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At Peace Parents Podcast

At Peace Parents Podcast

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 The At Peace Parents Podcast is your source for all things related to understanding, supporting, accommodating, and advocating for your demand avoidant or PDA child. It will completely transform the way you think about your PDA child's brain, behavior, and parenting, and support you in finding your path to more peace and stability in the home. For more information see www.atpeaceparents.com© 2023 At Peace Parents Podcast Parenting & Families Relationships
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  • Ten Tips for Navigating the Holidays With a Pathologically Demand Avoidant Child or Teen With Dr. Alex Klein | Ep. 188

    Ten Tips for Navigating the Holidays With a Pathologically Demand Avoidant Child or Teen With Dr. Alex Klein | Ep. 188
    10 Nov 2026
    The stretch from Halloween through the new year can feel like what my husband and I call the gauntlet. More expectations, more family, more activation. And the holidays can also bring a particular kind of grief: the gap between what you imagined and what is actually possible right now.In this episode I am joined by Dr. Alex Klein, clinical psychologist, to share ten practical tips for getting through the holiday season with a PDA child or teen. We cover how to lower the demand on yourself first, why processing your own grief is a precursor to actually enjoying a modified holiday, how to plan an out before you need one, and how to talk to family ahead of time so your accommodations do not fall apart under social pressure.We also talk about traditions, religious practices, scripts to prevent the auto-yes, monitoring your child’s social battery, and what it looks like to find the gray when black and white thinking takes over in burnout. These tips are drawn from our own lived experience and from years of working alongside families who are living these challenges.Key TakeawaysLower the Demand on Yourself First, Before You Lower It for Your Child | 00:04:23 One of the most useful things I did for our holiday season was give myself permission, during the pandemic, to have a low demand Thanksgiving: a couple of dishes, a table set for kids who could come or not, and potato chips as a totally valid holiday meal. That experience taught me something I could not have learned any other way. The more I let go of what the holiday was supposed to look like for me, the less activation leaked into the room for my kids. If you are walking into the holidays with a fixed picture of what has to happen, that picture may be one of the largest sources of demand in the environment.Processing Your Grief About the Holidays Is Not Anti-Neurodiversity Affirming | 00:07:32 Dr. Klein and I talked about this directly: a lot of parents feel like they should not be sad or disappointed that the holiday looks different than they imagined. As if feeling those things means they are not committed to their child’s autonomy or regulation. But what I have seen, and what Dr. Klein has observed in his work with families, is the opposite. Making room for your own feelings is what allows you to show up with more flexibility, not less.Have an Out Before You Need One, Even If Your Child Does Not Know About It | 00:15:06 Dr. Klein’s tip about planning an out applies whether your child can participate in the planning or not. For years, my older son could not engage in collaborative problem solving around the holidays. He would shut the conversation down before it started. So my husband and I game-theorized on our own: if this happens, we do this. If that happens, we leave. And because we consistently followed through on those plans in practice, my son came to know without being told that there was always an exit. That knowledge may have made it possible for him to stay longer in situations that would otherwise have felt like a trap.Talk to Family Ahead of Time and Find Your Ally in the Room | 00:17:46 Accommodating with an audience is a different skill than accommodating at home. When we are in front of extended family, the pressure to meet everyone else’s expectations can override what we know works for our child. My tip is to identify at least one person before the event who understands what you are doing and why, and to loop them in explicitly. This might mean telling your sister that your child may eat his chocolate dessert before the turkey is served, or asking someone you trust to help you hold the boundary if you feel yourself starting to cave. You do not need the whole room to understand PDA. You may only need one person.Find the Gray When Burnout Makes Everything Feel Like Black or White | 00:41:30 When a child is in burnout, it can feel like the only two options are full participation or nothing at all. That is the black and white thinking that fear produces. What I have learned, through years of doing this with both my sons, is that there is almost always a gray option. Last year, when my younger son could not leave the house, my husband and I did shifts at Thanksgiving so we could each be there for part of it. When William could not go cut down the Christmas tree, the tree still came home. He smelled the pine needles. He watched us decorate. He was part of it in the way he could be. That is not settling. That is finding the version of the tradition that is actually available right now.Relevant Resources Paradigm Shift Program My signature program where the holiday navigation frameworks discussed in this episode, including demand lowering, connection tracking, and working with extended family, are practiced as daily skills with live coaching support.Dr. Alex Klein is a clinical psychologist whose work with PDA families informs the tips and frameworks shared in this episode.Mentioned in this episode:Free Live WorkshopI'm offering a ...
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  • What Parents of Pathologically Demand Avoidant Children and Teens Need to Know About Screens | Ep. 187

