Neuroaffirming Learning: Supporting Families & Children with PDA and Beyond

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Transcript of “Neuroaffirming Learning: Supporting Families & Children with PDA and Beyond” – Bright Conversations Podcast

Hi and welcome to another episode of Bright Conversations. I am Shantaye Glover Jones and I am excited to be your host for today's episode. Today we will be talking with Marni and we'll be talking about her research as a neurodivergent consultant and advocate for neuroaffirming learning. Marni welcome to the show and if it's okay I'll give a brief introduction and then let you talk a little bit more about yourself and your experiences.

Yeah that sounds great. Okay great. Marni is a neurodivergent researcher and consultant who supports families in creating neuroaffirming learning environments. Her doctoral research focuses on family resilience and how autonomy supportive practices foster growth and well-being with over 15 years of experience and alternative education. Marni draws on both research and lived experience to support neurodivergent youth and their families and you can learn more about Marni and her work at WanderingBrightly.com.

We'll be sure to include that in all of our links for the show notes. So thank you Marni for being here today. Yeah thank you for having me. I'm really excited. So I gave your your formal bio your introduction.

Tell us a little bit more how you began this journey and how you found yourself doing this work. Sure so like many of us it started with personal experiences within so I decided to homeschool my kids before they were born and we had a really tight-knit homeschooling community and as it turns out the homeschooling community is largely neurodivergent and so we had a group of families that we were kind of going through life together educating our children and when the pandemic happened also as happened for many families some of the kids in our group started to get identified as neurodiver gent and then the parents also started to recognize our own neurodivergence and so that got me really interested in diving into a doctoral program as well as just really connecting with the neurodivergent community learning from lived experience. That's interesting that you had you knew even before birthing your children that you wanted to homeschool them. Yeah can you share a little bit more about your your thoughts or your experiences about homeschooling versus traditional schooling? Yeah I mean I think there's such a wide variety of schools and needs.

I think that for me that came from really having experience to disconnect between my public school experience and my learning needs as a young person. I was identified as gifted I really felt bored a lot in the classroom and sometimes I was able to find teachers who gave me a lot of autonomy and let me sort of go ahead and do a lot of independent studies which you know was good but I just really felt held back and that made me really angry and so that was a big part of it was just wanting to try something different for my kids and feeling like I just felt like I was a very autodidactic learner as many PDA people are you know which I'm sure we'll get into in this conversation but I had a lot of interest that I was excited to dive into and I felt like it didn't really make sense to me to have certain things that children were expected to learn at certain times rather than the things that they were really excited to learn because my experience was when you were told you had to learn something you learn it for the test and then it 's pretty much gone whereas if it's something that you're really excited about that's something that sticks with you and so that was sort of the philosophy that I wanted to experience with my own family and I had some experience before that in alternative education and observing the ways that these worked for families so it wasn't so far of a step for me to say we'll do this ourselves. We didn't talk about this yet but what part of the world are you joining us from? Yeah I am near Boulder Colorado okay and I'm originally from Michigan. Okay and you mentioned that there were a lot of other families nearby so you found the homeschooling community to be welcoming, easy to adapt to?

Yeah for sure I think that again varies based on location in terms of whether you can find people who are similar philosoph ically to what you're looking for where I am in your Boulder there's a lot of secular homeschoolers who are and there's a variety of different styles of homeschool ing so whether you're unschooling following a really self-directed sort of child- led approach or you're a Waldorf homeschooler, a Montessori or a classical homes chooler you know there's pretty much as many kinds of homeschooling as there is kinds of other brick and mortar schools so yeah you can connect with people who think similarly about it.

That's fantastic I do want to switch gears just a little bit because you already mentioned PDA and I want to talk more about PDA I feel like it's a term that we're hearing more about in research on social media more and more people are discussing it but there's still a lot of unfamiliarity with PDA and PDAers so let's break it down and talk about what PDA is for starters.

