Thoughts from a parent VLog – Thoughts – Jan12

Parenting neuro-diverse kiddos and I am more typical than divergent myself – Jan 12 thoughts

TEXT TO VIDEO THOUGHTS ABOVE (UNEDITED, NO STYLING)

all right it is January 12th it is Thursday I thought I would try a slightly different perspective on the camera maybe I can do um one from this angle means that I’m doing pdasd stuff or perhaps the others Triathlon I don’t know I’ll figure it out um or maybe just switching it up helps because I do do these things while I am driving and just kind of clear my head so this is a little bit more ASD PDA about our specific situation uh recently we started the process to uh get diagnoses for our 17 year old our seven-year-old or five and our two-year-old we weren’t too worried about the two-year-old but the doctor was doing the observation and

the stuff gathering information to do a diagnosis uh when we were there in the office he made something he’s like the two-year-old hasn’t engaged with me once in 90 minutes um to even the point of not even recognizing I exist so he’s like there’s something there so we kind of started something there for a little two-year-old and then 17 year old diagnosed ASD moving towards the PDA profile the seven-year-old ADHD keeping an eye open on ASD because of the way that things are going and how she’s presenting behaviorally we’ll see she is female so it could just be it’s a different it’s manifesting different five-year-old again for sure ASD tracking the PDA profile now one of the difficulties with PDA which is the pathological demand avoidance or pervasive demand aversion is that it is not readily accepted in the United States nor is it on the DSM-5 and so often they will say that it’s oppositional Defiance disorder or something else and the profile of PDA really is kind of drug the dysregulation or the disruption of the neural new response that neurotypicals or quote unquote normal [Music] um [Music] humans would have the capability and from where the stimulus happens to your response there is that space in there that is agency the capability for people to dissect quickly respond quickly and begin to impress their own choice many different factors and things that go there of course for everybody but in PDA that doesn’t really happen it’s either dysregulated or it’s disrupted for example my 17 year old is a wonderful

wants to he’s beating his chest of course because he is an adolescent he’s adolescent he is trying to try and show that he can do this All himself and uh he is in that wonderful age where he doesn’t understand that medicine is a support I’m sure there’s a lot of information and you know places Snapchat and Tick Tock all the other things uh we’ve had a great fun with him with his demand diversion stuff that sometimes he gets it sometimes he doesn’t there is a strong pull for autonomy so meaning that they want to self-govern they also when they are seeing others getting the attention or dopamine if they’re dopamine seeking and it is not happening for them they will do what’s something called leveling and they will try to heighten the level of interaction between themselves and anybody else to try to gain the control of that power Paradigm again it’s not narcissism it’s not anything more than just at the demand diversion level and their want for complete and full full control of autonomy um but it’s funny because you know when you give them Choice then they Panic

um and it’s also interesting because if you provide praise I was listening to some teacher that was over in Australia she found working with uh kiddos that she works with that praise has to be almost like passive aggressive you can’t directly say hey child the way that you did those dishes was excellent I’m so pleased or proud that you did it exactly this way because now the expectation changes and so because this neurological disruption dysregulation is highly associated with anxiety and that stressor is one of the promoting factors of dysregulation for them um you got to be careful it’s almost better to just say let’s imagine that the the teacher used the classroom environment she said look let’s imagine that little Johnny

or something and and she goes well the testing isn’t a good thing because I’m not supposed to share that kind of information with the other kids anyways um but it tracks for an example and uh so imagine Johnny’s there and little Sarah and you know and the teacher would say what I would propose is you would go up to little Sarah and you would say Sarah you did so well on that presuming that Sarah’s the more neurotypical did you did you see how well that Johnny did as well isn’t that amazing I’m so glad that multiple students are doing so well or with like the dishwashing it’s more of hey child other child um I you know you can say I was so pleasantly surprised look at this kitchen isn’t it looking so great how awesome to have those dishes done so you’re not going direct one-on-one with the child saying you did this and then that expectation framework changes because they heavily live and it’s I always use the phrase unreasonable expectations of just future resentments for pdas it’s all expectations are future resentments I’m fighting a bit of an allergy almost uh

had a asthma attack last night after working with our bunny stuff um but yeah anyways uh I just thought some tidbits to share there there is a person in our local group uh it’s an ASD thing where a child just had their tonsils out and they’re trying to figure out how to work with that uh child is miserable um so talk about you know the thing that kind of comes with ASD or any of the you know profiles that are out there a lot of sensory delays a lot of sensory overloads processing yeah so anyways and I’ve been thinking about a lot of things lately like uh kind of in this Frame one of our one of my old friends married a guy who’s a teacher and he’s nervous about this thing called chat GPT and I see nothing but upsides about it um but of course it’s got to be taught and stuff so maybe I’ll I’ll go there and talk about that next so talk soon