Misconceptions About Eating And PDA - Part 2 Of Our Series On Eating and Pathological Demand Avoidance

In this episode — Part 2 of our series on eating and PDA — I walk through the 10 misconceptions about eating that I personally had to unlearn in order to help my son. These are beliefs that are completely reasonable for most children and even most neurodivergent children, but do not apply to pathologically demand avoidant kids and teens. I cover why "kids will eat when they're hungry" isn't empirically true for PDAers, why behavioral approaches (even gentle ones) can backfire, why restricting sugar may not be the strategy you think it is, and why looking at eating in isolation misses the bigger picture of cumulative nervous system stress.

I also share what the research does and doesn't tell us, where the methodology gaps are when it comes to neurodivergence, and what has actually changed in our home over the years. If the approaches you've been trying aren't working — or are making things worse — this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways

PDA Kids Won't Just "Eat When Hungry" | 00:05:52 I explain how PDA is defined by a survival drive for autonomy and equality that consistently overrides other survival instincts — including hunger. Even when a child is physiologically hungry, the internalized demand of needing to eat, combined with cumulative nervous system stress, can make eating impossible.

Behavioral Methods Activate the Nervous System | 00:09:20 I walk through why behavioral approaches to feeding — including gentle ones like sticker charts, food rewards, or even subtly positive facial expressions — can backfire with PDA children. Because PDA is rooted in threat perception tied to autonomy, any method where a parent or therapist is the "decider" can trigger a nervous system response that makes eating harder, not easier.

Restrictive Eating Is a Symptom, Not the Problem | 00:14:33 I describe how restrictive eating is often a tipping point — a symptom of cumulative nervous system stress that has built up over weeks, months, and sometimes years. Rather than focusing only on what happens at the moment of eating, I explain why it's important to look at the full picture of a child's daily life and accommodate across the board.

Sensory Strategies Alone Won't Transform Eating | 00:26:15 I share how sensory-based feeding approaches, even fun and play-based ones, can still backfire if there isn't enough autonomy built in. I use an example from my own son's feeding therapy to illustrate how the lack of autonomy around engaging in a sensory protocol was causing him to avoid even the activities he enjoyed.

Sugar, Bento Boxes, and Family Meals Reconsidered | 00:31:09 I go through several misconceptions I personally had to unlearn — including the idea that sugar is the main enemy, that colorful bento box meals represent good parenting, and that home-cooked family meals at regular times naturally lead to healthy eating. I share how I came to think about these differently for PDA children, including what actually changed in my own home over time.

Relevant Resources

What is PDA - a foundational overview of PDA as a nervous system disability.

Free Burnout Masterclass - understand the burnout that can make restrictive eating so challenging for PDA kids.

Paradigm Shift Program® - our signature live program where we support parents to help their PDA children and teens through and out of burnout so their whole family can thrive.

Citations

Love Me, Feed Me - book by Katja Rowell.

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Is your neurodivergent child not eating and the approaches that you're using to help them eat more and more healthy seem to be backfiring? This is what happened seven years ago with my pathologically demand avoidant son when he went into burnout and largely stopped eating. So hi. This is Casey. I'm the founder of At Peace Parents, neurodivergent woman, and mom of two PDA sons. So when my son stopped eating, I was absolutely devastated, confused, in despair, And all the advice from parenting experts, the therapy strategies, what the pediatricians told me to do, seemed to make things worse in the sense that he would continually drop foods that he had previously eaten. And I remember watching him drop food after food, and one of the last, quote, healthy foods that he was eating slash drinking was chocolate milk with protein. And I was sneaking in collagen powder and vitamins because I wanted to make sure he was getting enough nutrients. And he even though, you know, these were advertised as imperceptible and no flavor, he perceived that I had done that without his consent or autonomy and suddenly dropped chocolate milk. So when we moved from Washington DC to Michigan, we had a wonderful occupational therapist and feeding specialist who noticed a pattern that she didn't recognize in the other neurodivergent children with sensory processing disorder that she was working with through what's called the SOS feeding protocol. Because every time she would help my son bridge between two foods, so for example, like flat Lay's potato chips to wavy potato chips to get him used to a different sensory experience, he would switch to the wavy potato chips and drop the Lay's potato chips.

