Your Demand Avoidant Diva
Rethinking why your child refuses
My husband was gone for ten days in his precious sprinter van, hiking into five Utah national parks.
I stayed alone (with our dog Wally)in a silent home. I missed his impromptu Tame Impala listening party where the whole house throbs. I missed the clapping — his particular brand of whole-body celebration he does when his soccer team scores. The man brings joy and stimulation into a room like nobody I know, he coordinates our meals during this new empty nest season and I am so grateful I snagged him over 20 years ago.
And yet.
For ten days, nothing happened that I did not implicitly seek out. I did only what I wanted to do. Drove a sight-impaired friend to work, played in a pickleball tournament, attended a writer’s book launch party and rolled around in the sheets long after the morning sun had risen. I planned one social engagement and one work obligation per day. Both were completely on my terms. I luxuriated in being the master of my domain. I showed up to my weightlifting date cheerier than I had in months - because my first 90 minutes of the morning were silent. I was now choosing to use my voice rather than respond to my talkative roommate.
I ate when I was hungry. I read when I felt like it. I went to bed without negotiating anything with anyone.
My nervous system exhaled in a way I haven’t experienced since being a child-free 20-something in my shared NYC apartment when my roommate would travelled.
This profound relief at not being asked to do or say or be anything that I hadn’t first decided to offer — has a name. And your Spicy One gets it.
It’s called Pervasive Drive for Autonomy. Shortened to PDA, it originally stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance — a damning but well meaning term coined in the 1980s by developmental psychologist Professor Elizabeth Newson. Elizabeth noticed a specific group of children at her clinic who resisted ordinary everyday demands in ways that didn’t fit any existing category.
PDA is not an official diagnosis — you won’t find it in the DSM published by the American Psychiatric Association and your pediatrician may roll her eyes. Meanwhile, in the UK, PDA has been a widely accepted and actively researched framework for decades. There’s a dedicated PDA society, clinical guidelines, and a growing body of literature built around it. For the parents who live with a resistant curmudgeon, PDA tends to feel less like an exploratory idea and more like a long overdue explanation.
PDA Spicy Ones experience ordinary demands as a threat to their nervous system. Not just big demands. Small ones. Loving ones. “Put your shoes on.” “Come eat dinner.” “It’s time for a bath.”
Their brain reads even gentle requests as a loss of control. And loss of control, for this child, is not just uncomfortable — it’s unbearable. The resistance you’re seeing isn’t defiance. It’s not manipulation. It’s a nervous system that sees autonomy as survival and your commands as a threat.
Sound like anyone in your house?
Listen, the goal is not to ask nothing of your child. That’s unrealistic and would set your child up to be a big old bull in the china shop of life.
But there are relational levers within your control like the amount and phrasing of demands that can shift behavior and reduce power struggles. There’s a difference between the demands that are load-bearing — the ones that keep your family functioning and your child safe — and the ambient pressure that accumulates all day long without anyone but the Spicy One clocking it. Learning to tell those apart, and shifting your phrasings of the necessary ones in ways that don’t trigger their alarm, is the goal.
Back to my ten days of semi-solitude. I still met my obligations. I still showed up for things. But I got to choose when and how. That small shift changed everything about how I functioned. I had no one to resist so I was less resistant. (But true story, the house was a mess and i didn’t eat as well as I do when my man runs the show).
So let’s get curious and expansive in the face of this hard assignment. Rather than ask yourself, “how do I get compliance from this child?”, play with the question: What does connection look like with a child wired for autonomy? How do I work with this child’s nature rather than fight it?
My book Parenting A Spicy One has a whole section exploring Imperative vs Declarative language when making a request of our child. Who knew you could use grammar to soothe the savage beast!?
That’s a part of the work inside Moms of Spicy Ones Academy - how to parent a child who is motivated by power and autonomy, not approval. Because the strategies that work beautifully on other kids tend to backfire spectacularly with yours. You need a different language. A different posture. A different understanding of what’s actually happening when your child digs in over something that seems completely unreasonable.
Over 1,700 moms have done this work. They came in exhausted and a little resentful. They left understanding their child in a way that changed everything — including their capacity to like them.
If you’ve been wondering why nothing seems to work — why your child resists even things they love, why your perfectly reasonable requests ignite a war — this might be the framework you’ve been missing.
My husband is home now. He chose what we ate for dinner but I got to choose the TV show (HACKS!).
What the Spicy One is Loving:
The Sound Healing session I stumbled upon in Sedona Arizona.
Might get my own Singing Bowls for Mother’s Day so I can play ethereal nervous system healing music at home.
These modern color pallet sticky pads for helping me keeping all the To Do’s of Maycember a little prettier. Who needs industrial yellow in their face?
I need to wash down the non-fiction I’ve been consuming with a juicy memoir: Strangers
Still here? Let’s get even juicier: an anthology of erotica compiled by a woman! I am three short stories in to the best curated smut available for your (*cough) pleasure.