Yeah sure so I identify as a PDAer PDA stands for persistent drive for autonomy or pathological demand avoidance depending on the the official clinical term is pathological demand avoidance and sometimes you'll see extreme demand avoidance in the literature as well and I'll just mention briefly the way it's described in the literature but then talk more about a lived experience perspective so PDA society UK is a really great resource for learning about PDA and some of the ways that it's described there and from the literature are resisting and avoiding the ordinary demands of life using social strategies as part of the avoidance and generally just not appearing autistic and matching autistic stereotypes or stereotypes about autistic people but I think that as we're moving beyond that in the lived experience realm we're really talking more about nervous system regulation it is characterized by an intense need for freedom and autonomy but then I think that a lot of what ends up being talked about with PDA really is coming down to the experiences of children who don't have enough autonomy to feel safe and particularly ones who express their distress in an externalized or outwardly explosive manner.

Many of the parents who are looking for support around PDA are kids who may have been identified as ADHD and ODD like oppositional defiant disorder you know these are kids who are eternalizing messages about just being bad they don't they don't understand why things are so hard the families are often really struggling and many of us in the lived experience community are really just trying to educate about the nervous system and how these behaviors really make sense if you can understand the underlying needs and if you can if you can work with them in a different way and really be patient that you can help them to come to a place where they can be more regulated more often yeah you mentioned a few keywords in your description safety being one of them and that oftentimes it's misinterpreted as being bad non-compliant defiant a lot of negative connotations with that particular profile or neurotype and not always recognizing that those students or those individuals are actually in distress and that they're they're searching for safety which is why you're receiving the response that you're receiving in those moments.

From what I read and from experience I can say that it is it can be a very frustrating experience on both ends for not just the the family but also for the PDA because they they don't quite understand why it's happening or how to help make the situation better for lack of a better word yeah absolutely and I'll just add that the other piece that we're just starting to talk about more is sort of the internalized experience of PDA and so the other thing is that you can have a child who is a PDA or who appears very compliant who does all the things that they're asked to do in school but then comes home and completely melts down and you know might be described as a Jekyll and Hyde kind of experience for parents sometimes parents are told that they're clearly the problem because the child is an angel at school and they come home and must be a problem at school and in fact that is that restraint collapse and that's that child who is feeling really unsafe to the point of fawning so if we talk about those fight flight freeze fawn funster we just keep adding Fs which is fun but you know that if it is a child with more of an internalized experience of PDA that it can be really difficult for families to find professionals who can support them and help them to understand what's going on and even sometimes those young people can get all the way into their teen years and then it can come out as problems with eating or school refusal. 

Sometimes that is that longer trajectory before families start to come to PDA and understand this. So what in that situation where you're finding that you may be encountering that that Jekyll and Hyde personality where the difficulty seems to all be at home and they're not a parent in school and it's hard to show or demonstrate to the the school staff and all of the stakeholders that this child is actually experiencing the stress at home and it does carry over to school because it's hard to get them to school it's hard to get them to complete home assignments they have a negative feeling about school but because they know that this is an expectation they perform and they mask in the school environment how do you tackle that so that you don't have to wait until the teen years where it's now manifested into eating disorders severe burnout school avoidance and so forth.