[00:02:13] So he was not actually expanding. The occupational therapist introduced me to pathological demand avoidance. And when I finally understood what that actually was, what I consider to be a nervous system disability, albeit fluctuating, everything clicked in my brain and everything made sense. I finally understood that the root cause of his avoidance, his behavioral struggles, his trouble accessing basic needs, leaving the house was due to constant threat perception on a subconscious level when he didn't have autonomy, choice, and freedom, or when he perceived that someone was above him in authority or was the decider. Told his brain, hey, you're in danger under life threat. So when I understood that root cause as a logical person with a PhD in quantitative social science methods and understanding of causality, I said to myself, okay. If autonomy and equality are the root cause of what's threatening him, the lack of that, then we need to give him that in order for his threat perception to come down. So I got it intellectually, but in order to make the change in my home, I had to confront 10 beliefs that I had deeply internalized and explore a completely new logic that went against the conventional wisdom in order to help him get back to the point where he was eating more than just three types of processed food, which took a long time and trial and error.

[00:03:54] But today, in part two of our series on eating and pathological demand avoidance, I wanna walk you through the 10 misconceptions about eating that won't apply to pathologically demand avoidant children and teens and maybe adults even if this logic is completely correct for the majority of other people with different neurotypes, even neurodivergent neurotypes like ADHD, dyslexia, sensory processing disorder, and non PDA autism. So as I go through these beliefs to try and help you understand where you're getting stuck and counter them with the logic of, like, why this actually does not apply to our kids, I want you to have a healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking and put your discernment goggles on because I'm never here to present a dogma or to try and convince you to do something that feels intuitively wrong for your family. But if you have a child who is trying to explore feeding through a sensory lens and they're continually dropping foods and not making progress, or if you have a child who's been diagnosed with anorexia or ARFID and the, like, family based therapy or the strategies that you're using are making things worse and you are completely at a loss and in despair, this episode is for you. Okay. So what are the 10 misconceptions that I had to change my thinking around in order to actually accommodate my son? And in the next episode, we'll talk about, like, the practical nitty gritty boots on the ground tactics of what we did and what we teach parents in the PDA community to do with their children.

[00:05:52] So let's start with number one. This is a big one. I'm sure you've heard it a million times because I have. Kids will eat when they're hungry. Okay? How many times have you heard that, and how many times did I trust that and watch my son not eat and continually eat less and less? So let's understand why this assumption or even observation of the majority is not empirically true for our outliers in the distribution. So what is the definition of PDA that I have coined, believe in, am researching, and assert as a conceptualization that is accurate for this neurotype? It is the following. PDA is defined by a survival drive for autonomy and equality that consistently overrides other survival instincts like eating, sleeping, hygiene, toileting, and or safety. What does that mean? That means that the survival instinct towards autonomy and being above another or equal to them is so strong that when there is a choice between in the brain, I'm hungry and therefore I need to survive by eating, the survival drive for autonomy will override that. So even if a child is really, really hungry and hasn't eaten for a very long time, and I know this to be true with adults that we've worked with as well, it's not that they're trying to control their, you know, the way that they look or their body image or even that it's cognitive or conscious.

[00:07:39] They simply can't eat and reject eating even though physiologically they're hungry because of the pressure they feel in the moment, the expectation they feel in the moment, the internalized demand of I have to eat, the internalized loss of autonomy of my body's telling me I'm hungry and I didn't consent to that, and the buildup over time of cumulative nervous system stress, which I'm gonna talk about in misconceptions two and three. So we see this pattern in PDA children and teens and adults with things like sleeping. Children or teens who have moved into a non twenty four hour sleep cycle or continually waking, and the more tired they get, the harder it is to actually sleep, and the body overrides that survival instinct of sleeping. So this is something that we really need to understand beyond the definition of PDA as like anxiety or an anxiety driven need for control or this is just rational demand avoidance of autism because, like, the sensory experience of the food is an aversion. Right? And that can also be at play, but we wanna go back to the root cause. Okay? So pathologically demand avoidant children, teens and adult, will not just eat when they're hungry. We've worked with lots of families whose children have been hospitalized, have had to have feeding tubes, have been in partial hospitalization programs because of this assumption.

