Eating and Pathological Demand Avoidance: My Son Only Ate Three Foods (Part 1 of 4)

If your child has dropped food after food, won't try new things no matter what you do, and every mealtime feels like a battle — this episode is the first in a four-part series where I get personal.

I'm sharing the story of my oldest son Cooper, who at his lowest point was eating only Honey Nut Cheerios out of a single specific bowl. I walked through grocery store aisles sobbing, frantically looking for protein bars he might eat. I watched him go through the SOS feeding protocol in occupational therapy and add foods only to drop them again. I tried sneaking vitamins into his chocolate milk. Nothing was gaining traction — and I didn't understand why.

In this first episode, I walk you through the years before I had a PDA lens: my own food-focused parenting, the Montessori methods I tried that he refused, the escalating meltdowns around eating, the developmental pediatrician who shamed me for not cooking every meal from scratch, and the moment I finally understood that the root cause of Cooper's eating struggles was not primarily sensory — it was autonomy and equality based.

I also talk about what happened when I stopped the SOS feeding protocol, lowered demands around food, and gave him true autonomy around what, when, and where he ate — and what his eating looks like seven years later.

This episode is for parents currently in the fear of it, for parents whose children have been diagnosed with ARFID or anorexia and haven't responded to traditional approaches, and for feeding therapists and other professionals who are wondering if there is another way to think about what they're seeing.

This is also the first episode in a four-part series. Part 2 covers the logic of viewing eating through a PDA lens. Part 3 covers practical accommodation strategies. Part 4 is tailored specifically to feeding therapy settings.

Key Takeaways

The mango slice that changed everything | 00:07:29 Cooper was about four and a half when he wanted a third or fourth mango slice and I said no. He physically fought me for it, and it escalated into a two-hour screaming meltdown. After that, he refused to eat mango slices entirely — dropping yet another food from his repertoire. That moment was one of the first times I saw the pattern, though I didn't have a framework for it yet.

Why the SOS feeding protocol stopped working | 00:16:05 We started the SOS protocol — a 30-step sensory-based exposure approach — and early on it was progressing. Looking back, I understand now that there was novelty, one-on-one attention, and a lot of autonomy built into the early stages because he didn't have to actually eat anything. But when we moved the protocol into the home during the pandemic, the novelty and dopamine were gone, and the rigid structure became something his nervous system perceived as a demand. He stopped engaging entirely.

Dropping foods rather than expanding them | 00:19:43 The occupational therapist noticed an unusual pattern: every time Cooper added a new adjacent food through sensory bridging, he dropped the one he had previously been eating. His repertoire wasn't expanding — it was staying flat. Through the PDA lens, I later understood that this was him exerting control to get back to nervous system safety: always needing to be in the position of the decider.

The grocery store moment | 00:23:06 I was standing in the aisle of a grocery store frantically picking out protein bars in birthday cake and double fudge brownie flavors, anything I could have in my back pocket for him to potentially eat. I was sobbing. I had watched him drop chocolate milk — his one reliable source of protein. I didn't understand why nothing was working. That moment was when I knew that the frameworks I'd been using didn't apply.

What shifted — and what seven years looks like | 00:26:46 When I finally understood that the root cause was autonomy and equality based — not primarily sensory — I made the decision to stop the SOS protocol, lower demands around food completely, and give him true autonomy: letting him choose what, when, where, and whether he ate, even if that meant Lay's potato chips, Pirate's Booty, and popcorn for almost two years. It was hard. There were moments I reverted, and I could immediately observe his eating reduce. But slowly, he began adding things back. Seven years later he eats carrots, apples, tacos, steak, salmon, pork shoulder, smoothies, pizza, and more — alongside processed food — and he is healthy and growing.

Relevant Resources

What is PDA? — Start here for a foundational overview.

Free Burnout Masterclass — Cooper's eating crisis happened in burnout — learn more about burnout here.

Is My Child PDA? — Take the free survey and/or class to help figure this out.

