grounded in your parenting, feeling empowered to know that your strategies actually will begin to work because you have the right roadmap.

Most parents have the best of intentions but the wrong way to get there.

They have more general parenting or traditional parenting experience or advice or guidance or just that ingrained parenting knowledge based on their childhood or how they were parented.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't PDA specific.

And that is where we need to make a change.

So you don't brace less or become more confident because the meltdowns are no longer there, but you yourself stop being a part of what escalates them.

You stop making it worse.

Again, your intention isn't there to make it worse.

I absolutely know that.

But if I'm being so honest with you so many times, parents, parents go what am I doing wrong?

Or what?

Why isn't this working?

You know, you said this strategy would work.

Actually, they don't say that.

But you know, I was told that this strategy would work or that this language would work.

But here's the thing, like the absolute truth.

If you are not regulated, if you don't regulate how you respond to a dysregulated child at 4pm or after school or leading up to that transition from school to home, then it will be really tricky for your child to regulate and to support their own emotions as they grow, as they develop.

If you want the guide that I have just created that gives you that language for that after school, that 4pm that transition from school to home, navigating that meltdown and how to support yourself, head on over to chantalhewitt.com PDA or click the link in the show notes next week I want to zoom out because that 4pm after school meltdown is never really about 4pm and I am going to explain to you exactly what is causing it and what you can do to change that right away.

Thank you so much for allowing me into your world today.

Wherever you are around the globe, if you like what you've heard, I would be so grateful if you would click that subscribe button and comment below to tell me one thing.

What support do you need?

This helps me create episodes that truly impact our shared community.

By commenting, you not only help yourself, but you help make modern neurodiversity affirming autism support accessible to those who are searching for a better parenting approach.

That actually feels good.

I'm Chantelle, and I'll see you next week.