[00:09:20] So we just wanna keep that in mind. Number two, whether or not this is explicit when people are giving you advice or when therapists are trying to support you with eating, we need to understand this misconception, which is not eating is a behavioral problem, so we can use behavioral methods to resolve it. So even if a therapist or a well meaning, you know, friend isn't saying, I have a behavioral solution for you or doesn't even realize that they're operating from the behavioral paradigm. They probably are. So what do I mean by this? Behavioral approaches, matter how gentle. Okay? They can involve no punishment and still be behavioral, are deliberate behaviors on the part of someone else, like a therapist, a teacher, a parent, to change the behavior of the child or teen. Okay. This can be, you know, something like a sticker chart. It can be rewarding eating what's on the plate with a treat. It can be giving more screen time if a certain number of vegetables are eaten. It can be very subtle where you are giving more affection or you have a more regulated tone or facial expression when you see your child doing what you want them to do. K? So it's modifying the behavior through incentives or disincentives. And it doesn't matter how gentle it is, it's still falling in the behavioral camp.

[00:11:05] So why does this matter? It matters because the neuroception or the subconscious perception of safety, threat, and life threat for PDA children is so strong and it is directly tied to whether or not they have full autonomy and are equal to you. So anytime we are putting ourselves above them in the decider of, like, I'm gonna create a sticker chart and reward you, or I'm gonna give you this treat, or I'm gonna smile more and tell you you did a good job when you eat that piece of lettuce. Those are all behavioral methods, and they they activate the nervous system in the PDAer. Right? So what happens when the when the nervous system is activated when the brain perceives danger or life threat? What happens? So even if the child goes into fight or flight or freeze or shut down, either way, the metabolism slows down. K? Because we're going into survival mode. Additionally, if you're going into fight or flight, which many of them are first, it's gonna be cortisol and adrenaline and, like, your body physiologically wanting to reduce fluids. So diarrhea, needing to throw up, etcetera. Think about it like an antelope on the savannah who's being confronted by a lion. And in order to get away from the lion, their body automatically does all the things that it needs to do without the antelope thinking to make the antelope light and not weighed down by fluids, and they're not gonna be digesting.

[00:12:52] Okay? That's why this is not the state of rest and digest or safe and social. So the root cause is not a child who is doing this for attention, for control in a cognitive way where they're like, I wanna control mom, or if I do this, then I'm gonna get this. We have to think about it as a nervous system response. And in order to support the eating, we have to resolve the nervous system issue, not just in the moment trying to incentivize, disincentivize, expose, and teach. Because for many PDA children, this will make things worse. Okay? So let me give you an example. With my son, when we were doing the SOS feeding protocol at home, we had to do six sort of sit down moments where we would have safe foods on the plate and new foods that he was exposed to, like maybe a raspberry and maybe a piece of spinach, and then there was a a bowl on the table, and he could, like, kiss or spit or lick the new food and spit it into the bowl. So very gentle, very play based, very sensory based. But my expectation and the imposition of routine and control of, like, six times a day, bud, we're gonna do this. I'm deciding it. I'm putting it out, and you have to do this. Even if I was gentle, was activating his nervous system so that he would avoid it more and be less likely to eat those foods.

[00:14:33] Okay? So even if he did it in the moment, he would avoid and he started running from the table and not engaging in the feeding protocol at all. So it was backfiring. Okay. So this leads us to our third misconception, which is you can focus on just eating skills and scaffolding in isolation and solve the feeding problem with a PDA child or teen. What do I mean by this? When we have a problem, eating. They won't eat. Sometimes we have compulsive eating, but today I'm talking about restrictive eating. They just won't eat. They're only eating processed foods. They'll only eat sugar. They're snacking all day, but they won't eat real meals. They won't sit at the table. We're thinking logically, okay. What can I do to fix each one of those problems? They're snacking all day. I'll reduce the snacking so that they're more hungry during mealtimes. Okay. They're not eating a lot during mealtimes. I'm gonna give them a buffet and have multiple choices. They're not sitting at the table. Okay. You know, I'm gonna put, like, a fidget thing on their chair so they can move their legs, and maybe they can bring a book to the table. These are not bad ideas, and some of them will soften the resistance and the avoidance. But but to really transform things with eating, we wanna go to another piece of unique logic to the PDA brain, which I'm gonna explain.

