Green eyes in the summer.

“My eyes are green in the summer.”

When my nine-year-old PDA son, Cooper, stated this matter-of-factly this week, I felt that familiar pang: The need to correct him.

I felt the need to be literal, factual, accurate and truthful because his eyes aren’t actually green in the summer. They continue to be bright blue, the same as in the spring, fall and winter.

Yet, now that I have years of practice, I was able to take a sacred pause and remind myself of the PDA lens and the logic my brain needed to *not* correct him: correcting or explicit teaching often puts my PDA son into his survival brain. While in his survival brain he cannot learn, think rationally or connect with me.

Correcting him puts a drop of nervous system stress in his cup, which can then move him towards his threshold of tolerance and ultimately disable him from things like attending school and eating.

I also reminded myself to be creative and think outside of my own linear, cognitive box:

Maybe his eyes DO have sparkles of green near bodies of water

Maybe his eyes SEE green where mine see blue.

Maybe his brain truly does perceive and sense the world differently than mine, and that is in fact the definition of neurodivergence and the core concept of neurodiversity.

Maybe this isn’t a “lie” or an “incorrect” fact at all.

As you read this, you might think that this is a particularly innocuous example of not correcting him in the moment. Because really, who cares if he thinks his eyes are green?

But what about when your PDA child or teen’s perceptions (or equalizing behavior) veer into things that are objectively not true, and appear to be outright lies?

Not correcting or teaching in the moment of activation (or choosing not to correct in order to not activate the nervous system) is one of the accommodations that parents of PDA children and teens struggle with most. Myself included, even after five years of practice.

It makes sense that this is a hard mindset shift and accommodation to implement. Our conventional wisdom around human behavior goes against this approach. And when we refrain from correcting or teaching in the moment, all sorts of thoughts will come up inside your head and body. You will think:

• It is my responsibility to teach my child or teen to be good. (vs. My child or teen IS good, but they can’t access that goodness behind their threat response).

• Humans don’t learn unless explicitly taught (vs. They will learn once they are out of the survival brain and spending more time in their thinking brain, which requires me to let go of correcting).

• My PDA child or teen will become bad or abusive if I don’t prevent that through correction and compliance. (vs. Actually, the behavior we are seeing is a reflection of fight/flight/freeze/collapse of the nervous system, not their temperament and motivated behavior. The more we can support them to not activate the nervous system, the better they can access empathy, by creating new neural pathways to the thinking brain!)

These thoughts will rear their ugly heads when you practice the accommodation of not correcting or teaching in the moment.

You will experience doubt, the fear of doing it wrong and failing your child and not preparing them for “real life” or the future. 

I get it.

This was a very atrophied muscle I had to strengthen through mindful practice, returning to the logic of the PDA brain and nervous system along the way. It was important to start with the easiest opportunities to shift my behavior - like letting his eyes be green in the summer.

As this got more comfortable and I saw how this positively shifted our relationship, his behavior, and his ability to do things like eat and leave the house, I could work on moments when things felt more challenging and confusing:  

• Him stating that something happened one way, like “We went to visit Michigan for the first time when I was two,” when actually, he was four.
• Him blaming me for something I did wrong that isn’t true, like knocking over his water when I am in fact standing in another room and he knocked it over.
• Him telling me that he said he wanted Cheetos and me bringing him a bowl. Then him stating that he never said that and in fact it was pretzels he wanted.
• Him saying that he didn’t spill the dog’s water bowl when in fact he did.

Over time, these moments have gotten less frequent, as his cumulative nervous system activation has come down.

Of course, the question I most often get about this teaching is the following: Yes, but then do you correct your child or teen after the fact? 

The answer is as annoying as it is accurate: It depends.

It depends on three things:

• The strength of felt safety and trust you have established with your PDA child or teen (which is based on their nervous system, not emotions).
• How close your child is to their threshold of tolerance
• Whether or not they are in burnout.

This is why we have to take what Dr. Bruce Perry calls a “neurosequential” approach when speaking about trauma (which has a lot of the same logic of parenting a PDA child or teen, just with a different root cause).

So sometimes the answer is “yes,” but the moment when you talk about the behavior of stating things not being true might come a week, a month, or a year after the fact.

The moment when there is a window of tolerance to experience the activation that comes with the topic and not tip over into full on panic.

This isn’t easy stuff to implement because you are going against all your education and experience and the conventional wisdom about what it means to be a good parent.

People will judge you and you will judge yourself.

I invite you to start small – with moments like “green eyes in the summer” – before taking the next small step.

For example, you may not want to start out correcting something like “You forgot to tell me grandma was stopping by” (when you didn’t forget) or “You said I could do X” (when you didn’t – Gentle reminder that you can still hold boundaries without correcting, but that is another topic all together!).

As you practice, you can reflect on:

• What it feels like to let your child be “right” or have the last word
• How this does or does not reduce power struggles
• How it might create more felt safety for your PDA child or teen when they haven’t experienced that in their body before.

I invite you to experiment.

With much love and happy trial and erroring!