Yeah I mean I think starting to get a team in place if that is accessible for a family to have a really good family therapist or a therapist for the child who can start to help document some of the things that are being experienced at home often getting an autism diagnosis is a key piece of how families can start to get support that is a bigger conversation in the current political climate but in general getting a diagnosis from the DSM is a way to get disability supports through the schools or you know in general some places have state-level disability support that families can access and really having someone I think to talk to who is familiar with PDA and can help to untangle some of that can really be helpful for families I know that this podcast is for SLPs so an SLP could also be part of that team of helping to be really observant because I think that the signs of distress may be there it's just that in a classroom of 30 children it may not be something that a teacher is necessarily aware of so if a child is seeing an SLP and it's a one-on-one situation they may be able to help document some of those things as well and then if you are the SLP who's able to note some of those things where do you go do you talk with the family do you talk with a case manager what should the next steps be as you're helping to support and build this case for the student needing more supports I'm not an SL P so I'll probably leave that to you to pull out but okay certainly talking to the family and the parents and trying you know if it's private us OP right then certainly talking to the parents if it's a school-based SLP then I guess they 're part of that team and they can share with the broader team some of the things that they're observing so one of the things that we talked a bit about them as conceptions and we talked some about you know what PDA can look like how do you recommend an individual or family member build that trust with a PDA or so that you can help them have those necessary life skills and support them yeah so I think one of the biggest things with the PDA is to recognize that they really need a lot more autonomy and ability to self-direct then children are generally given.

In a therapy space really focusing on connection and building relationship first which I imagine is probably the case with all children but just recognizing that you may need to go slower with a child who is identified as PDA or demand avoidant in terms of introducing any kind of adult directed kind of experiences I think one of the great things about speech though is that it really can be very play-based and child-centered as opposed to some other therapies where you might have goals that require doing certain things like NOT you know demonstrating skills speech really can be really play-based and so you know if you're not sure how to do that exactly and how to document it in the way that you need to for insurance or for whatever purposes then getting connected with a neuro aff irming speech therapist who can help sort of talk about how they do it and how they're still managing to do their documentation is really good and really I mentioned going slow but also just recognizing that if you do experience any sort of shutdown in a PDA or that it may take a while to gain back that trust and so you know if they start to shut down then going really back to the basics of play in connection and then building back up.

Would that be an example of a low demand based in your interactions on play or being child led? Yeah I think you could put it in the realm of low demand for sure I like to talk about nervous system regulation approaches sometimes I think that's really what we're getting at with a low demand approach is meeting a child exactly where they're at you know and often when we are talking about PDA kids we're also talking about kids who are either in burnout or teetering on the edge of burnout where they really aren't able to meet a lot of demands and so that is part of the conversation that gets missed sometimes I think which is that we're not going low demand because it just sounded like fun you know we're going there because that's what this child needs and that over time when you go really low demand and focus on that safety and connection then they're able to build back up those skills to engage in the ways that we hope that they would be able to. Yeah can you give us an example of a low demand what that day might look like for a PDA or how a parent might address or try to attack a low demand day for their kiddo. Yeah so I mean I think this really varies a lot depending on the regulation state of the child you know so a low demand day could look very conventional like if we're talking about let's just say it's like a summer weekend day and so you know it could look like going to the pool or going out to do fun things it might also look like staying at home in pajamas. I think a lot of what we're talking about with low demand is really being thoughtful about what is really important you know and so if you have a child who you know is a PDA child then you might think carefully about whether they actually need to get dressed for the day you know rather than that being a daily morning expectation it might be would you like to get dressed we were thinking about going out to the park you know and if the child's like no I want to stay in my pajamas then you know maybe that's for you to decide is it more important that we get to the park even if they're in their pajamas or is that actually not safe in my neighborhood for whatever reason and then maybe that is where you set a boundary of okay well you don't have to get dressed but I think we probably need to stay home then and you might explain why.

I think it's always just sort of staying attuned to the nervous system state of the child and then being careful about the requests that you make of them. That kind of leads to my other thought then what do you say to parents who are worried about giving in too much to their children because they're trying to make it easier to keep them regulated and and keep the demands low but they're also concerned about giving in too much and losing their authority. Yeah yeah my experience has been that as Dr. Ross Green says kids do well when they can and so my personal experience as a parent and the families that I work with has been that when you meet kids where they're at you help them to heal and to naturally get to a better place of wanting to do more and showing up to take care of you the way that you've taken care of them. I think the part that's hard for families is that it's not a quick fix and that sometimes it can take for a child and burnout for example it can take years before they may be able to access some of those skills that you might hope for them like using the bathroom independently for a child who is of an age where that society expects that right or being able to sleep alone things like that and again I think that is just it's always cost benefit analysis within a family in terms of are you someone who sleeps fine with a kid in the bed even though they're eight or nine or are you someone who really doesn't and then you have to try to collaborate around different solutions whether that's why parents sleeping with them or putting a mattress on the floor it's really different for different different people at different times.