[00:16:02] So we wanna start thinking about eating, whether it's control or restricting, like compulsive or restrictive eating as an outcome, a tipping point, a symptom of all the cumulative nervous system stress in their body that has built not just over a day, but over, like, weeks, months, and even years. Okay? So my son's eating got really bad when he went into burnout, when he tipped past his threshold of tolerance for what his little body could take, for how much his nervous system could be activated before things really went off the rails. So when you think about it, like, you think about your own body and you can reflect on a time when maybe you've had a scary incident where you've been held up, you know, where you've gotten lost in an area that wasn't safe, where maybe you're at a carnival or a fair and, like, you lose your kid for a minute, maybe you run through a stop sign, have a fender bender. If you think back to what your body did in those moments, you likely had, like, maybe some disassociation, maybe chest pains, your heart racing, like itching all over your body, heat flushing through your face. Right? So those are happening to you internally even if you're maintaining calm to, like, talk to the person you got in a fender bender with or, like, go to a loudspeaker and announce, like, your kid got lost in the crowd.

[00:17:35] So that feeling and that physiological response is happening all the time for your PDA child all the time. Like, not just when they're trying to eat because every time their brain's perceiving they don't have autonomy and equality, they are having that type of activation even if they're complying in other areas of their life. So that is what is building up to the point where control starts to coalesce, where they start to really control one or more basic needs. So often we have a stickiest basic need. For my older son, eating was his stickiest basic need. So it's not only looking at what can we do in the moment of eating. It's auditing the rest of their lives, whether it's at school, whether it's doing chores, whether it's not you know, they're calling you stupid and you're correcting them, whether it's, you know, making them tie their own shoes when they they can do it themselves but they want help. All of those moments are like drops in a bucket leading towards this threshold that when it's passed, the child starts to control the only things they really can, which is often a basic need. In this case, we're talking about eating. So in order to really help eating, we need to bring down over time, not just a day, but weeks and months consistently all of that nervous system stress in the system and get them back into their thinking brain so that they stop controlling so much about eating.

[00:19:14] So this is important to understand because it's subconscious, and so if you have a kid who, you know, you're thinking it's just sensory aversion, and remember that the nervous system interacts with the sensory system big time. Like, 80% of the signals that the brain gets are from the sensory input of the body, so it's bottom up, and then 20% is top down. So these are very integrated, and sensory aversions and, like, sensory differences will be exacerbated or amplified when their nervous system is stressed, so you will notice it more. But if you're focusing on the moment of, like, oh, you know, they don't like squishy food, so we're gonna practice with squishy food, it might not be that, like, they're incapable of liking squishy food. It's that we need to bring down the perception that they don't have autonomy and equality around what they're eating overall, and then they're able to eat a broader array over time in the long term of a variety of sensory profiles of food. Okay? So I hope that makes sense because those first three things are extraordinarily important to understand as a parent, as a teacher, and as a therapist. Okay? So we wanna understand comprehensively how to solve the long term problem of restrictive eating that can get pretty scary. Okay? So I'm in this next couple misconceptions, I'm gonna talk about some research. And, you know, I had to dig into this as a mom who's also a social scientist because, again, as I'm going through this, remember, I had to unlearn these misconceptions myself.

[00:21:14] So I know they're not easy, but I'm that's why we're walking through them. Okay. Number four was a big one for me, and I was also shamed by a pediatrician because I wasn't doing enough of this. So number four, home cooked family meals at regular times will naturally lead to healthy eating habits, healthy BMI, healthy weight, and better mental health. Okay. So, this was my assumption. It is also borne out in a lot of the research that I looked through, but I also looked at the methodologies notes. The methodologies do not control for neurodivergence. Okay? So let's think about it like this. Home cooked family meals in an ideal world, you know, we have enough time to cook them. We can afford to buy the healthy food. Our kids don't melt down, throw things, run out the front door, scream, hit their sibling, or fidget so much that they're breaking things and not able to eat at the table. In the ideal world, they're a neurotypical child who will simply sit at the table and eat. Right? And so in these studies, yeah, if you have a child like that, they're also probably gonna have less struggles with eating. They're gonna need less dopamine. They'll be less attracted to sugar, and they probably will have less mental health issues in these long term studies because they are not neurodivergent, which highly correlates with other things like eating habits and mental health.