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Are you the parent of a child or teen who just won't eat? Okay. So maybe they have been diagnosed with ARFID. Maybe they have been diagnosed with anorexia. Maybe they haven't been diagnosed with anything. But the more you approach their eating with traditional parenting and therapeutic approaches based on incentives, monitoring, correcting, teaching, exposure to new foods through a sensory based lens, it seems like they just keep dropping the foods, and no matter what you do, you can't gain traction. So if this is sounding familiar, or if you're simply a parent who's like, my child is so picky, and no matter what we do, we can't get them to eat or expand their repertoire, their variety, their amount, etcetera, this episode is for you. So today, I'm gonna talk about eating and pathological demand avoidance, but this can be applied to any neurodivergent child who's not responding in the way that is supportive to their well-being and health to more traditional approaches. So this is the first episode in a four part series that I'm going to do on pathological demand avoidance and eating. And today I'm going to start with my personal story so that you know that when I'm speaking about these things, I'm doing so from a perspective of a mom who has cried in the aisles of grocery stores, who has sobbed in occupational therapy sessions, who has watched their child only eat three processed foods for two years and was really really afraid of hospitalization and needing a feeding tube, and also from the perspective of someone who has worked with hundreds of parents whose pathologically demand avoidant children and teens had eating struggles.

[00:02:20] So of course, please apply discernment as to whether you think this is familiar and applies to you. And in episode two, I'm gonna talk about the logic of viewing eating struggles through a PDA lens. In episode three of this series, I'm gonna give you guys practical strategies to accommodate the threat response around eating. And then in the fourth episode in the series, I'm gonna speak more specifically to therapy settings. Okay. Let's get started. So I have two pathologically demand avoidant sons, one of whom is now 11, and he is very externalized, meaning whenever he perceives threats goes into very visible fight or flight behavior. So throughout his life, it was very easy for me to observe exactly when his brain was perceiving threat. So when my son started to go into burnout after my second son, William, was born, I noticed three primary things. One, that he his behavior was escalating to the point where he seemed like a feral animal and nothing I was doing to soothe him was working. The second thing I noticed was that he was increasingly going inward and he was stopping talking. He he didn't wanna leave the house. He didn't want to engage. And he would say, my legs don't work or would simply collapse when we tried to make him get some fresh air and walk outside.

[00:04:05] But the primary and sort of acute basic needs struggle that my son had was around restrictive eating. So let's go back to the beginning so that you don't think that I am a a laissez faire parent who was just like, sure, I'm just gonna give my kids Lay's potato chips and McDonald's and not care about nutrition or sugar because that was not the case. So when I was a young mom with my first child, I was kind of obsessive about eating. Right? I did exclusively breastfeeding And at the age of six months, I decided to do baby led weaning with homemade foods, everything organic, everything home cooked, and no sugar, no gluten, no processed foods. So I was, you know, in my own head, was being very mindful and healthy with the way that I was introducing feeding and food. My husband and I were also very conscious of our eating. You know, we went through periods of no sugar, no gluten, no dairy. You know, we would do the Whole30. We were not people who would eat a lot of processed foods. No judgment, if that's you. And in fact, I now eat more processed food because I have so much of it in my house. But I was not in the mindset of, like, kids can just eat whatever they want. I was also trying to do as he got older into, like, his toddler years, I was trying to introduce Montessori techniques for independence.

[00:05:47] So, you know, setting things at a level that he could engage with, like he could pour his own cup of water, or he could, you know, get a piece of food and put it on a plate, putting it at lower levels of the kitchen to try and instill independence. And the two things that I noticed, this was prior to William, my second child being born, was he did not want to engage in any of the Montessori techniques. Like, did not want to do things for himself, which went against the theory of Montessori and sort of, like, the observations on the mommy blogs. And I did notice that he was picky and that he would often spit out squishy food, like sweet potatoes or avocados and would tend more towards like chewy or crunchy. But in my head, this was just preference. This was temperament. This wasn't a red flag, and it was also my first child. So when my second son was born, when Cooper was almost four years old, my older PDA son, things started to escalate. I was not able to provide him complete undivided attention, which now through the PDA lens we can think of as constant signals of safety to the nervous system, right? So I was splitting my attention, I didn't feel well during my pregnancy, I was working full time, And so he sensed that, was not getting the undivided attention, and a couple things started to happen.

