Four Ways To Create Calm With Your Pathologically Demand Avoidant Child | Ep. 166

About this episode

Casey discusses the 4-S Framework developed to help manage the needs of pathologically demand avoidant children.

When he was young, it seemed like my son Cooper was almost always active and agitated. I tried everything I was told to try - bubble blowing for deep breathing, emotion naming, zones of regulation, nature walks with candy as incentives - but nothing worked. Maybe the activity would occupy him once, but then he'd be agitated all over again afterwards. I thought I must be going it wrong, or just a bad mom. What I know now is that I wasn't and I'm not - and neither are you. The logic underneath those approaches just does not match how a pathologically demand avoidant nervous system actually works. In this episode I discuss the 4-S Framework I developed to help my PDA son - and the children of the many families I was working with - stay regulated. The four S's are: safe nervous system, sensory intense experience with novelty and dopamine, screens, and special interests. I talk through what each one means for a PDA brain specifically, why children in burnout can often only access some of the four, and how to use this framework to structure unstructured time so it feels less like chaos and more like a plan. Key Takeaways Why the Approaches I Was Given Kept Making Things Worse |…

People in this episode

Host: Casey

Topics covered

• parenting
• demand avoidance
• child regulation
• PDA
• calm strategies

Keywords

• PDA
• demand avoidant child
• regulation strategies
• calm techniques
• parenting advice

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