[00:23:01] Okay? So if we don't control for that, then we can't really blindly take this correlation as causality. Okay? But let's break it down to the logic of, like, my family and yours. Okay? Just observationally. I was thinking in the beginning. I will cook these organic, home cooked family meals. My husband and I will sit down. We'll have no screens. My child will be there, and we'll have connection. We'll have conversation and healthy food. But time after time, what I observed was that the more I tried to make him sit at the table, the less he would eat. The more I tried to make him sit at the table and eat my, you know, organic colors of the rainbow plate that I had set down, the more he would refuse to eat. So the two things that we want to happen, healthy eating habits and healthy mental health, like, with a proxy of, like, family relationships were over and over not happening. And in fact, my insistence on home cooked family meals at fixed times at the table were actually leading to the opposite of what the research was showing. And this makes sense because even if it's true for the middle of the bell curve, we have kids who are outliers and not in the middle of the distribution. So I had to trust myself on that one, and I also had the backup of, like, my methodological background to be able to see, like, what did they actually control for here? Did they include neurodivergence? And most studies don't.

[00:24:38] And there is massively underdiagnosed neurodivergence, especially in the PDA community, because we don't fully understand it and haven't researched it. So, you know, it's been seven years, and I will tell you both from my own family and the coaching we've done, often for pathologically demand avoidant children, they eat more and better and have better connections with their family when they are not forced to sit at the table three times a day and eat what's on their plate and not have dessert. Okay? More healthy eating happens over the long term when they can eat in front of a screen, when they can eat in their room, when the food is delivered on command, especially if they're in burnout, when they have a plate that includes maybe the dessert and the quote healthy food, like apple slices, honey, and a Twix. Right? And that's gonna be jarring for for many of us to hear, especially if you're early on in this journey. But additionally, the connection and relationship, which is, you know, what they're actually trying to measure with these home cooked family meals as it relates to later mental health is stronger because we're allowing this autonomy and equality to access food. Okay? So that's number four. Number five, And this is gonna have a big asterisk, and I just want us to, again, be critically thinking we're not in binaries of, like, black and white, yes and no, zero to a 100.

[00:26:15] But I want you to think about this carefully. The misconception in the neurodivergent space is often that sensory aversion is the primary root cause your child is not eating. And this gets back to misconception number three, focusing on eating in isolation to solve the problem. So if we understand the root cause is truly, if your child is PDA, the threat perception around not having autonomy and equality over time and builds to the moment, then we can understand that, yes, sensory is important, but sensory strategies in isolation will not be the full transformation, okay, if we don't go to the root cause. Let me give you an example. When my son was in feeding therapy, even though we were doing it through a play based and a sensory based lens, there was not a ton of autonomy around engaging in it, even though he liked it in the moment of, like you know, we would do really fun games. Like, we're gonna put a raisin inside a balloon. Like, I would have a balloon. The therapist would have a balloon. He would have a balloon, and we'd have, like, different types of food. And each of us would, like, hide like, I'm gonna hide a raisin and a Cheerio and a piece of pasta in my balloon and blow it up, but I'm not gonna show them what I have in my balloon.

[00:27:40] And he's gonna do the same, and the therapist is gonna do the same, And then we're gonna, like, guess what's in each other's balloons, and we're gonna pop it, and then maybe we have to, like, have it in our hands as exposure. Right? So that example in and of itself is a great sensory based technique within the SOS feeding protocol. But when we're trying to do things like that on a schedule every time we came on command saying we're gonna do this. His lack of autonomy was making him reject even fun, sensory, and play appropriate methods to help with eating. Okay? And you might have noticed this pattern where it's like your kid really needs headphones, but they reject the headphones because the root cause of the aversion or demand avoidance to the sensory tool is being caused by the perception that you are trying to make them use it. Right? So again, that that survival drive for autonomy is overriding all the other things. So we want to experiment with prioritizing autonomy, equality, and lower demands in the context of supporting the sensory system and also understanding, you know, the difficulty of, like, a squishy food or, like, a wet pasta noodle or the smell of, you know, something like pickles is gonna be so much more intense if they have high cumulative nervous system stress.

