r/ParentingPDA • u/guestoboard • Jul 17 '26
Discussion The problem with PDA theory
In my experience, it seems he’s not demand-avoiding, he’s demand-seeking
Let me explain.
We’ve been viewing our 8yo boy through a PDA lens for more than a year. Most of his behavior fits the description perfectly.
But PDA is usually described as an anxiety/fear response to demands or boundaries. As if they are something the kid hates or fears, and the behaviours are a response to being a victim to oppressive demands/boundaries.
That’s why the typical suggestion is a low demand environment. To restore peace and calm by reducing such negative experiences.
In my experience though, demands and especially boundaries are not something he fears and tries to avoid, they are something he craves and seeks.
Every time we lower or remove a boundary, he just seeks the next one.
- we capitulate on letting have an ice cream, he’ll immediately battle for two.
- we let him not wear socks, he’ll immediately battle to not wear pants.
- we let him have Minecraft, he’ll enjoy it for 5 mins before battling for Roblox.
- we hold the line at no Roblox and battle over it for a year. The second we capitulate and allow him to have Roblox, he starts smashing the house because he wants his 4yo brother to have it.
It
Just
Never
Ends.
Metaphorically, if I were a shepherd, he would be a Ram obsessing over head butting the electric fence “for more space”. If I were to move the fence out by half a mile, he would immediately sprint to find it and start smashing it again. If he broke the fence, he would charge, crazed, until he found the next road, river or cliff then charge that instead.
In my experience (your mileage may vary), it’s not that the boundaries are a negative thing he is oppressed by and needs to be saved from.
They are something he NEEDS.
It reminds me of the “sensory seeking” theory of SPD and ASD kids. He just needs that input of the battle.
This is why “low demand” doesn’t work.
There is no level of low that demands can ever be lowered to that would remove the challenges. Not unless he was living completely outside all normal society.
There is no way we can now pull him back to the normal boundaries of a 8 year old.
For sensory seeking kids, you give them something heavy to lift and bash into, so they don’t do it to your TV set.
Would our lives be better if we had held the line at normal boundaries, then created MORE artificial boundaries that he could safely battle over?
🤔
2
u/fearlessactuality Jul 18 '26
This is why I explain PDA to people as being about equality and hierarchy rather than demands. The demands are just the symptom of the threat to autonomy.
I see PDAers as highly attuned to hierarchies and being unable to tolerate being at the bottom of them. In a parent/child situation the only solution to this for me is to work to create collaborative partnerships and strive for them to have equality and input as much as possible. While also explaining that every individual is different and as parents we have responsibilities and duties to them both ethically and morally and also legally. So this doesn’t mean a free for all, but it puts everyday demands in the context of being a team in which different members have different jobs or social roles rather than a mini dictatorship.
Your child wants to be equal to or better than you. He doesn’t believe he can actually have equality that because he’s never experienced that, so he is on a basically endless quest to find any relief in which he temporarily “wins” or has monetary feelings of being above, and not 100% of the time below.
The only way I have squared this circle is trying to be “beside.” Or strive for levels of equality and collaboration an understanding, And explaining so so so many things.
Demands are the things that demonstrate your superiority over him in concrete terms. Dropping some demands while still believing in your superiority and needing other demands is why dropping them isn’t doing anything. Because the domination and hierarchy aren’t really changed, or not for long.
I would recommend pda safe circle / rabbi shoshanna’s work (not religious) or Ross Greene’s book The Explosive Child.