Where is a "future fear" driving your parenting?

Is fear of the future driving your decisions with your PDA child?

Yesterday, as I was getting the kids ready for school, Cooper (my PDA son – 9 years old) stopped on the stairs and said, “Mama, I’m sad.” I watched his body slump a bit and asked – using my best declarative language – “Oh no! I wonder what’s going on.”

I was expecting him to talk about PDA, venom (what he calls his threat response), or something with friends at school.

Instead, he said “I have to wait a whole month until I get my spacer before I get braces.”

We kind of laughed when I realized that this wasn’t a super deep moment of reflection and that he was looking forward to getting braces and didn't like the wait.

Recently, I had been noticing that his preferred content for YouTube videos had changed - instead of animal videos, he was tuning in to an orthodontist talking about teeth and braces, and watching young adults with braces chew things like Cheetos and popcorn and then clean their teeth (Ew!).

I have been somewhat floored by his excitement and enthusiasm about getting braces. Four years ago, when we made the decision to stop trying to end his pacifier use (which at the time he used 24/7), one of my biggest fears was that his teeth would be messed up and he would refuse braces, just like he had been refusing the dentist and teeth brushing at the time of burnout.

Flash forward four years later and it is a non-issue. He wants the braces. He talks about his orthodontia appointments excitedly. And he is doing great at them so far, even through his gag reflexes as they take measurements inside his mouth. 

This made me reflect on all the “future fears” I had four years ago when I decided to let him keep using his pacifier as long as he wanted.

Other kids will make fun of him and he will have shame about it.

He will need speech therapy and it will affect his ability to pronounce words.

He will never stop using the pacifier (or “binki,” as we call it in our home).

Ultimately none of these fears came to fruition.

Despite the humming fear thoughts in the background, I decided to move through them - without attaching to the thoughts - and look clearly at the cost/benefit decision around limits with pacifiers in that present moment.

He was in burnout at the time. I recognized the true cost of setting a limit around the pacifier was too high for our tenuous trust and his cumulative nervous system activation (he would stop eating, develop problematic speech patters, stop trusting me, slow burnout recovery) vs. the true benefit of taking it away (I would stop worrying about whether I was doing the “right thing” by following what professionals told me to do).

Here is how each future fear *actually* turned out four years later.

Fear of kids judging him.

Once Cooper got a little older and went to a private Montessori (he couldn’t access public school) he started to ask for playdates again (around the age of six). He wasn’t using the pacifier at school, but putting it in his mouth the second he climbed into our van until he took it out the next morning before walking into the school building. When he asked for a friend to come over, he would say “Can you tell John’s mom I have PDA so I will have my pacifier in my mouth while we play?”

What occurred was that my son learned to self-advocate and our connection deepened. None of the kids gave two hoots about his pacifier once they had an explanation and saw that none of us adults or Cooper were embarrassed or worried about it. It actually made him more confident, not less, and deepened the sense that we were “on the same team.”

Fear of speech being messed up.

This fear was instilled in me by a very adamant speech language pathologist during his autism evaluation. Cooper used his pacifier off and on during it and the SLP kept emphasizing how it would mess up his speech and he would need all this therapy and it was my responsibility to get him to stop. This was in addition to telling me it would mess up his teeth irreparably.

I advocated for Cooper and said, "He needs it right now for his nervous system. If he needs therapy or braces in the future, we will support that in the future." (Of course afterwards I had yet another little voice in my head telling me to be fearful and that I was doing it wrong and making the wrong decision for my family.)

Fear that he would never give it up.

I eventually reached a mindset that if he needed a pacifier for the rest of his life, then I would support him. I even saw some #actuallyautistic Instagram creators who made decorated pacifiers for adults for oral regulation. And I thought, you know what? If a pacifier helps him live a good life, who am I to judge?