[00:29:21] And I can speak to this as a neurodivergent woman as well. Like, sometimes I actually can't take out the trash because, like, we cooked chicken the day before. And that happens when I'm really stressed. When I'm not stressed, I am fine taking out the trash. Or for example, you know, I take supplements that are in gummy form. And, like, when I'm doing well, when I'm not having panic attacks and not having cumulative nervous system stress, it's like no bigs to open my supplement thing. But if I'm stressed and I open it, the smell makes me gag. So and I don't wanna take the supplement. So we have to understand that intersection and allowing ourselves to explore how can we imbue this sensory lens with autonomy and equality first. So the example of the balloons was like maybe you have, like, balloons strewed in the feeding clinic, and you have, like, little organized piles of different foods, but you also have other activities and you have autonomy to go between the clinic space, the hammock swings and the play, and the feeding area. And the child has more autonomy to decide, oh, I wanna engage in this activity today. Oh, I don't feel like doing feeding today. Or can we do it in this area of the play space because I'm having avoidance to the kitchen? Right? And this requires adjusting on the part of therapists, and I know many therapists, if you're listening here, I know you're not in charge of all the protocols, but this is just to get your mind thinking about that different lens first in conjunction with sensory.

[00:31:09] Number six. This is a big one. People are gonna be really have all the feels about it, but I'm just gonna say it. Sugar is your main enemy. K. That's the misconception number six. Sugar is your main enemy. Okay. So, again, this was a big one. This was a big unlearning for me. Before my son went into burnout, I really tried to limit sugar. I really paid a lot of attention to organic, to not eating processed foods, both for him, but also for my husband and I. And if you have a PDA child or teen, you will know that your child is often fixated on sugar. Okay? So this is something that I had to get over and understand better for my unique child. And, of course, trust your intuition and your observations. If you have a child who you empirically observe, objectively observe that sugar is making them more dysregulated in the moment or over time, then, like, ignore this one. But for me, I had to let go of sugar as the main enemy. I had to reframe in my head. The main enemy is threat perception. Okay? So if my child is being forced to eat healthy food and being restricted from sugar, yes, there may be a slight benefit of, like, he's not getting a lot of sugar.

[00:32:40] But if the outcome is his body is constantly getting dumped with adrenaline and cortisol and he's having his metabolism affected by going into fight or flight all the time and then he's therefore avoiding healthy foods because of that restriction, then I have to reframe what the main enemy here is, and it is not sugar. Okay? So there is some research that I'm gonna include in here, a wonderful book, but I've had this this, pediatrician in our program before. She's wonderful. Her name is doctor Kaja Rowell, and she wrote two books about responsive feeding, which I learned about after I sort of intuited some of the stuff with a PDA lens. But she includes a lot of the research that backs up more responsive feeding practices. So I think getting her book, if you want all the science, is a good idea. But one of the points she makes is also that, like, the food is not addictive. Right? We can have addictive behaviors. And yes, I know sugar has a terrible impact. It's in everything in The United States. It's affecting us as a collective. But sugar, especially when your child is in burnout, can help them get out of their threat response so that they can eat. Let me give you an example. My older son would so often say, I want to but I can't eat. And so what I started doing was I would bring him a treat, like, oh, it seems like your body is feeling too scared to eat, so I'm gonna bring you a dum dum or a sucker or a Twix.

[00:34:23] And then he would eat that, have the hit of dopamine and sugar, not have this societal expectation or my agenda of, like, you can't have this. He would get that hit of autonomy and sort of feeling above me and societal expectations of, like, we're having a Twix for breakfast. And it would bring down his threat response, put him back in his thinking brain, and then he could eat a healthy breakfast. K? So this logic is different. It's different than, again, a neurotypical child. And this is why I always emphasize, like, what I talk about here is for PDA children or children with a very sensitive threat response or a survival drive for autonomy. I'm not saying, like, every child should just have sugar for breakfast. But the same thing is true for, actually, both my sons. My second son is in burnout now, and one of the things we do is we give dessert before dinner, or we give dessert with dinner, and he's allowed to eat it before the dinner. And so, like, this is very, very counterintuitive because we're thinking to ourselves, you know, sugar is addictive. It's gonna make them more unhealthy. They're gonna be more dysregulated, and they're not gonna eat the real food. But over the years and in the work that we do, we have seen this is not actually true.

