![]() Long term, children with PDA can learn to manage life and the demands they can respond to. We have worked with a number of PDA profile children who have been moved to a specialist provision or home schooled (with education still provided by the LA). They end up being traumatised, unable to cope with the millions of daily demands and the anxiety caused makes them unable to attend school at all. This is where many children with a PDA profile end up not attending school for some time. They are not ‘attention seeking’ but trying to manage in a very fearful and overwhelming world. But believe me, a child with autism and PDA profile NEEDS this. Of course you may not think this is a good way to treat a child. ![]() It means giving the child a lot of control over what they do and when. Sometimes we need to realise they are traumatised and need time first to recover and this means backing off from most demands, letting them recover at their own pace and then slowly reintroduce every day activities. We need to listen and work out together how to reduce stress on them and make successful ways of accessing life. It is so important to understand the communication of the autistic child and that may be through demand avoidant behaviour. We need to look at our own arousal levels, how we respond to their ‘can’t’ and examine whether we can handle the situations we find difficult in a better way. We can change the environment, it’s sensory demands, the sensory triggers and the demands of clutter or confusing places that overload an autistic / PDA profile child. We might need to communicate in a different way, a way that puts less pressure on the child to do all the interpreting work. We also found that they responded to less predictability than was usual for our autistic pupils, so every day we were using different strategies.Īs with all autistic children it is first and foremost OUR responsibility to change. Seeing the helpful approaches from the PDA Society we tried some out and saw that they did indeed reduce the anxiety the child had and enabled them to engage with the activities we had prepared for them. All were diagnosed as Autistic, but the usual strategies weren’t working and their behaviour was extreme in response to normal demands, even things we knew they liked. But reading the information on the PDA Society website and the research done by Elizabeth Newson I began to see some key characteristics that explained the differences in particular children I worked with. ![]() Certainly, I remember being a little cynical when I first heard about it. Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) might just seem like just another ‘syndrome’ that labels children these days.
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