Basked in the energy of my husband and I truly letting go of an agenda or timeline about the pacifier, he woke up one day a few months before his eighth birthday and announced he was ready to be done. Two weeks later, he had successfully planned his own gradual weaning and carried it out with our support (basically just cheering him on and being patient with the extra activation in his nervous system). He never put a pacifier in his mouth again.

The reason I share this with you is less about pacifiers and more about our fears as parents. How many of our decisions and actions are made based on a theoretical negative outcome in the future, rather than what we know to be true – and can observe with our own two eyes – right now, in this present moment.

This is THE primary place where I see parents of PDA children and teens get stuck in their journey. It is not a lack of information or cognitive understanding of PDA, but the difficulty of getting over the thoughts racing through your head that tell you that you are messing up your child and not a good parent.

The most common questions I get in this vein are:

Ok, but what happens when they grow up?

What about when they are adults, the world won’t accommodate them!

Aren’t you worried that they will grow up to be abusive?

How will they ever learn?

These are very valid fears and I want to name them with compassion. I also want to gently nudge you towards taking action even though you feel fearful and noticing that we actually don’t know that these fears will come to pass. They are simply that: fears.

(If you want the logic behind how to think about these fears, I have a multiple podcast episodes dedicated to these exact questions.

• Episode 11: Aren't you just rewarding bad behavior? 
• Episode 31: What does it look like long-term if we don't correct our children's "bad behavior"?
• Episode 40: If I accommodate now, what will happen when they grow up?). 

So how do we manage fear and make true paradigm shifts in our home that can change the trajectory or our unique kids and teens' lives for the better? How do we get unstuck? 

There are three skills that I teach in our signature Paradigm Shift Program. And I don't just teach them, we practice these skills, in real time in a large group of like-minded parents who are also working to move through their fears, get unstuck and find stability and peace with their PDA children and teens.

Skills you get to practice in the Paradigm Shift Program: 

1. Learning to work through an Experimental Approach. In the program (and drawing on all the dorkiness and doctorate-level training in the scientific method that I am so happy to share with you), we work from the hypothesis that your child or teen is PDA. We then experiment consistently with shifts – in our mindset, our energy, our decision-making, and 12 practical tools for autonomy and nervous system accommodation – and then we observe data in our home in the present moment to inform our decisions.
2. Based on the data, we gain clarity on where there are solutions vs. the need to make hard, uncomfortable decisions as parents. We do this through a Cost-Benefit Decision-Making Framework and develop the skill to see clearly where our agency lies, what are choices *truly* are and take the whole family system into account. We identify – is this a *true cost* or a *fear cost*? Parents practice this together on live sessions with me and in the moderated online community. Although it is triggering, this tool is designed to move you towards more acceptance energetically and to get you unstuck. This is where we start to make transformational progress with our kids.
3. We stop avoiding the fear (and the self-judgement that accompanies it). We recognize it, honor it with self-compassion, and let it move through us. As Les Aria from the Polyvagal Theory Certificate course I am in right now says, “We have to feel to heal.” We feel our fear in a resourced community with a sense of belonging, curiosity and non-judgment.

If you are ready to practice the necessary skills to move beyond information about PDA and truly make profound change and find peace while parenting a PDA child or teen, I invite you to join the waitlist for the May cohort of the next Paradigm Shift Program.

I am incredibly passionate about helping families shorten their timelines to help their child or teen out of burnout, to attain peace as a parent and reduce their pain and isolation on this journey. Why? Because it took me YEARS to get there. 

So my friends, I will leave you with this opportunity for reflection.

What future fears are keeping you stuck?

Is it the voice inside your head that tells you, “You have to correct this behavior in the moment or they will never learn right from wrong”?

Or is it a bigger structural fear –“If I pull my kid out of school, they will never return, never get an education, never learn to read, and fail at life and never be independent” (Hello, catastrophizing! I know you well!).

I hope this email supports you to make a tiny shift this weekend.

I believe in you and your child and know that the best is yet to come for your family.