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hey hey let’s see if this comes across the way that I’m hoping for it is uh April 8th or April 9th it is Wednesday and uh man talk about a morning so I opened my mouth and rendered a comment in our PDA one of the PDA groups I’m part of and a question came back and um I thought this would be more appropriate because every time that I tried to write it down and with my wonderful morning this morning like what I’m trying to say is I’m not trying to be judgmental at all i’m just trying to respond in a way that gives opportunity perhaps and so the person that asked for my opinion um it’s an interesting scenario because contextually speaking my read and there’s a lot of context that’s not shared there so that’s where I I just thought that this was more I thought a written response would come off disingenuous and so man just trying to be careful with the particulars on this that little human that little kiddo that’s got pathological demand avoidance so remember these kiddos have autism and PDA and so that biology and neurology like those conditions are just crazy and it sounds like this kiddo gets to navigate um a non-traditional parent scenario um and I remember the kid is under three years old so there’s a lot in that little kid plus to add on the layers of autism and PDA and I want to believe everybody’s trying to do the best for the kid for you know especially mom in this situation like drives me nuts that moms have to find themselves in these positions where they’re trying to navigate this maybe it’s a misread
but I wish
more
fathers would listen to the the instincts of these moms because most of the time they’re not wrong so in this particular scenario and trying to respond in my the opinion of you know unlimited I don’t think like my opinion in something like this is more of
the I’m more and more finding that there is not an absolute and the frustration is what would work for us won’t necessarily work for everybody else and so I go back to the time when we knew nothing about PDA and we didn’t want to believe that our kids were autistic um I was challenged my own self I guess with whatever layers of well if my kids are autistic then that means something’s coming from me and my partner because that’s how genetics work it can’t just be her or me it’s our combination and man we won the lottery because three of our kids are autistic diagnosed for sure the fourth one’s probably going to be late diagnosed she has ADHD of those three uh with the ASD diagnosis two are uh PDA uh and we have the PDA profile diagnost or not diagnostic but uh profile diagnosed all right so all of that to kind of set the stage for sharing my thoughts or opinion and please know that I operate this way i observe I inform and I’m getting to the point if and only if there is consent and that’s where it’s either like in professionally speaking there’s contracts involved etc and I’m not a therapist or anything i’m just talking in my IT professional space i don’t do free advice etc anymore so this person asked so I’m trying to be genuine here and I do think I appreciate the question because I hope that my response isn’t coming off that you have to do it one way or the other my read of this scenario is that the
kid is getting used to at under three years old a set of conditions to which they can thrive and understand with primary caregiver mom and that seems to be no screen time things are going pretty good and kind of weaned them down and you know relax that muscle and I share this kind of like think of screen time or the device this is like the soothing or not soothing this is like um a binky or a pacifier this is like uh do you continue to breastfeed or give a bottle and when do you wean them and what I was hoping to try to say is like I I look at screens or electronics etc a lot like physical therapy supports so in like physical therapy and I come from I do triathlons and iron mans and stuff like that and so I find a lot of people cuz an analogy was shared with me with with an injury I went through and I’m pretty good at avoiding and not having injuries but uh a doctor said to me when he was checking my knee said and my name’s Shane he said “Shane you’re bringing a fiddle to the orchestra and expecting it to be able to do the whole orchestra.” And that is kind of how I approach this PDA thing too like in this case from my read of the context this screen or the things like the mother’s doing the right things for their kiddo the challenge is is there seems to be a nontraditional meeting you know who knows mom and dad are splitting time no idea what that context is and so mom kind of got things set up so the kid uh is able to know those expectations and then goes to dad and then it’s completely opposite talk about confusing that set of norms is confusing for you know adults not to mention children and teens etc like so I kind of use the language of this so sometimes our techniques or parenting styles get into wardening and what I mean by that is the authoritative structure or and again the structure that we try to impress upon our kiddos is often what’s in our best interest out that’s what we do we’re humans and now that we’ve got this little human you know like how do we navigate that it’s so hard there’s no manual like the worst and the best part about parenting is every minute every 5 minutes every 10 minutes every day whiskey Tango Fox Truck there is no guide book we don’t know what we’re doing we’re making it up the best we can and we’re adapting as we go right and so I guess my takeaway for this person in what is my opinion here is more of the I don’t think there is an absolute there’s it’s not that there’s no screen time or that there’s unlimited screen time it’s what’s age appropriate where’s the development of the kiddo also measurements of neurotypes that are non-typical so ASD PDA all the other stuff that’s in there is what’s appropriate that timing may not be my time i use this kind of phrase and mantra of in time but not necessarily mine but their timing and then it kind of falls back into the quadrants or the concepts of you know it’s not that the kids won’t it’s can’t not won’t a lot of times these kiddos they want to impress us as primary caregivers they want our love and our satisfaction um hard to say if it’s love but like they want us and
