Life is full of expectations and demands. From the moment we open our eyes each day, there's a to-do list waiting for us—whether it’s personal expectations to get up, showered, dressed, and feed ourselves, or external expectations dictating our behaviour and productivity to keep a job that pays the bills. Demands are a constant presence within the human experience.
When it comes to children, it’s widely acknowledged that having clear and consistent behavioural expectations is important for fostering stability and security. A trusted adult setting boundaries and taking on the responsibility of problem-solving and decision-making can give kids the reassurance that they are safe to get on with being kids.
And clarity around expectations is helpful for autistic people of all ages. Understanding what's expected in various situations and knowing what’s within our responsibilities and what falls to others can minimise uncertainty and misunderstandings, and just generally lighten the mental processing load.
But that mental processing load is where this can be a challenge for those of us who are autistic. Because while a task could be totally manageable on most days, on other days the cognitive load of sensory input, social demands and bottom-up processing we’ve experienced might leave us with a much lower capacity. When this is the case, that particular task or expectation might just be too much to handle.
So a child who can easily brush their teeth most evenings might find the process and sensations overwhelming after a particularly draining day. Or an adult who usually navigates social interactions with ease might struggle to engage in conversation over dinner in a noisy, chaotic restaurant.
With the extra sensitive nervous systems most autistic people have, this mental overload can send us into distress, which might look like a meltdown or shutdown.
Fluctuating capacities are part of being autistic. So while parenting and classroom approaches that emphasise consistency and enforce compliance through rewards and consequences may offer safety and security for some kids, for children who are capable of meeting those demands sometimes and not other times, this approach simply doesn’t feel safe. When demands regularly lead to overwhelm and distress, the focus moves from the specifics of what they’re being asked to do to the experience of having an expectation or demand placed on them. The demand itself can feel really threatening, and trigger anxiety, avoidance or reactive outbursts.
This seems to be the pattern associated with PDA, or Pathological Demand Avoidance in children.1 Not a clinical diagnosis as such, PDA is recognised as a ‘profile’ or behaviour pattern sometimes associated with autism, describing extreme resistance to seemingly reasonable expectations. Hearing from the experiences of parents whose kids have these patterns of behaviour, there’s a lot in it that makes logical sense to me.
I wouldn’t describe this kind of stress response to demands in my own children, and as a child, nobody would have described this pattern of behaviour in me either. But I certainly share many common autistic traits that I imagine would contribute to this inclination - a general disregard for social hierarchy, a sensitivity to injustice and resistance to authoritarianism, and a bottom-up way of processing information that wants to know the “why” and deems the response “because I said so” completely inadequate. I’ve always been far more motivated by my internal drivers than anything external - I love a home workout to a YouTube video, but can’t think of anything less appealing than a group gym session with someone shouting instructions and encouragement. I am fiercely committed to holding boundaries and my right to say “no”. And am pretty adept at straight up avoiding tasks that feel too hard. I imagine a lot of this could be captured with the renaming of the PDA acronym that’s been embraced by many autistic adults - Pervasive Drive for Autonomy.2
But I also don’t want to downplay the challenging experiences of those parenting children with particularly intense patterns of demand-avoidant behaviour. I have huge respect for the parents I’ve come across online who are willingly and vulnerably sharing their own experiences, even when it’s been traumatic for all involved, in the hope that what they’ve learned could help other families.3 And when I see kids behaving in seemingly defiant ways, learning about PDA certainly helps me withhold judgement for either child or parent and extend compassion for the challenges both may be experiencing.
There are questions within this discussion that are relevant for all parents though: how do we provide clarity and security, support our kids in tackling challenges that are within their capability to build resilience, and also honour their autonomy to say "No, not today"? I think the key is flexibility—recognising when our kids are getting overwhelmed, adjusting demands, and supporting them to assess their own capacity and make decisions about what they can handle. There’s also that intrinsic motivation piece - encouraging our kids to decide what’s important to them and to see demands as invitations that they have the self-agency to accept or decline.
I see these as life skills that many of us, across our different neurotypes, are struggling with into adulthood, and that comes with both relational and self-image implications. When we feel obligated to say "yes" and fear judgment if we can’t follow through, other people’s requests can be experienced as stressors that lead to anxiety or resentment. Similarly, when shame is attached to not meeting our self-imposed expectations, those demands can feel like they just set us up for failure.
Can we reframe others’ requests as invitations rather than attempts to control us? Can we find that balance between saying “yes” to challenges aligned with our values and declining when our capacity is limited? Can we nurture self-compassion and understanding around our fluctuating capacities? In these ways, I hope we might learn to honour our own autonomy anew.
There’s SO much information on PDA to sift through online, coming from various perspectives and with plenty of debate attached, but this piece from the UK’s National Autistic Society gives a good overview. And the PDA Society website is very comprehensive.
This name change was first suggested on Tomlin Wilding’s Changing The name PDA blog post. For more information on PDA from this lens, Tomlin’s website is really extensive.
A couple of Instagram accounts I want to recommend for their insights into parenting kids with challenges associated with PDA - Amanda Diekman of @lowdemandamanda and Casey Ehrlich of @atpeaceparents.