The Teacher's Introduction to Pathological Demand Avoidance: Essential Strategies for the Classroom

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Don’t let these strategies get in the way of maintaining honesty in your communication and interaction with students with PDA.

Being Julia – A Personal Account of Living with Pathalogical Demand Avoidance | Ruth Fidler and Julia Daunt It is best practice for an autism assessment to identify and record a person’s unique strengths and challenges and so demand-avoidant characteristics or a strong need for personal autonomy must be recorded, with or without the use of any particular terminology such as PDA.Psypact certified to work with clients in 23 other states providing neuropsychological and social cognition evaluations. It is important that people experiencing persistent and marked demand avoidance are recognised and supported using strategies and approaches personalised to their specific strengths and needs. It is important to note that when demand avoidance was first described, some of the behaviours observed were considered uncommon in autistic people. However, as our understanding of autism as a spectrum condition has developed, a number of these behaviours are now understood to be more common. As a mother, grandmother, educator, and counsellor of quirky-brained kids, I have 30+ years experience supporting children, adolescents, young adults, and caregivers/parents. As an experienced teacher, school counsellor, and college tutor I can help in advocating for inclusion within the systems. As a homeschooling parent for 15+ years, I have experience supporting home educators and their students. I am currently in private practice as a Solution-focused Strengths-based counsellor, parent coach, and educational consultant. I am available to any North American time zone via phone or video chat. Title: The educational experiences of autistic children with and without extreme demand avoidance behaviours

giving excuses (which may be fanciful – for example, 'I can't because I am a tractor and tractors don't have hands' or 'I can't because my legs are broken' (though they aren't)) Some (low quality) research highlights a relationship between this characteristic and the presence of both:

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Besides autism, it has been suggested that the presentation of a persistent and marked resistance to demands may be connected with other conditions, including: inability to attend education or employment due to distress and/or burnout, which may result in exclusion or termination.

While autism is a widely recognized term our understanding of the full breadth and complexity of the autism spectrum is still evolving. The National Autistic Society explains autism as, “a lifelong disability which affects how people communicate and interact with the world.” Many autistic advocates embrace the neurodiversity concept, where a range of neurological differences is viewed as being part of a natural human variation. Demand avoidance is most often conceived as a characteristic experienced by and/or observed in autistic people. It has been characterised as the key characteristic of a proposed condition or profile of autism called Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), although this is a controversial label that is not recognised clinically (meaning it is not included in medical manuals) and is contested within the autism community. At the end of each chapter is a very helpful summary such as the one shown above (also transcribed below). Although advocates of PDA most often think of it as a potential profile of autism, some have suggested PDA may be a distinct neurotype or neurological difference, not connected to autism or the conditions listed below.Everyone experiences ‘demand avoidance’ (resistance to doing something that is requested or expected of you) sometimes. However, here we use demand avoidance to mean the characteristic of a persistent and marked resistance to 'the demands of everyday life’, which may include essential demands such as eating and sleeping as well as expected demands such as going to school or work. Title: Demand avoidance phenomena: circularity, integrity and validity – a commentary on the 2018 National Autistic Society PDA Conference Source: Good Autism Practice 20, no. 2 (2019): 28-40. passivity/withdrawal (becoming floppy; curling up into a ball; not responding; walking/running away; withdrawing into fantasy)

Here’s an exclusive extract from Teaching and Education Consultant, Clare Truman’s The Teacher’s Introduction to Pathological Demand Avoidance: Essential Strategies for the Classroom. Truman has a wealth of teaching experience both within mainstream schools and special schools , including an autism-specific school . In 2017, she established Spectrum Space Community Interest Company, a social enterprise and alternative education provision which specialised in supporting children with PDA whose anxiety made it difficult for them to attend school. Before I met students with PDA, I had a very clear idea of how I wanted my classroom to run, and it didn't involve flexibility, child-led learning, problem-solving or collaboration. When I first went into teaching, I was determined that I was going to lay down clear rules and expectations and use traditional behaviour strategies such as rewards and consequences to ensure that every child followed my instructions. But that was before I had met a student with PDA..... When the way I was teaching no longer met the needs of the people I was teaching, I had to change my approach.... Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) is a term originally developed by the British psychologist Elisabeth Newson in the 1980s and first used in a published research paper by Newson in 2003. It was used to describe a group of children who did not fit into the stereotypical presentation of autism recognised at that time but who shared certain characteristics with each other, the key one being a persistent and marked resistance to demands.We know that autism is dimensional – it involves a complex and overlapping pattern of strengths, differences and challenges that present differently from one individual to another and in the same individual over time or in different environments.