PDA and homework drama

Every day this week, my 9-year-old PDA son, Cooper, has come home from 4th grade saying “I can’t do my homework,” accompanied by his telltale signs of nervous system activation:

• Reverting to groans and whining even when we assure him he doesn’t have to do his homework.
• Tension in his brow, jaw and shoulders.
• Aggression in his voice, from the fight/flight response.

Caveat (or “Before we begin”)

Now, before I go any further, I want to address those of you experiencing school refusal, needing to pull your child from school, or who are in the middle of your child or teen’s burnout and trauma cave and would give anything to be worrying about whether your PDA child or teen does their homework this week.

You may read this and think – Her child goes to school! He is so much less PDA than my kid!

Listen, I would have thought the exact same thing five years ago when we were unschooling with no plan for about a year and a half and my son could barely leave one part of the couch, let alone the house.

I want to share the homework anecdote below because I think it demonstrates how much things can change dramatically in a positive direction, over the long term using an accommodation and nervous system-based approach. This is true even if your child or teen doesn’t return to formal school.

I also want to highlight the skills we still use regularly in the home to support Cooper to do things like being on a tackle football team and attending a school he loves.  

Homework

The homework this week was “vocab” and he had an entire week to do it, yet each day he refused.

Even when we dropped the demand, Cooper insisted that he had to do it. This is what I like to call a “cognitive loop” - when the PDA child or teen’s nervous system resists or avoids doing something, while at the same time fixates and obsesses on needing to do the thing. 

Yesterday, Cooper walked in, slammed his backpack on the sideboard and grunted almost inaudibly: “You are the reason I can’t do my homework.”  I responded, “I’m sorry hon, I didn’t hear you.”

He raised his voice enough so that I could hear him angrily blame me and our au pair for taking his writing journal and homework folder out of his backpack and not putting it back in.

It was my choice point and my knee-jerk reaction was to want to correct the fact that, no, actually it is not my fault. But I made the opposite choice – the choice to accommodate and support him back into his thinking brain.  

First, I recognized that he was equalizing (trying to get back to nervous system safety by putting himself above me and the au pair in terms of blame). I reminded myself – this is a nervous system response.

I said, “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. Yes, that is my fault and I know exactly where I put them.”

Grunt. Annoyance. And also a sense of softening.

I walked over, grabbed his folder and notebook and set them on the kitchen table as I said, “I can email your teachers right now and let them know that it wasn’t your fault you didn’t have your homework or journal today.”

He gravitated towards the kitchen table where I had left the journal and homework, while I silently got a mini Twix, unwrapped it, and set it next to him.

I saw a small smile cross his face as he grabbed a pencil and ate the Twix.

I said, “I am happy to help you with your homework if that feels good.”

“Ok.”

I also set out water, goldfish, and toast (his preferred snack) and sat next to him. He quickly made it through about 75% of the vocabulary homework, while chatting with me about his ideas for sentences using the new words. He then stopped and said, “will you write the rest for me?”

I agreed and we worked together to create more sentences using his new vocabulary, and I wrote them down. We had talked about the meaning of the words, made up silly examples, and finished the homework he had avoided all week in just ten minutes.

I helped him settle into some Kids YouTube videos about animals and delivered him Cheetos before football practice.

The short email I sent to his teachers let them know that I had “lowered the demand of writing,” but that we had worked on the vocabulary and the meanings of the words together.

The Practice of Accommodating

The skills I used in this anecdote were things that it took me YEARS and lots of pain to learn and put into practice consistently:

Declarative Language – e.g. “I am happy to help you with your homework.”

Strewing – silently leaving out his homework on the kitchen table, and then the Twix and his snack, again with no words exchanged.

Diffusion – recognizing blame and projection onto me as a nervous system response and taking the blame in the moment, to help him back into his thinking brain.

Lowering demands – writing 25% of the vocabulary sentences for him, even though he has the skill to write.

Dopamine and Novelty – mini Twix bar at a time we don’t normally eat candy (he used to hide behind couches and curtains eating stolen candy and sugary things!!).

Advocacy – Using Non-Violent Communication and specific requests with his teachers, we have opened up the possibility of a) no homework and b) sharing the demand of homework by writing for him.

Putting these skills into practise has taken several years of hard work, but it is possible.  I'm here cheering you on.