Mm-hmm as you're talking I'm just thinking about how different the responses to these things can be because sometimes especially if you're not if you're looking at autism through an older lens a less nuanced lens and you're not recognizing that your child is nor divergent you may be thinking that this child is just being non-compliant like I said before being immature and still wanted to sleep with parents so it can be it could be tricky to tease this out for for some people who aren't as aware or aren't as informed at what point would you say or what are some things that maybe would be like a aha moment for a parent to say maybe I should talk to my pediatrician or maybe I should talk to someone because I'm not sure if this is just my kiddo being stubborn maybe this is something more. Yeah unfortunately pediatricians some of them are really great and up-to-date about you know our current understanding of autistic experience but many are not and so I always recommend parents to start by really listening to lived experience and to start making notes for themselves about things that they're observing in their child so that then when they do go to a professional that they have a better sense of what they want to talk about. For example an easy one is stimming you know for professionals like oh does your child stim might say well no they don't you know spin around in circle or flap or you know stare at fans or any of these sort of stereotypical things and then but you might read in a more nuanced description that stimming might look like twirling your hair right or it might look like tapping your foot. I mean really the way that we talk about autism is just these pathologized ways of talking about natural human traits that are more intensified because the DSM description of autism is a description of a genetically autistic person in distress and so they're just distress behaviors and trying to unravel all of that when you're a parent new to this world it's just it's such a huge job but there are some places where you can start to get that nuanced information and to help yourself start to make those lists and then to weigh the options for your family about what you think is gonna get you the best supports based on what your kids need. Not all kids need not all autistic kids need an autism diagnosis.

I don't know personally. I agree. Yeah I agree but if it will help you get the support that you need I do think that it can be helpful to have that unfortunately because without it some people don't take the the needs seriously unless you have that diagnosis at times. Yeah no 100% and I guess I also like to talk about the difference between getting an official medical diagnosis and introducing concepts of neurodiversity to children to talk about these things and to help them to start to understand it especially if you might have a PDA kid it's great or any child actually it's great to let them start to like explore those concepts and to sort of decide whether it sounds right to them rather than having it be this thing that this black box that some they go into this evaluation and then someone places these terms on them right it's great they can kind of come to their own sort of oh yeah like that does kind of sound like me maybe through a great media representation or a book something like that. Yeah I like to I'm a big proponent of picture books and literacy and I think that oftentimes you know we can select a book because we think it's a mere representation of a student but sometimes it's a window into a new world but for us as the the selector of the book we may think it's a window but it may end up being a book that a child can identify themselves in and it may be a conversation started to help them have the vocabulary to say I feel like that character or I see myself in that character and then help you to have a better sense of what they're feeling inside and I would say as a parent and as a speech pathologist that it's so important to listen to kids because they really do know themselves you know and when they when they tell you what they're feeling to listen to them and not invalidate the things that they share as well.