    What Parents of Pathologically Demand Avoidant Children and Teens Need to Know About Screens | Ep. 187
    3 Nov 2026
    If you are worried about how much your PDA child is on screens, this episode is for you. Not because I am going to tell you screens are fine and to stop worrying. But because I want to give you a framework for understanding what is actually driving the screen use, so you can make decisions from logic rather than fear.In this episode I walk through the places parents most commonly get stuck around screens: treating them as a moral issue, misreading the causality, not understanding the 4-S framework for what regulates a PDA nervous system, and interpreting screen time as a sign that connection has broken down. I also share what happened in my own home, twice, when I let go of screen limits and what I have seen across thousands of families who have done the same.This is not a permission slip to do nothing. It is an invitation to interrogate what you are actually seeing, what is driving it, and what trade-offs you are making when you push against it.Key TakeawaysScreens Are Not Causing Burnout. Burnout Is Driving the Screen Use. | 00:10:45 One of the most common patterns I see is a parent who believes screens are making their child worse, when what is actually happening is that a child already in burnout is seeking out one of the few things that helps their nervous system feel regulated. Screens offer autonomy, sensory intensity, dopamine, and freedom from social demand. For a PDA child in deep burnout, those are not entertainment. They are survival. Removing screens without addressing the underlying nervous system activation does not resolve the burnout. For many families, it makes the daily situation harder and the child’s access to regulation narrower.The 4-S Framework: What Actually Regulates a PDA Nervous System | 00:12:21 There are four states or scenarios that can be regulating for a PDA nervous system: someone else's safe nervous system, meaning one-on-one undivided attention from a co-regulating adult; screens; sensory-intense experiences with novelty and/or dopamine; and engagement in a special interest. In deep burnout, the third and fourth options may not be accessible at all. That often leaves only two: your nervous system and a screen. When parents remove the screen without being available as a full co-regulator, they are not giving their child more regulation. They are taking away the one remaining source of felt safety their child can access independently.Timelines Are Long and Progress Does Not Look the Way We Expect | 00:14:30 My younger son spent eighty-six days leaving his room only to use the bathroom. He was on screens from the moment he woke up until he went to sleep. And he was seven. For a teenager who has been accumulating nervous system activation for years, the timeline for coming out of burnout can be longer. That does not mean there is no progress during that time. It means the progress we are tracking is not screen time. It is connection indicators: parallel play, info dumping, initiating conversation, physical affection. Screen time is not one of our indicators, and treating it as one will make the process harder for you and for your child.Screen Use in Burnout Can Look Like Connection if You Know What to Track | 00:15:30 Many parents tell me their child is not connecting with them because their child is on a screen. But connection for a PDA child does not always look like reciprocal conversation or joint attention. It can look like wanting you in the room while they play. It can look like info dumping about a game. It can look like asking you to watch them. My younger son’s primary form of connection during his deepest burnout was playing Minecraft with his father, where he would destroy his father’s structures and avatar over and over. That was equalizing. That was also connection. When we hold onto a neurotypical definition of what connection is supposed to look like, we miss the real thing that is happening.What PDAers Did Before Screens, and What That Tells Us | 00:19:03 I hear this question often: what about PDA children who grew up before the digital age? The honest answer is that they found something else. I filled entire rooms with journals as a child, recording what I saw and thought, over and over, because it regulated me. PDA adults who grew up before screens found other ways to access the same states: intense reading, repetitive drawing, music, physical movement. Screens are not creating a new drive. They are a modern container for a nervous system that has always needed a way to feel autonomous, safe, and in control of its own sensory input. Viewing that as addiction or compulsion, rather than as an adaptive response to a world that feels threatening, is a reframe worth sitting with.Relevant ResourcesParadigm Shift Program My signature program where the frameworks discussed in this episode, including the 4-S framework, connection tracking, and burnout recovery timelines, are taught and practiced with live coaching support.Mentioned in this episode:Free ...
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    21 dk.
  • The Neuroscience Behind Pathological Demand Avoidance With Dr. Amy Arnsten | Ep. 186