[00:07:29] He started to drop foods that he had previously liked eating and he was having these, like, knock down, drag out power struggles around finishing his food or not eating a snack, you know, before he eats a full meal. So I was trying to do the logic that our pediatrician told us about of, like, don't do a lot of snacking, make sure he doesn't have a dessert or anything sweet before he finishes what's on his plate, sit down for meals as a family, and, you know, limit the amount of snacking and introduce food at predictable intervals so he knows that he's not gonna be hungry. So all of these things made sense to me, but the more sort of attention and structure I put around eating, the more I noticed him rejecting things. So I'll give you two anecdotes from this time period. It was about he was, like, four and a half. So one of the things he liked was dried mango slices that were organic from Whole Foods. They were chewy, they were organic, but I was trying to limit the amount of mango slices he could have between meals because of the sugar content. And I remember him standing on these little wooden steps in our kitchen in the Washington DC area, and he wanted like a third or a fourth mango slice. And I said no, because that's what parents do. And he physically fought me to try and get the mango slice, and it continually escalated to the point where he had, like, a two hour screaming meltdown.

[00:09:21] And anytime I would approach him, he would hiss at me and lash out and it was like a wounded animal in the corner of the house. Right? And and it was like he would scream and scream and scream like he did as a baby. And so, you know, I remember following the pediatrician's advice of like, you know, having a time in corner or a sensory corner or, like, you know, just ignoring the behavior. So I would be on my bed, like, looking at an iPhone to try and distract myself from the sensory input of the screaming. I would remember I would after, like, thirty minutes, I would feel him sort of, like, creeping towards my bed because his his bedroom was across from mine. And I would turn around quietly and see him and he would flee from me and start screaming again. So after that mango slice incident, he refused to eat mango slices. So this was yet another thing that he dropped from his repertoire. So I went to a developmental pediatrician to talk to her about, you know, I'm really concerned with my son's eating. And I had been doing sort of the suggestions, and she pulled out a statistic from a peer reviewed journal about the correlation. I know this because I'm a social scientist, but she imposed causality on it and said, like, are you making home cooked meals and sitting down multiple times a day? And I said, you know, we try and have family meals at least four times a week, but I can't cook every meal home cooked because both my husband and I are working full time.

[00:11:08] We're commuting from the city. And she basically shamed me and said, you know, I had four kids, and I made sure I had home cooked meals at every meal. And, you know, I'm a doctor, and I was just flabbergasted because it was essentially placing blame on me when I was really doing my best and paying a lot of attention to the eating of, like, your lack of home cooked meals, I. E. You working outside of the home, is causing your child's eating struggles. Okay? So this was my first experience with, like, shame, doubt, and confusion around what I was trying to do. Because as you heard me start this podcast, you know, I was like reading all the research and trying to only do organic and do baby led weaning and breastfeeding and all the things. So long story short with the eating stuff, as it was moving towards a crisis, is that things continually escalated. He started dropping preferred foods that he had previously eaten, like the little, like, doctor Prager's, like spinach and sweet potato hash brown type things, like, you know, things that were marginally nutritious or were nutritious, and he used to eat, and he just started refusing.

[00:12:34] And he would throw things on the floor, he would gag, he would he would run from the table, pure fight flight responses. And so I was starting to observe like, oh, this is not getting better. We went through a pretty severe crisis with his burnout where, you know, he largely stopped talking, walking, engaging, wanting to leave the house and eating, and that was the time when my husband and I decided to have me leave my career in Washington DC to stabilize my son because the pediatricians were asking us to admit him to a psychiatric emergency room. So we moved back to Michigan, which is where I grew up from Washington DC, because we could not afford to live in the city without full time salaries. And by the time we arrived in Michigan where my family is, Cooper, my son who is in burnout, was only eating Honey Nut Cheerios out of a particular bowl. That's all he would eat. Okay? So we were staying with my mom, and I remember for, like, four or five days, all he had eaten was Honey Nut Cheerios. And my mom had taken him over to my sister's house because I was trying to, like, move stuff and care for the other baby. And I told her, like, please pour the Honey Nut Cheerios into this bowl if you're gonna feed him. And he was hiding under one of my sister's pieces of furniture, and my mom forgot and and poured the Honey Nut Cheerios into a different bowl.

[00:14:17] And she brought it over to him, and he took the bowl and and threw it into her face. Okay? So in the back of my mind and what every every pediatrician, every piece of research, the conventional wisdom had always been saying was, your child will eat if they are hungry enough. In the same way that we hear, your child will sleep when they're tired enough. And these are exactly the things that don't ring true and don't prove true for pathologically demand avoidant humans. Why? Because the definition and, like, the concept and the meaning of PDA is a survival drive for autonomy and equality that consistently overrides other survival instincts like eating, sleeping, hygiene, toileting, and safety. So at this time, I was terrified. My husband was had just started a new job. He was traveling all over Michigan. I was staying with my mom and then a rental. And the first thing I did was try and get Cooper into occupational therapy for feeding because we have been doing some occupational therapy in the Washington DC area. So I was looking at it first through a sensory lens, which to a degree made sense to me. Okay. He's always liked crunchy and chewy food. He's never liked things like oatmeal. He spit out avocados. You know, there's the tactile, the olfactory, the, like, taste senses, and so that's the thing we're gonna work on with an occupational therapist, and that we had started working on in Washington DC.

