Some Days I Hate the Thing I Teach: On loving a PDA child fiercely, falling apart quietly, and why both things are true at the same time.

There are days I could stand in front of a room full of parents, professionals, and sceptics and speak about Pervasive Demand Avoidance with the calm authority of someone who has lived inside it for years — because I have. I know the research. I know the language. I know why my child's nervous system interprets even the gentlest request as a threat. I know it in my bones, in my sleep, in the way I've quietly restructured our entire family life around a framework most people have never even heard of.

And then there are mornings like this.

Days when all of that knowledge sits in a pile at my feet like kindling, and I want to set it on fire.

What PDA Actually Is (And Why It Changes Everything)

For those who are new here: Pervasive Demand Avoidance — increasingly reframed by many clinicians as Persistent Drive for Autonomy — is a profile on the autism spectrum characterised by an extreme, anxiety-driven need to resist and avoid the ordinary demands of everyday life. Not because of defiance. Not because of bad parenting. But because the PDA nervous system experiences a loss of control as genuinely, physiologically threatening. It is a nervous system disability.

Requests that seem completely benign — put your shoes on, it's time for dinner, can you brush your teeth — can register in a PDA brain as a threat equivalent to danger. The avoidance isn't a choice. It is a survival response.

This is why traditional parenting strategies don't just fail with PDA kids — they often make things catastrophically worse. Reward charts. Consequences. Firm boundaries. The more you push, the harder the system fights back. It is not stubbornness. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it was wired to do: protect.
This is also why, when I teach about PDA, I teach with such urgency. Because misunderstood PDA children are punished for symptoms they cannot control. They are labelled manipulative, oppositional, exhausting. They internalise those labels. And the damage compounds.
I teach because the stakes are too high not to.

We Have Come So Far

My child has spent years — years — working to build a bridge between what they feel and what they can say out loud. This is not a small thing. For many autistic and PDA young people, interoception — the ability to read internal bodily and emotional states — is significantly disrupted. Hunger doesn't feel like hunger. Fear doesn't feel like fear. Pain is a scrambled signal. Emotions arrive without names, without edges, without a clear address.
We have worked on this together. Slowly.

Painstakingly. With therapists and tools and a thousand quiet conversations. And we have gotten somewhere real. My child can now — with effort, with difficulty, but with courage — tell me when they are in pain. When they are angry. When they are hurt. I do not take that for granted for a single day.

But today, for the first time, in a long time, my child said the words I hate to hear. They always linger in the shadows and threaten to dive out at me when I expect them the least, and this morning was no exception.
They told me they want to die. That the only way out of this life feels like not being in it anymore.

The Thing Nobody Tells You About This Moment

Nobody prepares you for the specific quality of silence that follows those words when they come from your own child. I know what I'm supposed to do. I know the clinical guidance. I know to stay calm, to not catastrophise in front of them, to validate without agreeing, to ask gentle questions, to make a safety plan, to contact the right people. I know all of it.And simultaneously, I felt like the floor opened up and swallowed me whole. I also felt guilty. Because my child said 'I don't want to make you sad. I don't want you to cry. But I know you always say I must tell you when I feel this way.'

This is the cruel paradox of parenting a child with profound emotional and communicative differences: you spend years celebrating every breakthrough, every new word for a feeling, every moment of honest expression. And then the thing they finally find words for is this. And you realise you were hoping — you were praying, somewhere quiet inside yourself — that the words would never catch up to this particular feeling. They did. Again.

Why PDA Teens Are So Vulnerable to This Pain

This is not random. It is, heartbreakingly, predictable. Young people move through the world in a state of near-constant threat response. Their autonomic nervous system is rarely, if ever, at rest. The accumulation of demands — school, social interaction, the relentless unpredictability of other humans, sensory overwhelm, the exhaustion of masking — is not just tiring. It is depleting at a neurological level that most people around them cannot see.

Research and clinical observation consistently show that PDA individuals experience profoundly high rates of anxiety, burnout, and depression. They often have an acute and painful awareness of being different, of not fitting, of the gap between what the world expects and what their nervous system can offer.

Many PDA young people describe feeling fundamentally wrong — not in their behaviour, but in their very existence.And because their emotional world is so difficult to access and articulate, that pain often has nowhere to go. It builds. It pressurises. It turns inward.
When a PDA teen finally says I want to die, it is almost never impulsive. It is usually the surface breaking after a very long time underwater.

What You Can Do — And What You Cannot

If your PDA child comes to you with suicidal thoughts, here is what the research and lived experience suggest:
Stay regulated, even if you are falling apart inside. Your nervous system is the most powerful co-regulator your child has. They are watching yours for information about whether it is safe to keep talking. Breathe. Stay present. You can cry later — and you should.
Don't demand explanations. "Why do you feel this way?" can feel like just another demand to a PDA brain already at capacity. Instead: "I'm really glad you told me. I'm right here."

Don't make promises you can't keep. Don't say "it'll be okay" if you don't know that. Say instead: "I'm not going anywhere. We'll figure out what you need together."

Reduce demands immediately and drastically. 

This is not the moment for school attendance, chores, or any form of normal routine. The nervous system needs to come down before anything else can happen. Getting out into nature helps Liv enormously, my brain is already scrambling for places to go tomorrow.

Get professional support — and advocate fiercely. 

Many mental health professionals are not trained in PDA. You may need to help them understand your child's profile before they can help. That is exhausting and it is unfair and it is also sometimes necessary. Luckily, my child's psychiatrist and psychologist DO know PDA and I am unafraid to admit I have them on speed dial. And yes, I have already called them.

Safety planning matters, but connection comes first. A child who feels understood is more likely to stay safe than one who is simply supervised. Connection is not soft — it is clinical. It is the intervention.

And Now, About You

I want to talk to you. The parent reading this who has just had this conversation with their child, or who fears it, or who had it last week and hasn't told anyone.

It is okay to feel lost. I do. It is okay to feel useless, even though you are not. It is okay to fantasise — just for a moment — about catching the first flight out of the country and disappearing into a life where nobody needs anything from you for five consecutive minutes. It is okay to sit in your car in the driveway and sob until your ribs hurt.

It is okay to love your child completely and also resent, with every cell in your body, the condition that makes their life so hard and your love feel so insufficient.

It is okay to hate PDA today. I do. I hate it on the days it steals my child's peace. I hate it on the days it makes them unreachable. I hate it on the days it turns something simple into something impossible, and on the days — like today — it has taken them somewhere dark and terrible and I cannot follow.
You are not a bad parent for feeling this way. You are a human being carrying something enormous, and you have been carrying it for a very long time.

Why I Still Teach

Tomorrow, or next week, or whenever I can stand up straight again, I will still teach about PDA. I will still explain the autonomic nervous system to rooms full of people who are just starting to understand their children. I will still advocate, write, and fight for neurodivergent young people to be seen as who they are rather than punished for what they cannot help.

I will do it because my child deserves a world that understands them.

I will do it because somewhere out there, another parent is where I am today, and they need to know they are not alone and they are not failing. And I will do it because on the days I hate PDA with a ferocity that frightens me, I love my child more. Those two things live together. They always have.

This morning has been a terrible morning. But we are still here. That is enough for now.