August 22, 2025

Unconvincing reframings and renamings of PDA

Posted in Uncategorized tagged Autism, Disability, Neurodiversity, PDA at 4:16 pm by chavisory

Those of you who follow me on other platforms know that I’ve been pretty openly critical of the label of PDA (for Pathological Demand Avoidance) and the ideas behind it. One common response to criticisms of the PDA community has been to promote relabeling the phenomenon, often as either “Pervasive/Persistent Demand for Autonomy” or as “Rational Demand Avoidance.” But this recent article, arguing for such less overtly-pathologizing terminology, to me serves instead as an excellent example of why I maintain that the name is actually the least-bad thing about the framework of PDA, and why I think simply substituting euphemisms won’t help, and instead serve to further obscure rather than illuminate important things about autism and about why autistic children may adopt the behaviors of “PDA” as coping strategies.

“PDA describes autistic children exhibiting obsessive resistance to everyday demands and requests,” explain authors Robert Naseef and Stephen Shore. But autism already, by definition, involves difficulty with everyday tasks and activities. The problem with the label of PDA isn’t that it’s unnecessarily pathologizing or dehumanizing (although it is); it’s that it’s obscuring the fact that an autistic child obsessively avoiding a task or request probably has some kind of fundamental difficulty with that task.

In the first example given, for instance, “Twelve-year-old Calishea frequently melts down when asked to clear the dishes from the table after dinner, rinse them off and put them in the dishwasher. After a brief period of whining, she slams her silverware on the table, stands up, knocking her chair backwards, and shrieks as she stomps out of the kitchen.”

We’re meant to assume, I suppose, that Calishea has no actual difficulty completing this task, that she’s reacting to the demand and not the task itself. But is that true? To clear the table, rinse the dishes, and put them in the dishwasher is a hugely complicated sequence of motor tasks which also include multiple potentially distressing sensory elements (the clatter of dishes, the sight or tactile feeling of soggy or partially eaten food, the growl of the garbage disposal, the feeling of water on your hands or trickling down your sleeves) to demand of a child with a disability that’s coming to be recognized as inherently having movement and motor planning components (and has been widely recognized for a long time as having sensory ones).

(It’s also a task with which I had immense trouble and frequently resisted doing, albeit not as dramatically, when I was exactly that age.)

So there’s a way in which I think “Rational Demand Avoidance” is getting closer to the issue—that many children are avoiding/refusing tasks rationally to avoid distress. But I also think that to say a child “rationally” refuses tasks that make no sense to them actually refracts into about three separate possible underlying issues, and to conflate them and then let that be the end of the story seriously risks obscuring real distress and important deeper mechanisms of autism.

-There may truly be people who are refusing tasks they’ve logically determined have no purpose or meaning in their lives, and are logically deciding to bear the consequences—like failing out of college—of those decisions.

-I suspect, however, that when we’re talking about children, who particularly may not have language for or the ability to describe why they find a task too difficult or distressing, that this is an excuse. I don’t mean that these kids are lying with the intent to deceive, but that an excuse is often what substitutes when someone can’t tell the truth. And far more than that a child has actually done a fully informed calculation and determined logically that a task like washing the dishes doesn’t make any sense, I suspect most kids who are offering a statement like this are substituting an explanation they can find for one that they either don’t have the language for, or fear won’t be believed.

(Mine was often that I was “too tired.” And I was. I was tired. But I wouldn’t have had a chance in hell of successfully explaining why.)

-In the chapter on autism in Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon, researcher Michael Wigler says “There is probably an interplay between personality and the deficit. You and I could have similar deficiencies, but we would make different choices. It sounds odd that a two-year-old may be making a choice about what he can and can’t handle, but they probably do. You could have two kids that grow up in the same impoverished environment, and one joins the priesthood and the other becomes a thief, right? I think that can happen internally.”

In a chapter that I otherwise found disappointing in the extreme, this is an observation that I thought was really astute about the complexity of interactions that may determine why autistic children can follow such different developmental trajectories. Mel Baggs described similar dynamics in “About the way autistic people put our skills into different areas,” as far as autistic people engaging in cognitive tradeoffs to access different skill sets in response to different environmental demands, or allocating energy to different skill sets at different times.

I think that in a significant number of cases, even if a child does understand the logic or necessity behind a request, it may require an amount of bandwidth or motor planning that they do not have access to, and so a child is rationally, even if they can’t explain why, making tradeoffs to conserve bandwidth for more vital tasks.

I think autistic children are often intuitively making decisions about worthwhile use of their energy or bandwidth in ways they could never logically explain, either because they lack the words or because the act of explanation itself would require a level of verbal bandwidth they may not have.

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Likewise–why does an individual exercising “persistent drive for autonomy” need to exercise such intense control over their environment? Aside from that an adult is in no way obligated to change their living environment or routines just because someone else says so and they may be correctly asserting their rights to live as they wish in the face of undue interference (though obviously there’s a lot of nuance here for someone who doesn’t live alone), once again, given what we know about autism, is it possible that someone has set up their living quarters or arranged their daily routines in order to enable them to function the way they need to by circumventing movement, executive functioning, or sensory challenges.

And the thing is, even if someone doesn’t know why they need their environment to be a certain way in order to function at their best, only that they do, even if they don’t know anything about what the research shows regarding autism and movement disorders, even if they can’t explain any of this—they’re still right. Their insistence on maintaining certain environmental conditions or routines isn’t just coming from nowhere; it is grounded in things we already know about autism.

And if it is actually necessary that someone change their habits or living environment, because they are posing an unacceptable health or safety risk to themselves or others, then better understanding those mechanisms stands a better chance of enabling a solution or workaround that accounts for those core challenges.

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I remember years ago now when I was in a discussion with a parent in a comment thread, who complained that her young adult autistic daughter “just wouldn’t do what she was supposed to.” When I asked what she meant by that, she listed chores like doing the dishes and laundry, picking up her room, etc.

Okay, I said, is it possible that she’s experiencing some kind of sensory, transitioning, visual processing or motor planning challenge to tasks like that?

No, she insisted. Her autistic daughter didn’t have any of those.

I don’t think we need another term to say “autistic people just won’t do what they’re told” when what we know about autism at this point already offers myriad plausible explanations for why some seemingly socially capable autistic kids strenuously resist seemingly simple tasks and requests (namely, inertia, difficulty with transitions and starting/stopping/changing activities, sensory challenges, motor planning challenges, and intolerance of unpredictability).

“PDA can be mistaken for defiance or oppositionality because it presents as ignoring or avoiding tasks that are asked of someone.” But why is a child so strenuously avoiding a basic request? Don’t we have any obligation to this child to investigate whether any of the well-documented characteristics of autism known to render it a disabling condition could be at play here, and whether compromises, adaptations, or workarounds become possible if a child is enabled to name and understand those issues?

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