[00:16:05] So we started what's called the SOS feeding protocol, which is a very gentle sensory based exposure protocol, which is a 30 step process. So the first thing that kids do, or teens or adults, is the first step in the 30 is literally just being in the same room as a food. Okay? So maybe it's being in the kitchen at the occupational therapy clinic with visible spinach leaves, and that is step one. Right? And then maybe you progress to engaging with the spinach with your hands, playing with it, feeling it. Then maybe you you know, there's multiple steps in between, but maybe the next steps are more putting it close to your mouth. So, like, we would play games like put a spinach leaf on your lips and then blow it into a bowl. Right? So you're getting to the point after thirty steps of exposure, very gentle and play based exposure, you are gonna be eventually chewing and swallowing certain foods. So we did not start with spinach. Okay? We started with, like, bridging from honey nut Cheerios to a different type of Cheerios or cereal. So one of the things, you know, my son could start further along on the steps because he could already, like, be in a room with cereal. But the first thing we did was, like, he would crush cereal with a hammer into a bunch of powder or crumbs, and then we would use glue and glitter and, like, make art out of the food.

[00:17:54] Okay? So, you know, when he's in this feeding protocol in the beginning, he's moving through the steps. He's doing well. And retrospectively, I now understand this is like it's novelty. It's play based. It's one on one undivided attention. He's got a lot of autonomy and equality in it because he doesn't need to actually eat the thing. And so things are progressing, I think, in a way that's going well. But then the pandemic hits, and he no longer wants to attend occupational therapy because there isn't the novelty in dopamine of, like, the swings and the hammock that he can be in and and the trampolines and, like, the padded room and all the toys. But we're trying to continue the SOS feeding protocol in the home, which includes, like, six times when you're presenting food, preferred food and food, and then a bowl that they can, like, spit the food into that they don't want. But me implementing this, I did not know this at the time, was imposing this rigid structure and unspoken expectation around six times a day, we're gonna be doing this protocol in the home without the novelty excitement and dopamine of engaging in a new occupational therapy setting. So he starts rejecting even looking at or engaging in or touching any of the foods for the SOS feeding protocol, and I'm doing occupational therapy sessions, which are really sort of counseling sessions with him in the background because he won't engage.

[00:19:43] He won't do the things. And one of the things the occupational therapist noticed was when he had been engaging in the SOS feeding protocol, you know, they would do bridge foods. Like, let's say he would eat a Lay's potato chip. So he started eating Lay's potato chip. He we would get, like, a wavy Lay's potato chip to bridge the sensory experience cause that was the root cause that we were assuming was preventing him or causing the avoidance of eating. Okay? So he would then quickly be like, oh, these wavy potato chips are good and crunchy, but then he would drop the unwavy Lay's potato chip. And so over time and observation, my occupational therapist said, you know, this does not look like the normal pattern that we see with SOS feeding protocol because what we tend to see is that when we bridge sensorially to a new food, it expands the repertoire. It but he was staying the same, like, only, like, three or four foods. And every time he would add one that was adjacent sensorially, you know, like, it's a chip, but now it's a wavy chip, and now it's an avocado oil based chip, and now it's a different brand of chip, he would just drop the one that he had been previously eating. Through the PDA lens, this makes sense because he's exerting control as a way of getting back to nervous system safety. He needs to be in the position of the decider and have autonomy around it, and so he would drop something every single time.

