Your child might recognize the inherent power imbalance in society—that adults are treated as superior to and better than kids—and find that to be unjust, and not have a diagnosis of PDA.
Please hear what I’m saying. I’m not trying to make the gate smaller or the opening narrower or let fewer people in. I’m trying to make it more open and let more people in!
I’m not trying to make anyone question the diagnosis they already have, or second-guess the help they’ve already gotten. I’m trying to put signposts out that let more people get more help (or change the world more!) without needing to have a diagnosis attached in the first place.
I’ve been working in this space long enough that I can see trends in the societal discussion in the neurodiversity sphere. Sometimes I observe trends in myself and my own practice; sometimes they reflect the society, too.
I feel like the trend I see right now is societal: a big conversation about power imbalance, about hierarchy, about how we raise kids who aren’t unquestioning followers of authority for authority’s sake, about how we protect kids’ right to self-determination and self-advocacy without squashing their immature skills but instead shepherding them to grow. I love this conversation. I am throwing myself wholeheartedly into it. I do not want it to be limited to one type of way brains work. I want us to uproot these systems as a whole. I want a whole next generation who doesn’t think they’re better than kids just because they’re older than them.
That type of intolerance for societally-accepted child-directed injustice is so common within PDA as to be perhaps ubiquitous; and it is also very common within autism; but it is not exclusive to those neurotypes nor do I want it to be! I want every kid to believe that they’re worth listening to and that something is wrong if the grownups are disregarding their thoughts. I want every kid to know that if there’s a grownup being unfair to them that they can go find a different grownup and tell them and be heard, supported, defended.
If you find yourself reading stuff on the internet that sounds like it would help your kid but your kid doesn’t seem like they fit the label that the stuff is labeled with, I want you to have permission to try it out anyway. And I want you to help me make a society moving in the direction of justice for everybody. The Autistic kids are often the canaries in a coal mine, that something in the society is hurting the kids and they’re the first ones to drop, and the PDAers are often the canary of the canaries. But just because they’re the first or the most sensitive to notice doesn’t mean that everybody else is ok to keep breathing the toxic fumes.
Sharing power with kids benefits all the kids (and, I’d argue, all of us). Learning tools to get their needs met and learning how to independently access them benefits all the kids. Being able to verbalize, negotiate, explain benefits all the kids. Finding ways to see the kid as an individual instead of sweeping them into the established system benefits all the kids. Let’s keep making it better for all the kids. Yours included, no matter who they are. 