Yeah definitely I will say there 's a little nuance around just sometimes families do need to go through the evaluation process and sometimes a child might not identify with any of it and that can be okay too and then I still need to try to figure out how can I best get this child support but in general I think that the more information we can give kids the better. Yeah yeah I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about unschooling and self-directed education something that you have a lot of experience in but I do also want to talk about the public school environment as well we probably will have folks who come from a variety of environments and work settings and so while some of us may work privately with clients some of us may still be in school environment so how can we support autistic children and PDAers regardless of the environment but let's first talk a little bit about unschooling and self-directed education why was this something that you chose or why do you think that some families often feel that this is the best path for for their family and for their child? Yeah I talked about it a little bit when we first started talking but basically my own experience as a learner were that I didn't feel like I needed to follow a specific sort of laid-out curriculum as much I mean I did follow curriculums but it was the things that stuck with me were the things that I was passionate about and I wanted to explore that for young people and so I did that in some self-directed education schools and there are democratic schools where kids can go and be self-directed learners there's different models and so then when I had my own children decided to explore unschooling with them which is a self-directed education model that's primarily within a home or family setting but many unschoolers are very much in the community so for my three children each of them it has looked very different but it's often at least offering a lot of community-based resources so my daughter is the one who is the most interested in being busy all week and so she likes to have you know go to this place on Mondays in a different place on Tuesdays and then on Wednesdays we might have a more quiet day and she might just have something online and sort of we're able to piece together exactly the week that works for her but it's still quite busy my boys have tended to like things to be a little more laid-back you know they like to really be able to deep dive into their own interests they're not as excited about going to classes generally.

Although my oldest at 15 last year started taking community college courses which is a common thing for unschoolers to do particularly because community college is so much more flexible and has so much more autonomy than conventional high school and so you can start to piece together a class here in a class there so that's a little bit of unschooling and I would just say that it can just be customized so much for each individual learner so if you have someone who really loves horseback riding they could do a lot of horseback riding and then sometimes people will explore different aspects of academic type subjects in relation to that interest like a lot of that comes up naturally in the course of getting deep into passions but sometimes families with consent will you know design a science curriculum or a math project around those passions and so it really can look a wide variety of different ways do your children or the other families that you support do they work together in cohorts or is most of the learning individualized it can be both so we have a science co-op for example that has a few different families that get together each week and we take turns teaching sometimes families it's not very common in homeschooling for families to do something like an it's called like a pod kind of like the pandemic was a learning pod yeah really isn't a very homeschool-y kind of thing in general okay yeah that's more of like a a pandemic schooling idea of what homeschooling might look like okay yeah people do that sometimes it's just not as common again because it is so customized for each child and so it you know they wouldn't necessarily all want to do that art class or not writing or that rock climbing or whatever it is did I was definitely thinking of a pod when when I was thinking about that because of the pandemic and it sounded like it offered opportunities for socialization that you might not or at least I presume you might not have with homeschooling if it's just the parent and the child or the you know the parent and the and the siblings is that how accurate would you say that that is I'm assuming they probably have lots of opportunities to socialize in different spaces since like your daughter goes to different things in the community and I'm sure your your boys also have opportunities to socialize now with community college or other activities to the defeat that's an issue at all no and I think that that is a little bit of sort of a common idea that our society has around that children should be with the same children many hours a day multiple days right and I think when we're talking about neurodivergent kids in particular those preferences very really widely from there are neurodivergent kids who love that and who actually asked to go to school after they've been homeschooled because they want to be with other kids the same kids multiple days a week some kids love that other neurodivergent kids are like I really prefer to spend time with adults mostly or you know people much older or much younger than me or mostly online where I can have a lot more control over what kinds of things feel safe to me in terms of social interactions.