[00:21:26] Of course, I did not know this because I did not know about pathological demand avoidance, and this is why I do these podcasts with all of you so that you don't have to go through this long story that I'm telling you. So he had during occupational therapy, we could get him to drink chocolate milk, which was like, kinda like my safety net because it had protein in it, It had some calcium, nutrition, and it was, like, the only thing that had protein and protein in it. So one of the things that we were trying to do was to think creatively about getting more nutrients, vitamins into him. Right? So what do people say? Oh, you know, like, mix this powder that has no taste at all into the chocolate milk and he won't even notice. And so I started trying to do that with vitamins and collagen and he sensed it. And through the PDA lens, we can understand that this is a loss of autonomy and equality because I decided it without his consent, input, or collaboration. And remember, this is subconscious. Like, he's not a four and a half year old who's like, you didn't give me consent, mama. It is the subconscious perception of I don't have freedom and choice, and mom is trying to make me do something, and therefore, my survival brain tells my body I'm under I'm in danger or under life threat.

[00:23:06] And then two things happen. Physiologically, we have a bunch of things happening that make it harder to eat because you don't want to be you know, you don't want a full stomach when you're an antelope running from a lion on the savannah, and control starts to coalesce around things that we as parents actually cannot control, like eating or other basic needs. So I remember walking through the aisle of a local grocery store and frantically trying to pick out all these protein bars that were had these ridiculous flavors like birthday cake and double fudge brownie and, like, just anything that I could have in my back pocket to have him potentially eat. I mean, was essentially candy bars. And I was just standing there sobbing. And, you know, I don't often cry. I usually cry out of frustration or, like, when I hit my nervous system threshold, but not as much out of sadness. But I felt absolute despair. Absolute despair. I was just like, okay. He's just dropped chocolate milk. A part of me knows that he's not gonna eat these candy bars that are masquerading as protein bars, but I don't know why. And I'm doing everything I can to support his eating, but I don't understand. Okay? So, of course, this is where pathological demand avoidance comes into play because all the understood paradigms and logical frameworks and root causes to avoidance and control around eating were not applying.

[00:24:54] And so, thankfully, my occupational therapist at this time period introduced me to pathological demand avoidance. But again, I didn't truly understand it. I was just like, okay, he has avoidance, but how do we solve this? Right? Like, what's the root cause and why? And this is the work that I do, is trying to help parents go beyond just like, okay, demand avoidance, which can be caused by a million trillion things. So during this time period, I understood finally that PDA is a fluctuating nervous system disability. The root cause of his eating struggles, I could finally see was no longer primarily sensory based, but autonomy and equality based. Meaning, every time he doesn't have freedom, choice, and autonomy or perceives that someone, something, or a situation is above him, like in the deciding role or having an agenda, his brain tells him he's not safe. It pings in the body, and it drops in the bucket to the point where it builds to his threshold of tolerance in his nervous system, and he tipped over into burnout, which is where we found ourselves with this eating situation. And so, logically, if we truly believe, and I did because I was willing to do anything and think out of the box, if I truly believe these autistic advocates and what I'm reading about PDA and what I've observed in my own son from the moment he was born, if the root cause or threats to autonomy and equality that causes this, then I need to go directly to the root cause to resolve it.

[00:26:46] And this is a huge leap. Okay? Because the last thing you wanna do as a mom is see your child only eating Lay's potato chips, Pirate's Booty, which is like a more healthy rice based Cheeto. It's not actually healthy, and popcorn. Like, those three things and say to yourself, you know what? I'm going to give autonomy and equality around this. I'm going to, quote, let him choose when he eats, where he eats, how he eats, and if he eats. Okay? So that is a very tall order for a parent, but intuitively and in my body and from my observations in my home, I knew that the way that we were going was the wrong direction. And if I didn't try something radically different, we were not going to improve. Okay? And it's like that old saying or the adage by Einstein. It's like, if you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, you are not that intelligent. That's not exactly what it says, but it's something like that. So I decided to experiment with not correcting him, lowering the demands of eating, meaning delivering him food on command, even if it was food that I did not think was healthy and letting him eat what he wanted. And, of course, I had moments of, like, don't you think you want some chocolate milk? Or, you know, you need to eat x before y, where I would revert, and it would immediately reduce his eating.

[00:28:25] So I would observe the causal mechanism in my home. That is definitely the silver lining of having such an externalized and observable nervous system experience for my son because I could see the root cause, the causality, and what was causing the problem. So what happened? For almost two years, he only ate Lay's potato chips, Pirate's Booty, and popcorn. He did not eat vitamins or supplements, but I could observe him eating more and having less of a gag reflex, and he started to, like, demonstrate interest in other foods. Like, for example, he would sit at the table and be around the foods we were eating, or he would you know, we would get sushi and he would get one of the chopsticks and, like, shove it into my sushi roll. Okay? So that doesn't sound like success to a lot of people but for a child who, like, used to step on one oatmeal flake from his baby brother and run from the room gagging, like, this was progress. So we started to see an expansion. One of the first things he added back in was ice cream. Again, does not seem like, oh, that's super healthy, but it was a new texture, a new food, and it had dairy in it. Of course, during this time period, as a mother, the amount of shame, embarrassment, and, like, isolation that I felt when this was happening was extreme.

