PDA in Adulthood: What It's Really Like and What Helps
Most of what's written about PDA is about children. This piece is for adults. Written by two people who live it, Laetitia (parent, PDAer, and founder of Understanding Zoe) and Caitlin (neuroaffirming mental health social worker and PDAer), it covers what demand avoidance actually feels like from the inside, why wanting to do something and being able to start it aren't the same thing, and why the usual advice to just break it into steps or build a routine often backfires. There are honest accounts of the invisible labour of being a PDA adult and parenting a PDA child, plus the shifts that genuinely help: choice over instruction, invitation over expectation, and lowering the demand without lowering the goal. If you recognise yourself here, you're not broken. You may simply be carrying more demands than the people around you can see.