I think it really varies and it also varies based on your geographic location and to what extent there are a lot of opportunities I would say near major cities there's generally a lot and then sometimes if you live in a more rural area it's gonna be a lot harder to find things in person during the day for homeschoolers particularly if say you are a secular homeschooler and it's more religious homeschoolers in that area or vice versa so it depends on how well you can find people who match with what you're looking for but where we are there are a million opportunities far more than we could fit into our week that's good to hear good to know I think that is a common misconception for since we're talking a lot about neurodivergent learners some of which you may need support from more specialized intervention what's your understanding or your relationship with having SLPs OTs other support personnel to assist with those children yeah I do think that is a reason that a portion of homeschooling families decide to homeschool is because it you know if you're going to be accessing services sometimes that is a lot easier when you homeschool I think that having those professionals can be a really important part of a week for a homeschooled child and it can as my as I mentioned earlier having sort of that team that's in your corner for support sort of that we don't live in a in a world anymore where we have a natural village but your SLPs your OTs they can really be part of that support and for parents who are newer to understanding neurodivergence often an SLP or an OT might be their first really regular contact around what this is and so that's a huge opportunity for a neuro affirming provider to be able to reframe and to say there's nothing wrong with your child this is all completely expected for a autistic child and it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them and I'm here to support you through it and here's some great books to go back out yeah yeah yeah we talked a little bit about regulation and that's definitely a piece that OTs and SLPs can help with as well are there any situations where you feel like in a therapist a clinician might inadvertently increase a child's anxiety or their resistance to learning or intervention yeah I definitely think that in general adults who are professionals often have the experience of a parent is bringing a child in the hopes that things are going to get better and that they might have very specific ideas around what they're hoping is going to change and so I think the professional helping for that mind shift again that rather than going for quick change you know based on outward observed methods you know we're instead going for increased regulation over time and connection and so trying to explain that nervous system based approach yeah be really huge and a big part of helping them to shift and just again that piece around like this is okay it's okay that your child is taking a different trajectory like this idea that our society tells us that all kids are supposed to do the same things at the same time is actually quite ridiculous and that's not how we do that here in our practice you know we're meeting the child where they're at and we're meeting you where you're at as a parent and it 's all just about making sure that everybody has that chance to be seen and sued and heard basically yeah yeah yeah yeah let's talk about giftedness and twice exceptional students like I believe earlier on you mentioned that you were a two-e kid when you were learning and when we talk about the traditional public school setting do you feel that those students often get missed because of their academic giftedness and so those other those other areas aren't as supported yeah definitely I was identified as gifted we didn't really have neuro divergent girls as much in the 90s so that was never something that was considered but we did we just didn't identify exactly we existed but it was not it was not on anybody's radar yeah you know it's interesting I'm sorry to interrupt but I I'm late diagnosed neuro divergent and I remember with one of my evaluations the evaluate are asking me why didn't anyone say something when I was a kid I was like I don't know but also we didn't know about a lot of this back then our parents certainly weren't educated in these areas so that might be funny you know when we're talking about the 80s and the 90s we just didn't have the nuances that we have now and so it's always interesting to me when folks say well you know in my day we didn't have that like we did we were there sure we were there.