[00:30:13] I had to constantly check myself of like Casey. You already tried for years things that did not work and in fact got you to the point where this was worse. And then you're seeing with this different approach based on the logic of how the brain works that things are starting to get better. Okay? So the tide started to turn, but it was not an overnight success. It required not just providing accommodations and a PDA lens to eating, like stopping the SOS feeding protocol, giving him more autonomy even within the feeding therapy at the clinic, dropping my agenda around, you know, the fact that he wasn't eating with utensils, the fact that he was eating in front of a screen in his room, on the floor, me having to clean up crumbs everywhere, you know, watching him eat processed food for the majority of his meals. Like, it was very, very difficult. But slowly and surely, he added things in. And, yes, he would still drop things. But now, seven years later, he eats a ton of things. Things that I cannot believe he will eat. Carrots, apples, homemade bread and peanut butter sandwiches, tacos with cheese and ground beef, pork shoulder, steak, pizzas, chicken nuggets, smoothies, you know, salmon bites, all sorts of things in addition to processed food. He has not dropped eating, like, flaming hot Cheetos in his lunch, but he's also eating all of these other things. And he's healthy, and he's growing, and he plays tackle football, and he has a much healthier relationship to food.

[00:32:08] So I share this story because there's two sets of people that I wanna be speaking to here, maybe three. First, if you are a parent that is currently in that moment of crying in the grocery store and trying to find, like, cupcake flavored protein bars or sneaking things into chocolate milk or having knockdown drag out, you know, hour long meltdowns or them fleeing when you're trying to support them to eat through more, like, even gentle and traditional approaches, this is for you and so are the next three episodes. If you are a parent who has a child, teen, or young adult who has been diagnosed with ARFID or anorexia and has not had success with the traditional approaches, like family based therapy or some of the approaches that they've done, This is another logic. Okay? Because often in our coaching and education, we work with families who have children who have gone through, you know, hospitalization, partial hospitalization program, having a feeding tube, being diagnosed with ARFID or anorexia, and it not working because the root cause was actually PDA, and then the family needing to reevaluate the approach. Okay? Again, caveat. I'm not a clinician. I'm not prescribing anything, and I'm always here to help you discern and use your critical thinking to determine, like, is this the right approach for me? Because it's not the right approach for everyone, especially not everyone who's been diagnosed with ARFID and or anorexia.

[00:34:04] But this is an alternative approach to serve the families for whom the existing conventional wisdom has failed them. Okay? And then third, I hope this piques the interest of feeding therapists and occupational therapists, speech language pathologists who work on feeding, and maybe developmental pediatricians because this episode and the next three episodes, I'm gonna talk about an alternative approach, both the logic and causality of why some of these conventional approaches haven't worked for this subset of children and teens. I'm gonna talk about all the practical strategies. So, like, what did I actually do during those years, those seven years? Right? Like, what do we what skills do we teach parents to use both for supporting their child, but also managing themselves when they're in these situations? And then fourth, I'm gonna have a tailored episode about the feeding therapy, sort of like the logic of the SOS protocol, but adjusted for PDA and some of, like, the lessons learned and hopefully some prompts that will help you think creatively about how to apply some of these ideas in your practice if you have a client who just isn't responding to the traditional methods. Alright, my friends. I hope this was helpful. I hope it made you feel less alone, and I am excited to record the next few episodes to support those families who are really experiencing fear and confusion around eating. Have a good week, everyone, and I'll see you next week.

Topics Covered

PDA and eating
pathological demand avoidance eating
ARFID and PDA
PDA restrictive eating
PDA child won't eat
SOS feeding protocol PDA
autonomy-based feeding approach
PDA burnout and food
nervous system and eating
demand avoidance and food refusal
PDA occupational therapy feeding
picky eating neurodivergent child
PDA sensory eating
food dropping PDA
PDA child food refusal
PDA anorexia
PDA ARFID treatment
feeding therapy PDA
PDA eating strategies
pervasive drive for autonomy eating