How to reduce power struggles with your PDA child

For parents of children with pathological demand avoidance, everyday tasks can turn into power struggles that leave everyone exhausted. The harder we push, pressure, or incentivize, the more our children may resist.

Here is how that played out with my son Cooper, and a small experiment you can try with your own PDA child.

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A few years ago, I was on a podcast interview with an occupational therapy clinic about how to support PDA children.

The therapist described a particularly challenging PDA child who simply would not put his shoes on at the end of the session before leaving the clinic.

They had “tried everything.”

• Letting him choose between putting his shoes on in the sensory room or the waiting room
• Blowing bubbles and offering little rewards to make it more fun
• Putting him on a scooter and pulling him to the edge of the waiting room
• Putting his shoes on for him, even though independence with shoes was a therapy goal

She finished describing all the creative strategies and asked if I had any other tactics.

I said - perhaps too bluntly - “What about just letting him leave without shoes?”

She paused and said, “I never thought of that.”

You might be thinking exactly what I used to think as a young mom navigating a toddler who seemed allergic to shoes:

• What about stepping on stones or glass in the parking lot?
• Doesn’t he have to learn to wear shoes in appropriate places?
• Will he never wear shoes?

But eventually I learned - what many of us learn the hard way - even before we know about PDA: the harder we push, pressure, incentivize, or force a PDA child or teen to do something, the more they resist and fixate on doing the opposite.

The hopeful part is that when we deliberately step out of black-and-white thinking like “We must always wear shoes outside the home,” more space opens up for problem-solving.

That might look like:

• Parking closer to the clinic and checking the sidewalk before letting him walk in socks
• Letting the child wait on the sidewalk while you pull the car up, or dropping off so they can scoot into the clinic while you park
• Giving a piggyback ride to and from the car while carrying the shoes

These are the kinds of things I did with my older PDA son, Cooper.

As a baby, toddler, and young child he simply hated wearing shoes.

He would throw them out of the stroller in Washington D.C., toss them out the window in the car, and sometimes physically fight me when I tried to put them on.

By the time we got to occupational therapy, I had stopped fighting that battle. I parked close, he walked in without shoes, and that was that. The truth was, by that point, I was too tired to worry about it.

For me, the cost of “winning” the shoe fight was too high: I did not want to risk him refusing to go into a session he loved with a therapist he trusted.

An experiment to try:

1. Pick one ongoing power struggle with your PDA child or teen (shoes, clothes, where they sit to eat, hanging up their coat, etc.).
2. Ask yourself: “If I didn’t assume ‘this is just the way it has to be,’ what else could we try that still protects health and basic safety?”
3. Choose one small, low-stakes “let it go” experiment for the next 3-7 days.
4. Track what happens to:
   • Your child or teen’s meltdowns or shutdowns
   • Your own nervous system load
   • Your sense of connection with them

In case you were wondering - my now-11-year-old son now happily wears shoes without power struggles. It turns out some battles can be set down, and everyone is still okay.