But, again, I mean and a lot of us would still be missed honestly we're doing better but a lot of us because we know we're seeing young people some are getting identified some are asking to be to have an evaluation you know and they're getting pushed back on like oh you're just watching TikTok it's like okay well I heard this on TikTok and it resonates right and that we can go in for an evaluation and depending on the evaluator they might get properly identified or not yeah but yes I think that again there's just so little depth of understanding I think in the general public around what it means to be autistic and so particularly for kids who are both gifted and autistic there is still a lot of misconceptions that oh that's just the giftedness that makes them have those sensory sensitivities yeah you know sort of and and a lot of parents want to believe that understandably because autism has been a scary diagnosis and I guess what I often try to do is to help people look beyond the DSM conception of neurodivergence and to say this can actually be a really beautiful way to be in the world and lots and lots of neurodiver gent people are very happy and able to create lives that work really well for them doesn't mean that this is some sort of terrible thing it just means that this could really help them to understand themselves in a new way for you to understand them in a new way yeah yeah I think that that's so key it's not an indictment in any way on the parenting or or you as the parent but it does give so much insight to the individual into how you are and how you're going to experience the world it makes it helps you make sense out of who you are and in this picture as opposed to looking for something else but you're right you know for such a long time autism has been framed in such a way where parents would grieve receiving that type of a diagnosis but I want to believe that we're we're pushing forward into a new space and a new chapter where we're looking at it from a different lens where we're being more obviously more affirming but also accepting of all of the variations that an autistic person may show up how they may show up in the world and how they may experience the world for someone who's twice exceptional and gifted which means that you're probably not experiencing traditional challenges when it comes to academics that may mean that it's harder for you would not be referred then to a child study team you might not be sent for intervention and resource support because you're not showing up as having bad grades you're not showing up as not being able to function in in big or small group settings right but there may be some other challenges that are happening that are being overlooked is there a way for you to get support in school in spite of that and if so what would that look like yeah there were a few things in what you said and I just want to step back a little bit to say that you can also be someone who's identified as a problem child you know and be gifted and so it is also possible for the giftedness to be hidden and not seen and that part not to be supported it's especially common if there is a co-occurring experience of dyslexia dysgraphia some sort of learning difference or disability and that that masks this idea because people often will say well they can't be gifted because they're not reading or whatever right you know certainly not true a good evaluator can help to tease all of those pieces out you can also have a child if it's a PDA child it could be that they just completely refuse and that they're identified as a problem child or a bad child and you know it may be that if they are placed into some sort of educational environment where they are interested and engaged and particularly if they're not asked to do so much busy work that they might be able to engage better so supporting that giftedness piece around making sure that the academic challenge is appropriate can really be helpful for many kids I do think that the degree of support for giftedness varies state by state because our educational system is so state- based and even down to the district or the individual school or classroom level you know when you're talking about schools it varies so much but yeah I know that in Colorado that gifted kids have a right to have advanced learning plans but I don't know that that's the case across the country okay and what what do you mean by an advanced learning plan would that be somewhat to an individualized education plan in other states like an IEP okay yeah yeah so in Colorado they actually have what's called an ALP and so okay they do screening of all students in second grade and then if they are identified as gifted they should have an ALP I'm not super in touch with what goes on in the public schools I have heard a little bit of you know varying reports on how much those ALPs might be followed or how valuable they might be but it's a good start anyway are there any things that an educator or therapist can watch for when it comes to working with two e-kids yeah there's a lot I think just the first step is to recognize that for two e-kids it can often be a really confusing experience for the child themselves and to be really compassionate about that there are books about two e-kids that you can read to try to bring yourself up to date on sort of the complexity of those experiences to the extent that families and children can get a really good evaluation so that there is more information about what exactly is going on for them and so that they can get disability accommodations if appropriate that can make a really big difference because sometimes kids are able to compensate for things that they're struggling with but there's a big cost to doing that and so they should have the accommodations that they need for their disability just as much as they should have access to curriculum that is appropriate for their giftedness.

Yeah so as we begin to try to summarize this conversation I know we talked about a lot of different things and I think it's been very helpful conversation I hope to for parents if they're listening what are some tips that either SLPs or other clinicians can take away for working with PDA learners yeah so I think the first thing is really to follow their lead so you know with speech in particular it's really possible to be very child-centered my own kids have been through a few different speech therapists so I've observed different ways of working with kids and been able to find one who was really is neurod ivergent themselves is really neuro affirming and does just a beautiful job of following my PDA kids you know what they need in that moment focusing on connection and nervous system safety above all else even if that means you're taking the long view on getting those goals met and connecting with other neurodivergent SLPs who can kind of help guide you in this neuro affirming journey I think the isn't the two sides of the spectrum was that one SLPs do you remember that podcast I don't know that one I'm not sure I'm not familiar with that yeah I think that one two sides of the spectrum I'm pretty sure that they are SLPs that's an excellent podcast there's also an hamman who does neural wilds and has a lot of excellent she's an SLP and or there in SLP has really wonderful graphics yeah yeah I lost my train of thought but there was something that you had mentioned oh I know you had mentioned you your own children have had different SLPs and I just want to highlight and I try to do this as often as I can when possible that it's okay to recognize that you're not the right fit for a family or that a therapist is not the right fit for your family and I know that you know it may take some privilege and resources to be able to do that but when possible it's okay for you to say I don't think this is working I don't think that this is the clinician for my child or for myself and and keep looking until you find the one that is a better fit that seems to be following the the approach and I don't mean it from a clinical sense but just making sure there's a connection because if there's no connection then you're going to see limited progress you really have to focus on having that connection that relationship first and foremost so I just wanted to highlight what you mentioned about the importance of finding a therapist that gets you and gets your children yeah that's a really excellent point and it's something that as a parent since I have been a parent for a long time at this point that and gone through some different experiences that now I know some of the things to ask upfront young parents don't always know to ask for example can I stay in the room does that work with you and that was something that really helped with my older child because by being in the room I could hear what they were working on and I could work on that during the week whereas you know other parents may not want to be in the room for whatever reason maybe they need that hour to just read a book maybe their week is completely exhausting right so just as you mentioned just trying to find somebody who's on the same page.

