PDA and School: Patterns, Advocacy, and Accommodations With Dr. Alex Klein | Ep. 183

Casey Erlich (0:02)

If you're parenting a PDA or suspected PDA child or teen, and it feels like your whole family is living in a long, slow burnout, you are in the right place. I'm Casey Erlich, mom of two PDA autistic sons and founder of At Peace Parents. I'm the co-author of the first peer-reviewed studies on PDA in the United States, and I've supported over 3,000 families as they learn to stabilize daily life with their PDA children and teens. On this podcast, I help you understand pathological demand avoidance, or what I call pervasive drive for autonomy, through a PDA-affirming trauma-aware lens. We'll talk about how to support your PDA child or team's autonomy and nervous system, lower the daily conflict at home, and protect your own nervous system in the process. You can expect teaching from my own home and from my work with families, conversations with aligned experts, and simple experiments you can actually try in real life so you can see things start to shift. The goal isn't a perfect household. It's moving from constant crisis to more days that feel hard but doable, with moments of real connection, visible progress, and even some humor. This podcast is education and coaching, not therapy or a crisis service. But my hope is that you leave each episode feeling a little less alone and a little more resource to support your PDA child or teen, and yourself. Let's get started.

Before we get in to today's episode, I want to make sure you know about something that might really help if your PDA or suspected PDA child or teen is in burnout and you're running on fumes too. This month, I'm teaching a free 90-minute live workshop called Parenting Your PDA Child or Teen Through Burnout without breaking yourself in the process.

We'll talk about what's actually going on in your child or teen's nervous system, why so many common strategies backfire with PDA, and a gentler, more sustainable way to support them and yourself. You can save your spot and get access to the replay at atpeaceparents.com/freedashworkshops.

Or just click the link in the show notes below. Okay, let's jump in to today's episode. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the At Peace Parents Podcast. I am here with one of my favorite colleagues and clinical psychologists, Dr. Alex Klein. And today we're going to talk about PDA and school, which is I know a big topic for those of you listening, who are in the Northern Hemisphere and we're in the first month of that back to school stage. So we hope this conversation will be supportive to you. I'll be speaking a little bit more from the parent perspective. And Alex will be talking about patterns he notices with his clients that he works with, many of whom are families raising PDA children and teens and he also works with them directly. So welcome, Alex.

Alex Klein (3:17)

Thank you so much, Casey, for having me back here. I love our conversation, so I'm thrilled to chat with you today.

Casey Erlich (3:23)

Me too. And you're a parent too. I don't want to discount that because I know you have your own back to school. How's that going?

Alex Klein (3:31)

Oof, you know, third grade for my twins is, you know, it's been a lot.

Some good, some hard. We're hanging in there. We're hanging in.

Casey Erlich (3:42)

Yeah, hanging in. That's the name of the game.

Alex Klein (3:45)

Very good.

Casey Erlich (3:46)

Well, I'm going to share a little bit about our transition as we're answering questions together. So let's kick it off with our first theme. So the first theme is, how do we understand PDA in school? So let's talk about how each of us sort of defines PDA and our views around autonomy, equality and demand avoidance in the school setting.

Alex Klein (4:15)

Yeah, big topic, big, big topic. I mean, it can play out in so many different ways in the school setting. I mean, I certainly think of PDA, I mean, I guess a fairly standard way, right? This is largely thought of as a subtype on the autism spectrum. We don't have so much research that either refuting that or confirming that. Some of this is theorized, we're doing the best we can.

I think I've said before in previous podcasts, I see an overactive stress response as being very, very, very common and central, and of course, to real and perceive losses of autonomy, right? So that's a really extra hyper sensitive to any perceived loss of autonomy, is obviously a really core piece. I mean, one of the things I am often thinking about, especially in the school settings, this is going to manifest at home too, would be, I think, with any kid I come in contact with, families that I talk to, we are peeling away and looking at what are the different layers of demand avoidance, because it's almost always quite multifaceted, right? So sometimes, sure, we can ask the question like, is this PDA or not? But sometimes a more important question for me could be like, what are the different layers of demand avoidance? Is this the most commonly in PDAs, the most common thing we think about is that demand avoidance, because we need to feel in that place of power or not beneath, or having that sense of autonomy, right? So the high need for control is sometimes put that way. But also, is this like a kid who's lacking capacity because they are just been overly depleted over the course of the year?