[00:35:47] Okay? My older son does not eat that much sugar anymore, and he eats much more healthy things that I make, like salmon or smoothies. You know, he does eat processed foods and he does eat sugar, but probably in the range of, like, an average child in The United States. Right? And, yeah, I am middle to upper class white woman, highly educated, So my demographic would probably have their kids eating less sugar than mine, and that's fine, but my kids are PDA. Oh, and I also looked up one of my coaches sent me this interesting article in Nature. It's a scientific journal that is a peer reviewed article titled, Experiencing Sweet Taste is Associated with an Increase in Prosocial Behavior. And so the whole article is about, like, what part of the brain the sweet taste actually impacts. So the results suggest that sweetness may be a source domain for prosocial functioning. The results show that the sweet taste was associated with an increase in prosocial behavior compared with previously experiencing salty taste, but did not affect control stimuli ratings. FMRI results revealed a modulation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex associated with this sweetness effect. This brain area is known to play a central role in monitoring conflicts and decisions and has been directly linked to selfish and prosocial economic decisions. So this indicates that there is a purpose for sweet taste. Right? And we can see this with our children's drive to get that sweet taste.

[00:37:34] Okay? So, you know, in my head, I think about it like this. These kids, teens, and adults are constantly feeling discomfort and pain in their bodies from constantly having their nervous system activated. I know what this feels like. I have panic disorder. And so they're trying to distract from that pain through the use of sweet food. Okay? So just think about that one. You know, just mull it around in your brain space and make your own decisions. Okay. Here's number seven. If you don't explicitly teach them or make them eat healthy, they never will. Okay? So that if you don't teach explicitly or make them explicitly, they'll never learn is actually just an overarching misconception in the PDA space or in the, like, child development space because these children actually learn more when we're not trying to, like, force them to learn. So, you know, we have put aside trying to make our kids eat healthy, but they have learned through observation and through what my husband and I eat. And this did not happen in six months. My older son is now very aware of what's healthy because his special interest of football has led him to research what types of foods are healthy for building muscle, for having energy, and being competitive on the football field. Okay? And this is a kid who ate Lay's potato chips, Pirate's Booty, and popcorn for two years.

[00:39:10] And I, at that time, really didn't think he would ever eat anything healthy ever. But increasingly, because he can actually think about things and he's not just acting from survival, he is able to do some research and rational thinking about his goals. So that is something that I just want you to think about in terms of these misconceptions. Okay. Same thing. If you don't make them eat at the table or teach them how to cook, they'll never learn. So this is something that I was very surprised about. I had gone through the radical acceptance process of, like, you know, my son will never eat at the table. We'll never have a family dinner, and that's okay. Like, I can still be a happy, healthy human. I can still love my husband. I can still make my contribution to society and, like, have friends. It's gonna be fine. But over the years, we would set a table place for him, and as things calmed in our home after burnout, my husband and I would try and eat family meals. And, obviously, our kids saw us cooking, and now my son will come to the table and eat with us with autonomy. Right? So it doesn't happen every night. It's not like you have to do this. It's an offering. And he comes because he feels safe and that he doesn't have to. Additionally, over the last two years, somehow, my son has got himself to cook.

[00:40:45] And, you know, he'll bring us breakfast in bed with the nastiest eggs you've ever tasted and make a hurricane storm of dishes and, you know, raw egg splattered around the kitchen, but he is teaching himself to make food without us ever having to make him learn. And we have these conversations about like, oh, you know, I don't say this like this, but like, his special interest is football. It's what motivates him. He wants to play football in high school and college, and therefore he wants to talk about like, well, how am I gonna eat in the dorm? How am I gonna cook for myself when I'm older? Because he it's connected to his special interest, which is motivating for him. And then I have an entry point where I can teach because it's asked for, because he has the autonomy around it, and he does not feel below me. The next one is if you allow them to eat on demand, then they will never eat healthy foods. Meaning, if they're asking for snacks, you can't give them snacks all the time because if you do, then they won't eat their full meal. K? So this is something that I had to rethink when I was trying to get my son out of burnout. And I'll tell you, like, this isn't a costless decision on the part of a parent because I find myself still after school, like, delivering lots of food and more crumbs are in the house.