Mm-hmm, definitely how can parents start creating a more neuro affirming home environment yeah I mean I think it's pretty much those same things like follow your child's lead focus on connection and nervous system safety and then trust the process you know that is a really big one to trust that your child no matter how hard it is this is like this this too belongs you know this is something that they have to move through and that finding ways that you can feel supported as a parent to be able to walk through that with them without needing to push so hard you know I think most of us trust that like our very young children that they are going to crawl they're going to you know do those things and sure that's not true for all children sometimes they don't do those things and we have to pivot but for the vast majority you know you trust that those things are going to happen and they do and I think that sometimes with neuro divergent kids you have to trust harder you know it can take a lot longer and so if you can connect with other people who have walked this journey before that can help to allay some of those fears yeah and trust that their their journey will be their journey as you mentioned like some children will not walk some children may not speak with words and that's okay too that just trusting and supporting them for where they are and help them to get to where they can go and that every every child even within your own children I'll say like you know a quick lesson I learned was that you can parent your kids the same way the way I parent my older daughter was not the way that I could parent my younger daughter and I think it's just important to know that it really there really is no one size fits all approach yeah definitely and I love that you bring that up because it really brings up also that radical acceptance I think is a piece when you are parenting any child you know that this is the child that I have and it may not be that like what I imagined but this is this is the child in front of me and their journey as you said it's gonna be their own journey and so how can we be together in a family system to get through this it's not always easy but that you'll get there yeah and what I'm hearing from you is that you really want to your whether it's your your neuro divergent child your PDA or your autism whatever it may be you want them to feel like they're important and that they have value in not just this family not just the school environment but in society in general and so you want to try to support and amplify them for who they are not who we thought they might be or who we wanted them to be but for who they are yeah yeah yeah I want to thank you for sharing with us this afternoon I don't know when everyone will be listening and I want to thank you again to for your encouragement I think another key piece that we talked a lot about today was the importance of collaborating with other stakeholders who are involved in your child's life and and advocating for for having that involvement with those folks if if they're not already and being flexible in your support for those students and if people want to learn more about your work and your story and your expertise I know you mentioned that you've been doing research as well where can they follow you and where can they continue to learn with you yeah thanks I think sub stack is often the best way to connect with me so my sub stack is wandering brightly I have a website as well wandering brightly calm and I also have a podcast with my friend Chris Wells called PDA resistance and resilience.

I didn't know that but I will definitely check that out and PDA North America I believe that that's where I initially heard with some of your work and that's a good resource as well for anyone who's looking to learn more about PDA and we'll list all of those resources in the show notes for this episode I want to invite everyone to continue to listen if you're interested in learning more please do visit the bright ideas media website at d the brightest calm where we do have some courses on understanding PDA and you can listen to additional bright conversations episodes there as well thank you so much again for joining us Marni today and it's been a pleasure to talk with you and learn a lot more about the PDA experience and your personal and professional experience.

Thank you Shontaye, I really enjoyed it.

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