A Parent’s Guide to Navigating Pathological Demand Avoidance

What Is Pathological Demand Avoidance?

Learning about Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) — a profile characterized by intense, anxiety-driven resistance to everyday demands and expectations — finally helped me understand my son, Max, and how to support him.

During his early years, Max would frequently refuse to do what was asked of him and insist everything be done his way. He would inexplicably melt down or erupt in anger over seemingly minor issues. By the time he was 7, he had collected several diagnoses, including ADHD, autism, and ODD. Commonly suggested behavioral strategies for neurodivergent children — from setting clear rules to using checklists, visual timers, and liberally doling out praise — didn’t help. In fact, all they seemed to do was set up further power struggles where everyone lost.

If this story sounds familiar, learning about PDA may also help you.

Children with PDA have extremely reactive nervous systems that prime them to interpret requests and expectations as threats. Alongside this pressure-sensitivity lies an intense need for equity and autonomy. As such, children who fit the PDA profile need an approach that prioritizes collaboration over command and connection over compliance. They need a flexible, low-key, and low-demand parenting approach — an approach that, admittedly, did not come naturally to me and my husband. Oh, and did I mention that it requires parents to be very skilled at regulating their own emotions?

Ultimately, all parents raising unusually challenging kids want the same things. We all want to bring the best version of ourselves to our parenting. We all want a loving and stable connection with our child. We all want to feel less confused and overwhelmed and more confident, joyful, and hopeful along the way. We all want our kids — our complicated, wonderful kids — to thrive. To that end, here are the approaches that have helped us support our son more effectively and see positive change.

Pathological Demand Avoidance: 8 Essential Shifts for Parents

1. Look Through a Brain-Based Lens

Ross Greene, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and author of The Explosive Child, has a saying that has served us well for navigating PDA: “Kids do well if they can.” 

[Read: 10 Rules for Dealing with the Explosive Child]

If you find yourself using words like disobedient or defiant to describe your child, it’s a sign that you’re viewing them through a behavioral lens. You are assuming that their challenging behaviors are intentional and fully within their ability to control. When it comes to PDA, it’s a lens that evokes frustration and anger.

Switch to a brain-based lens, and you’ll remember that: (1) Children who fit the PDA profile are predisposed to interpret demands as threats to their safety and autonomy; and (2) Demands and pressure trigger strong stress responses that emerge as challenging behavior. It’s a perspective shift that reduces frustration and leads to more productive responses.

2. Reduce Demands

In the context of PDA, the term “demands” refers to any expectation or perceived expectation placed upon an individual. Demands can be direct instructions (e.g., “put your shoes on”), routine tasks (e.g., showering or brushing teeth), implicit or social expectations (e.g., making eye contact in conversation, greeting someone politely), transitions and changes, or even internal demands such as those related to hunger, thirst, or toileting.

Because our pressure-sensitive children have very reactive nervous systems, demands can trigger intense anxiety and lead to resistance, avoidance, or emotional outbursts.

[Read: Defiance, Defused — A Roadmap to Radical Behavior Change]

Navigating a day’s worth of demands can progressively drain our child’s capacity to cope. To help them conserve energy so that they can meet unavoidable or essential demands, it’s important that we drop unessential ones to reduce the load.

3. Prioritize Connection and Collaboration

As parents, when we encounter resistance, avoidance, or refusal, it is frequently tempting to dig in ourselves and insist on compliance. When it comes to PDA, however, taking this approach often leads to power struggles that create additional distress. Prioritizing deep listening, flexibility, and collaborative problem solving will help your child feel safer and more in control.

4. Learn to Self-Regulate

Ultimately, we want our demand avoidant child to learn how to better regulate their own threat-response reactions and cope more effectively with demands. However, we parents are going to need all the self-regulation skills that underpin these abilities long before our demand avoidant children are capable of applying them consistently.

No matter how good you get at connecting and collaborating with your child, you are not going to be able to sidestep or defuse every meltdown or explosion. PDA kids are intense and it is easy to get swept up in their emotional storms. As such, it is essential for us as parents to get good at grounding ourselves—to learn how to better manage our own stress responses, frustration, and anger, so that we can stay calmer under pressure.

5. Plan for Explosive Moments

Intense meltdowns are common with demand-avoidant children. These episodes can be distressing for everyone involved, especially when they involve destructive or violent behavior. It’s important for parents to develop a contingency “rage plan” that identifies clear priorities during an extreme meltdown. “Protect, defuse, de-escalate” is our mantra for navigating explosive moments.

6. Upskill in Relationship Repair

At times your own grounding skills are going to fail you and you will experience parenting moments that you wish you could redo. What then? You practice self-compassion and then you repair. You return to that moment of disconnection, take responsibility for your behavior, and acknowledge its impact on your child. This will build trust and strengthen your connection.

7. Lean Into Your Child’s Fascinations

Many PDA children have strong special interests. They may love fishing, dinosaurs, Minecraft…you name it. You may not love these things with the same focused intensity as your child, but these fascinations are gateways to deep connection.

Spend time with your child as they engage in the things they love. Be with them, learn with them (let them teach you), play with them, and talk with them about their interests. When you genuinely take an interest in what they love, you’re building the sort of relationship that increases their willingness to join you when you ask things of them.

8. Focus on What You Can Control (Spoiler: That’s Yourself)

• Pick your battles. Raising a demand-avoidant child will force you to challenge your own hardwired assumptions about parenting. Most of us were taught to value hierarchy and authority. We often step into parenting expecting that our children “should” comply and obey. These approaches simply don’t work for children who fit a PDA profile. When I catch myself feeling like my child “should” be doing something they’re resisting, I pause and ask myself, “Why does this matter to me?” and “How important is this, really?”
• Remember the ultimate goal: A positive parent-child relationship. We may not be able to get our children to brush their teeth, take showers, attend school, or do any number of things we would like them to do. However, we can control who we are and how we show up in our relationships with them. Real change usually starts with us. When we focus less on “fixing” or “controlling” our child and more on understanding, adapting, and reshaping our expectations, we often see more of the connection and progress we’re longing for.

Pathological Demand Avoidance: Next Steps

• Free Download: How to End Confrontations and Defiance
• Read: The Parents’ Guide to Dismantling Oppositional, Defiant Behavior
• Read: 6 Truths About Child Behavior Problems That Unlock Better Behavior
• Read: 10 Rules for Dealing with the Explosive Child

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Updated on May 27, 2025