    The Neuroscience Behind Pathological Demand Avoidance With Dr. Amy Arnsten | Ep. 186
    27 Oct 2026
    What is actually happening in the brain and nervous system of a PDA child when they are in a threat state? In this episode I sit down with Dr. Amy Arnsten, a neuroscientist at Yale, to get the most scientifically grounded answer I have ever had to that question.We talk about the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala: what they do, how stress flips the brain from thoughtful and regulated to reactive and survival-focused, and why that flip can happen so rapidly. Dr. Arnsten also explains the role of dopamine and norepinephrine under stress, how cortisol amplifies those pathways, and why perceived control, not actual control, is what determines whether the prefrontal cortex stays online.For those of us who have watched our children go through exposure-based treatments that seemed to make things worse rather than better, Dr. Arnsten offers a neuroscience framework for understanding sensitization and why repetition without safety can deepen threat pathways rather than extinguish them. She also explains how guanfacine works and why it may be helpful for PDA children and teens with a heightened threat response.This is one of the most validating conversations I have recorded. I hope it gives you more compassion, more language, and a clearer picture of the biology underneath what you are living.Key Takeaways The Prefrontal Cortex Goes Offline Under Stress, and That Is by Design | 00:10:44 The prefrontal cortex, located behind our forehead, is the most recently evolved part of the human brain. It supports abstract thought, working memory, top-down control of attention and emotion, and the ability to calm the amygdala by signaling that we are safe. Under stress, a flood of norepinephrine and dopamine disconnects those prefrontal circuits rapidly, and the brain shifts to a more primitive, instinctive survival response. This is not a malfunction. It is a feature that has survival value. But for PDA children who may be operating from a threat baseline much of the time, that prefrontal offline state can become the default rather than the exception. Dopamine and Norepinephrine and the Prefrontal Cortex | 00:21:37 Most people know dopamine as the reward chemical. But there is a separate dopamine system that goes to the prefrontal cortex, where it functions alongside norepinephrine as a signal of salience and safety. At modest levels, under nonstress conditions, both chemicals strengthen prefrontal connections and support higher thinking. At high levels, triggered by threat, they flood the prefrontal cortex and activate receptors that disconnect it. Cortisol amplifies this effect by blocking the cellular vacuum cleaners that would normally limit how far norepinephrine and dopamine spread. This is why chronic stress does not just create bad days. Over time, it can erode the actual connections that allow for regulation, empathy, and flexible thinking. Perceived Control Protects Prefrontal Function, Even When the Control Is Not Real | 00:35:48 Research spanning decades has shown that it is not whether a person has actual control over a stressor that matters. What matters is whether they perceive that they do. In one classic study, subjects who believed they had a button to stop a loud noise performed better on cognitive tasks than those who did not, even though the button did nothing. Brain imaging studies confirm the same pattern: perceived control maintains stronger prefrontal connectivity, while the absence of perceived control weakens it. This is one of the clearest neuroscience explanations for why autonomy is not just a preference for PDA children. It may be the condition under which their thinking brain can function at all. Sensitization Explains Why Exposure-Based Approaches Can Make Things Worse | 00:43:46 When the prefrontal cortex is not functioning well, it cannot perform the extinction learning that allows us to update a threat association. In a healthy prefrontal cortex, repeated exposure to a non-threatening version of something scary teaches the amygdala to stand down. But when prefrontal circuits are weakened by stress, that learning does not happen. The amygdala may instead generalize the threat, gathering up surrounding associations until even the word for something, like school, activates the fear response. For PDA children and teens who have gone through behavioral or exposure-based treatments without improvement, this framework offers a neurological explanation for what families have observed: that more pressure under the wrong conditions may deepen the pathway rather than weaken it. Guanfacine Seeks to Send a System-Wide Safety Signal | 00:50:20 The medication guanfacine targets the alpha-2A norepinephrine receptor in the prefrontal cortex, a receptor that Dr. Arnsten describes as a signal to the brain that we are safe. When activated at modest norepinephrine levels, this receptor strengthens prefrontal connections, quiets the amygdala, and reduces activity in the stress pathways of the autonomic ...
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