The PDA postbox

Answers From Someone Who's Actually Lived It

By Andrea Grant

Every week my inbox fills up with some version of the same seven questions from exhausted, loving, slightly frazzled moms and dads of PDA kids. And every week I do my best to answer them from the outside — as a facilitator, a coach, a fellow parent in a mixed-neurotype house. 

But there's only so far "professional insight" can take you when the question is really: what is actually happening inside my child's head?For that, I go to someone who doesn't have to guess. Hythem Betts is a counsellor, a PDA adult himself, and someone who has spent years translating his own nervous system for the rest of us (find him at newhorisons.net). 

I asked him to take on the questions I get asked most. What follows are his answers, in his own logic — occasionally uncomfortable, often funny, and more useful than anything you'll find in a parenting manual written by someone who has never once had their own compliment thrown back in their face.

1. "Why does my kid flinch at praise too?"
You'd think warmth would be the safe option. Reprimands trigger the PDA nervous system — fine, everyone knows that by now. But praise? Surely praise is the reward we're all chasing?
Not so fast. Hythem's take is that a dysregulated nervous system doesn't actually distinguish that cleanly between "nice" and "not nice" — it's scanning for threat, full stop, and anything can register as one. Add Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) into the mix and the sensitivity goes up another notch. 
🤍The deciding factor isn't the compliment itself, it's whether it's genuine, and PDA radar for insincerity is frighteningly accurate.
 Praise that's really "I was taught to say something nice here" lands as thinly veiled criticism, and it will detonate faster than the reprimand ever would have.
Hythem's advice: skip the compliment sandwich entirely, read the body language before you speak, and take Thumper's rule from Bambi and upgrade it — if you don't have something nice, genuine, and well-timed to say, don't say anything at all. And be prepared for your praise to occasionally get handed straight back to you. That's not rejection of you. That's a nervous system doing its job.

2. "Isn't offering choices just a sneakier demand?"

📔Every PDA parenting guide tells you to offer choices. "Leave in five minutes or ten?" And plenty of PDA kids see straight through it anyway, which raises the obvious question: Does choice actually help, or are we just running a slightly more polite manipulation?
According to Hythem, the difference comes down to whether the choice is real. "Do you want breakfast now or in ten minutes?" is genuine. 
"Do you want me to pick your shirt, or do you want this shirt?" is not a choice — it's an ultimatum wearing a costume, and nobody over the age of five is fooled by it.
The point of offering choice was never to trick anyone into compliance. It's to hand back agency — the ability to meet life's requirements on your own terms rather than someone else's.
Compliance, in Hythem's framing, is submission to authority; agency is voluntary cooperation. Those are not the same skill, and only one of them is worth building.

3. "My kid holds it together all day at school — is that a good sign?"

This is the one that keeps parents up at night, because the smoother the school day looks, the harder the after-school collapse tends to land.
Hythem's answer is (unsurprisingly) blunt: yes, it's a debt, and the size of it depends entirely on who your child has had to deal with that day. 
Authority, as he puts it, is really just the ability to impose your will on someone else — some people earn that through respect, some through reason, and some through plain intimidation. 
PDA nervous systems don't recognise the "because I said so" version as legitimate authority at all; they experience it as low-grade bullying, tolerable for a while, but the cost comes due eventually. Usually on your couch, at 4pm, directed at the person who feels safest.
The reframe worth sitting with: coping is not the goal. Coping just means surviving the pain. What we actually want is a way to metabolise it that doesn't require surviving anything.

4. "Does my child think they're my equal — or is that just self-protection?"

Both, and Hythem doesn't see much daylight between the two. Most PDA people, in his experience, have simply clocked something true: hierarchy is a social construct, and a lot of the authority adults wield is either undeserved or badly placed. Hythem's image for it is a toddler who's put on a police uniform and tries to arrest you. You wouldn't comply, because you'd instantly recognise the authority as fake. 

That's exactly how "just because I'm the adult" lands for a PDAer — not as legitimate, just as a costume.The workaround isn't to abandon authority altogether. It's to earn it — through intelligence, understanding, actually knowing what you're talking about. Prove the badge is real, and the pushback softens considerably.

5. "Why does my kid abandon hobbies the second they get good at them?"

💔 This is the one that breaks parents' hearts, because it looks like sabotage. It isn't.
Hythem points to the sociological idea of the "generalized other" — the imagined, judging audience we all carry around in our heads, the one we measure ourselves against. 
The moment an activity picks up a requirement to perform for that audience, it stops being play and becomes a demand, judged and found wanting before it's even finished.
Hythem tells his own story: launching a YouTube channel around his special interest, the thing he loves talking about more than almost anything. Four videos in, with fewer than twenty subscribers, he hit a wall — not because the audience was too big, but because the need for it to be perfect had quietly turned a joy into an obligation. The hobby didn't change. The judgment attached to it did.

6. "Is my child trying to control me, or are they just panicking?"

📌Parents often feel like the ones being controlled in a PDA household, which makes this question land with real frustration behind it.
Hythem's reframe: most of us grow up believing that once we're the parent, we'll finally be the one in charge. So when a child refuses to be controlled, it doesn't just feel like defiance — it reactivates the parent's own old wounds about being controlled as a child. 
Controlling another person, in his view (and I would have to agree), is inherently an act of force, however gently it's dressed up.The paradox resolves once the parent stops chasing control and starts working with reason and influence instead, aiming for a self-controlled kid rather than a compliant one.Viewed from that angle, the PDA child was never trying to dominate anyone — they were trying to stay safe, and they'll only fight as hard as they need to in order to feel that way.

7. "How do I tell my child that hitting, kicking, and swearing at me isn't okay — without it becoming another battle?"

The most practical question of the seven, and Hythem's answer is refreshingly concrete: learn the difference between a rule and a boundary.
A rule governs someone else's behaviour — "you're not allowed to hit." 
A boundary governs yours — "if you hit me, I'm going to walk away." 
One is an order; the other is information about what you will do, which is much harder to fight against because there's nothing to push on.
For younger children, a boundary like "if you throw a tantrum, I'll hold you until you're calm" works the same way — it doesn't force the desired behaviour, it just puts a non-violent consequence in place. Enforce consequences without violence for long enough, Hythem says, and the child stops needing violence to feel safe. None of it, he's quick to admit, was easy to learn. But it works.
A huge thank you to Hythem Betts — counsellor, PDA adult, and the person I go to whenever I want the answer from the inside rather than the outside. You can find him at newhorisons.net