Six years ago...🥭

This week my dad and stepmom are in town from Alabama and we have spent the bulk of our days hanging out with family at a cottage they rented on a small lake near our home.

The kids have been running around with their cousins, jumping on the trampoline, “swimming” in the hot tub (with goggles and snorkels lol), going on kayaks, and fishing off the small dock for hours and hours and hours.

This has been heaven for My PDA son, Cooper (9 years old), given that fishing is one of his three main special interests (in addition to dogs and American football).

He and his cousin have spent their days stalking “The Big One” – a large catfish that they have seen jump and splash in the middle of the lake. Both are determined to catch that fish and willing to spend four-hour stretches strategizing about different kinds of bait and how far to cast their lures.

Yesterday, on a fishing break, I watched Cooper grab himself a snack – some dried mangos – and then head back down to the dock.

From the outside looking in, this moment might not seem significant, but to me it was symbolic enough to pause, take a breath and reflect on how far we have come over the last six years and all the mistakes I have made along the way.

The Mango Showdown

Dried mangos have a special significance to me as Cooper’s mom because he used to LOVE them as a three- and four-year-old.

Before he went into nervous system burnout around the age of 4.5 years old, Cooper would often munch happily on dried mangos as a healthy snack, which I took completely for granted.

As a toddler and young child, I considered him a very “picky” eater, without understanding how his neuroception worked. At the same time, he was eating a much larger variety of things than he does now - things like chocolate milk, yogurt, rice cakes with peanut butter, spinach and sweat potato fritters, and some fruit.

As he started to get more picky, he was also increasingly “defiant” and avoidant.  

He did things like:

• Physically fighting me when I tried to buckle his seatbelt
• Collapsing on the stairs and kicking me when I would try to carry him up to bedtime
• Slumping down in the stroller and dragging his feet on the ground to prevent me from walking wherever we needed to go

Eating became a particularly intense flashpoint for us because it was one of the areas where he was most avoidant and “defiant.”

I obsessively followed the pediatrician and a psychologist’s advice to be more strict and consistent with my parenting. To not let him “run the show” in my home.

I tried implementing the rules that I saw other families use with success in their homes:

• No dessert until you finish what is on your plate.
• I serve the food and you decide if you are going to eat it. If you don’t eat it, you go hungry.
• You need to have protein so that you aren’t constantly hungry and snacking (little did I know that much of his snacking was due to sensory and oral regulation needs, rather than hunger).

One afternoon back then, after a trip to the pool, I watched Cooper grab a bag of dried mangos without my permission and start eating them.

I told him he wasn’t allowed to snack before dinner and that he needed to eat a meal before he could have them. He grabbed the bag, looked me in the eye, and kept eating. I tried to take the bag away and he held onto it with adrenaline-fueled strength, pulled away from me, and grabbed more. He started fixating on eating as many as he could.

I felt a surge of rage inside of me – that familiar voice that said “You have to be in charge. He doesn’t get to run the show.” I remember trying to grab the bag, with my voice raised – Cooper, give me the bag of mangos. Now.

He did not relent. He started moaning and crying, pulling the bag closer to his chest and running from me. When I caught up with him, he fell to the ground, and I pried the bag out of his hands while he kicked me and screamed.

He went into a full-blown meltdown, screaming and hissing.

From that moment forth, Cooper refused to eat dried mangos. He dropped them entirely.

Not only did he drop mangos, he soon would drop every single healthy food he had previously eaten. For two years, Cooper only ate processed foods like potato chips, fruit snacks and Pirate’s Booty. I still don’t know how he kept growing and stayed alive.

It wasn’t until SIX YEARS later that he would - out of the blue - ask Can I have some dried mangos? and start eating them again.

Three Lessons from the Great Mango Showdown.  

1. Your will or “consistency” will never overpower your PDA child or teen’s survival response.

I am a very disciplined, focused and intensely consistent person (I have many faults, but inconsistency is not one of them). For example, when I was in my PhD program at University of Wisconsin, I would study (read, write, do statistics) for 10-11 hours a day, 7 days a week, for years.

Yet, my will and consistency could NEVER outlast or outpower my PDA son. I found this baffling and terrifying. I now understand why this is – a PDA response (which often looks like defiance or avoidance) is not under the willpower or conscious control of the child or teen. It is a survival response, driven by a subconscious perception of danger or life threat.

The behavioral responses are nervous system driven, happening before rational thought and cognition kicks in. On an evolutionary level, the nervous system – whether it is activated by getting into a car crash, being held up in a dark alley, or not perceiving autonomy around eating dried mangos – is designed to keep the human race alive.

Ultimately, even if the survival response gets internalized in the body of your PDA child or teen (meaning the nervous system pathway becomes more freeze or shutdown/collapse) and on the surface they comply, the physiological impact on them builds in the system and they may go into burnout or it may explode out into fight/flight at random moments.

2. The thing that is scariest to drop control of is often the very thing that we need to let go.

When parents begin lowering demands to support the PDA child or teen, they gain some traction by letting certain things go – the child doesn’t have to go to the grocery store with the parent, or doesn’t need to practice piano, or the PDA teen can stop doing chores.

Yet, as parents, we stagnate in our progress and the true paradigm shift when we start to confront things like eating, sleeping, toileting, and hygiene. This is totally normal. These are the basic needs our children and teens need to stay alive.

For me this was eating – I couldn’t let it go. I was terrified that my son wouldn’t eat healthy and well. In our home, we ate healthy, organic food. I had breastfed and did baby-led weaning and all the things I thought would set my son up to eat like we ate.

Yet the more I focused on controlling this and using behavioral approaches (incentives, disincentives, punishment, threats, reminders), the more my fear came to fruition. Cooper stopped eating.

3. A PDAer’s Stickiest Basic Need is often the thing we as parents (or therapists, educators, etc.) put the most pressure on and then it becomes the slowest to improve.

Often, for PDA children and teens, when nervous system accumulation increases, control coalesces around a particular basic need (eating, sleeping, hygiene, and/or toileting). The thing that that takes the longest to improve. Sometimes it can take years.

This is what I call the “Stickiest Basic Need” for a PDA child or teen.  

In the case of Cooper, I am not entirely sure if my PDA son’s control would have coalesced around eating during his burnout had I not pressured him and tried to control him so much.

Yet, now that I have coached 100s of parents of PDA children and teens, I see a pattern: the stickiest basic need is often correlated with the very thing that parents put the most pressure on. This is not a criticism. It is an instinct that I understand well. I did the same thing.

Rather than judging ourselves, we can recognize that we can experiment with more flexibility and autonomy around certain basic needs where our children and teens are most avoidant.

It feels counterintuitive, and scary, because it requires us to give up some control.

But we can start small. 

Like letting the 4-year-old version of my PDA son have those dried mangos before dinner.