so the tools that we use and in this case that’s why I kind of shared the scenario in this group of would we take a wheelchair or a crutch is what I think I said and would we take that away because we’re handicapping them because from a physical standpoint if that’s what they need physically what they need is some type of mechanism that helps them self soo self self soothe it helps them navigate this disruption or dysregulation the primary caregiver probably can’t do it a thousand million% of the time even though we do that because we have freaking hearts and we love our kids and then we put ourselves in o in our own burnout and disregulate etc so TV screen times access to electronics and so listening or reading that this parent you know did all the trials like I think what we found that worked well for us and I’ll say that so here’s something actionable we got to the point after we did some coaching and learning more about PDA and how obstinate I was being i my neurotype is dyslexia and of course my kids PDA so there’s something in there my wife is self- diagnosed autistic she’s ADHD for sure that’s diagnosed from an early age u but she’s a late bloomer female autistic so just to give some patterns there but to the actionable things we decided to let we had the opportunity and I don’t know again this doesn’t always work I’m an IT guy so it all makes sense we put some simple impositions through nonhuman measures so they became more natural consequenceoriented what I mean by that is we impose that okay the internet is available at certain times so most of the kids that want the screen times they want you know like I said like they want to be deity and have full and complete autonomy and these screens and games give them that or they get to watch whatever they’re consuming and I get it razer’s Edge most of the stuff that they consume like that’s so frustrating so what I’m trying to get to for this hopefully this genuine question from this other parent this mother hang in there trying to sit in the mud with you on this advice is difficult on this one the kid I think you said is two and a
half in a similar scenario to you what we decided was we used more of the strategy is the kid needed something they needed their binky they needed the bottle in this case it’s the screen like you we put in some of the educational or more what we wanted to cultivate and give them an opportunity to flourish to help their brain so it’s not just a melting mush we put impositions through using Wi-Fi tools that allowed certain things like whether we did we tried the time limits did an hour like all of the tokenization sticker chart oriented things and none of it worked and so ultimately what we we tried to do is just said okay this is available from this time to this time there’s a hard stop we impose that so and we chose uh to turn off internet an hour before our general bedtime and we don’t let it come on until you know after after school they get to school to begin with and then on the weekends uh we try to do 8 or 8:30 in the morning like let them start watching or using their tablets or tools or screens or whatever so that’s the recipe that works for us um my 19-year-old my now 19-year-old PDA just last week came back to my wife and said “Thank you for trying to do some of these things.” I saw another post where 21-year-old said that maybe it’s planets are aligning or something but um and I say that because we would have liked to see our our 19-year-old catch on to that at 14 he’s now 19 and catching on to it a lot of kids pick up on it between 12 and 14 so to my point in time their time not our time so sorry I rambled so much uh my opinion is is there is not a hard and fast solution i’m trying to give some guidelines and some context and some potential strategies we imposed more natural restrictions so that you know the tablets aren’t fully available we also when at times if they’re not sleeping etc we let them have their tablets if that’s going to be something that allows us as caregivers to go ahead and get the rest and the sleep that we need because if we’re not available for them and we’re not rested and recovered it doesn’t matter and it’s just a torpedo down a world pool of chaos that sucks so to this person if I do it this way I wish there was an easy button there’s not and when we find something that works the most frustrating aspect of ASD with PDA is what worked in one scenario in five minutes or tomorrow or the next time like it can just flip on a dime it could be working for like a week or a year straight and next thing you know it doesn’t and it’s those adaptations that is the hardest thing because we have to have a for us as parenting and caregivers like what I what I kind of explained it’s like we have to have like this toolbox that is both very capable of being flexible very wide and not too deep and then other times we have to go hyperfocused and be just very deep on a certain tool within that toolbox so it could be screens or it could be the you know the pacifier um my now 7-year-old for example she potty trained on a dime and then she still wears diapers cuz she she doesn’t want that during the night um
and wouldn’t have it any other way and I wish that the DNA donors known as dads could be better and I don’t know your scenario and hopefully that’s not you know I’m not misreading wrong things but getting two parents the ones that created the wonderful child to get on the same page to parent in similar ways is such a difficulty and I see it destroy so many people and it’s that for us we chose to make sure and it took us a while to get on the same page but and we’re not necessarily always on the same page we’re at least in the same chapter we’re reading from the same book at least
um but all of what I’m saying may not even
apply it may not work for you and that’s the hardest thing about this thing because at the end of the day like sometimes you just got to sit in the mud and commiserate and not spiral but look at those moments like I think you mentioned that hey it it works sometimes too like you were right there you were pumping the muscle you were priming it you were getting it all ready you were building the helping them build and shape the coping mechanism and then here comes this thing and that’s the problem with the ASD and the PDA profile together is like my autonomy is gone it’s not like we get them into
this just bless your heart and I don’t say that derogatory
like it’s crazy that the universe trusts us in trying to raise these little kids because it’s just silly stupid doesn’t make sense and for me I go back to the Mark Manson book of everything is effed and that gives me hope sounds crazy but that’s where my hope comes from and uh yeah so I don’t know if I’m going to share