[00:42:22] But more snacks on command has actually led to more healthy and more varied eating over time because it has provided both lower demands of, like, I'm bringing it to you and autonomy around when he's eating and equality around when he's eating. Meaning, I'm not the one deciding when and he can and cannot eat. Right? So, you know, think about our public schools today, like how many threats to autonomy and equality our kids have around their basic needs. Like, lot of classrooms, you know, they won't let the kid go to the bathroom. They won't let the kid go get a drink of water. They're not allowed to eat when they're hungry. And these are things that just build and build in the system and really overall make it harder for PDA kids to access these basic needs. Okay. Number 10 is, first, I was really into it, and I wanted to emulate this. Then I got really annoyed with this trend, and every time I saw it, I wanted to punch my screen or, like, throw my phone against the wall. And now finally, I am more neutral towards it because I'm no longer in Traumaville. So the tenth misconception, like, colorful bento boxes and square meals are the epitome of healthy eating and good parenting. Okay. So if you're anything like me, maybe you, like, bought little bento boxes and you tried to, like, make the little cute toothpick constructed, you know, strawberry berries and all the things that you see online of, like, get your head to eat healthy, like, from a nutritionist or a dietitian.

[00:44:12] And that, like, each meal has to have protein, and it has to have, like, a certain proportion of protein and greens and cruciferous vegetables and fruit, and it's, like, all perfect aesthetically, and that is what we should be aiming for. Well, first of all, none of us have time to do that. And second of all, the construction of these perfect square meals and bento boxes are a demand and a loss of autonomy. Meaning, there's so much agenda behind it, right, that our kids perceive and feel. And if you're doing it because they like it, because they've asked for it, because it's fun, because it's a way to do a buffet, and maybe it helps them separate the food so they don't mix. Like, there's no judgment, but I want you to reflect on the energy behind it because for me, it was like, I'm gonna do this trick, this tip, this hack, and if I do it, then they'll eat. Then he'll have healthy eating and I'll feel like a good mom. But that perception of, like, all the that organization and, like, you know, putting things into certain packages was being perceived as a loss of autonomy and equality in my son's PDA brain. Okay? So it didn't work, obviously, and the pattern that organically emerged from both my sons eating as I dropped the control was not square meals in a day, but, like, over the course of a week, they might have more square meals.

[00:45:55] Meaning, like, maybe on Monday, they only ate fruit. And then the next day, it was, like, you know, some processed food and some more fruit. And then the next day, my son would eat like four hamburger patties with no buns. Right? And so, like, if you pan out over the course of a week, I could see, like, oh, if I had taken the sum total of all these different types of food and then proportion them out to three meals a day according to, like, the proportions that are healthy, they're the eating actually wasn't that bad over a week. But if you're looking at it as plate by plate or bento box by bento box, you're gonna drive yourself crazy. Okay? And sometimes the amount of time for, like, enough variety to happen will take a couple weeks instead of the course of one meal. So this is something that I really had to unlearn. I now try and view everything neutrally and think about the energy and intention behind it. Is there control behind it or is it an offering? Like, I'm trying to do some novelty and this helps my executive functioning to organize the bento box. So thinking about also the rhythms of how your child eats and not worrying so much if, like, you know, they just wanna eat, like, mandarin oranges for lunch and dinner, but the next day they're having, like, you know, some pasta and, you know, peanut butter toast and then they have an apple and a hamburger.

[00:47:37] So even the amounts can be varied day to day. And and some of the research in the Love Me, Feed Me book shows that, which made me feel so much better. Okay? So I am gonna wrap this up. I hope these 10 misconceptions and the new way to think about it is helpful for you. When I was looking at a little bit of the research before recording this podcast and looking at the citations in the book that I'm recommending, I saw that eighty percent of developmentally delayed children present with some form of feeding disorder. So this is incredibly important, I think, to understand the variety of ways that neurodivergence can impact eating. And for PDA children and teens, we might be missing the perception of threat around autonomy and equality as the root cause and potentially part of the solution when other approaches or methodologies are not working. So I'd love to hear from you if this is helpful. Let me know if it resonated. And our next podcast episode in the feeding, eating, and pathological demand avoidance series will be your guys' favorite practical tips for how to actually accommodate a PDA child or teen who has restrictive eating. Alright, everyone. I'll see you next week. Thanks for being here. Bye.

Topics Covered

PDA and eating

Pathological Demand Avoidance Restrictive Eating

PDA child won't eat

ARFID and PDA

PDA burnout and food autonomy and eating in PDA nervous system

SOS feeding protocol

PDA behavioral approaches to feeding backfire

Family meals and neurodivergent children

Sugar and PDA children

Sensory feeding therapy PDA

PDA and anorexia

Cumulative nervous system stress responsive feeding

Pervasive Drive for Autonomy eating