(Konferencja #PDA, Perth, 11 listopada 2025)
Amanda Diekman is the author of Low-Demand Parenting, the mother of neurodivergent children, and an autistic adult herself. She grounded her talk in lived experience, but also situated it within research on autonomy, safety, and regulation.
She stressed that this is not only about PDA - research shows that all people have a fundamental need for autonomy, and that losing it is one of the fastest ways to worsen mental health.
Starting point
She began with a story from several years ago. Her six-year-old child was in a state of deep dysregulation: not eating, not speaking, and not leaving the room without enormous stress. The school system was unable to respond to the child’s needs. Classical parenting strategies failed. The family was in crisis.
Out of that situation, her concept emerged.
What is PDA in her view?
PDA is a different neurobiological way of moving through the world, in which autonomy functions like a primary survival drive. For some people, this drive may override other mechanisms connected to survival.
The most important sentence she kept repeating was:
“It’s a can’t, not a won’t.”
A demand is anything that, in a given moment, is “too hard” and triggers a threat response in the nervous system. It is not only a command. It can also be a question, time pressure, an expectation, a transition to another activity, or even the need to eat or sleep under pressure.
Survival responses
Diekman describes four classic threat-system responses:
1. Fight
Open opposition, aggression, resistance. From the outside, it looks like disobedience. In her framing, it is a biological defense against loss of autonomy.
2. Flight
Withdrawal, avoidance. Often misread as “anxiety that needs to be pushed through.” She emphasizes that adding pressure in such a state increases threat rather than reducing it.
3. Freeze
Mental and physical shutdown. Shallower breathing, bodily tension, loss of speech or access to skills. Diekman describes it as dissociation: “the lights are on, but nobody is home.” She quotes: “my legs don’t work.” This is not an excuse. In this state, the body may genuinely be unable to move.
4. Fawn
Appeasing the threat through perfect compliance. Doing everything exactly as another person expects. From the outside, it can look like perfectionism. Diekman says this is the response she recognizes most in herself. Long term, it leads to loss of contact with one’s own needs.
Diekman also makes another point very clearly: behaviour is not a marker of “good” or “bad.” In her view, “All behaviours make sense.” Every behaviour makes sense in the context of the person’s brain, experience, and history.
In her framing, when a demand is experienced as a threat to autonomy, survival responses are activated. For a person with PDA, a demand may be experienced as an existential threat. She uses the phrases:
“It feels like you’re going to die.”
“If I go along with this demand, I will cease to exist.”
This is not rhetorical metaphor. It is a description of subjective experience. The organism reacts like a hunted animal, as if there were no safe place in the world. If we look at it this way, it stops being a matter of parenting. It becomes a matter of survival.
Eating and sleep as the clearest example
I found the section on eating and sleep especially important, because it shows the mechanism in its purest form. Diekman develops this very concretely.
She says directly: if you pressure a person with PDA to eat, you may push them into starving themselves. Not because they are manipulating. Because pressure triggers a threat response.
If you say, “you must sleep at 9 p.m.,” the very imposition of a time can make the body physically unable to fall asleep. Sleep requires safety. Pressure activates vigilance.
This is can’t, not won’t.
Her description suggests that when pressure itself triggers survival mode, adding more control can increase tension rather than lower it. In my interpretation, this means that if the context itself strongly activates the nervous system, then working only through consequences, without changing the conditions, may maintain the stress.
Low-demand parenting
Low-demand is a practice of radical acceptance. This means recognizing that there is nothing wrong with the way a child’s body and brain are wired - “there is nothing wrong with the way your brain is wired.”
Instead of expecting the child to change in order to fit the world, the environment is what needs to shift.
Diekman also cites research showing that the most supportive learning environments are those in which every member of the community feels safe. Development does not happen in survival mode.
Low-demand does not mean “giving up everything.” It means reducing what the body registers as threat.
In practice, as Diekman explains, this means:
- noticing what registers in the body as a threat,
- figuring out ways to let those demands go,
- shifting the environment rather than expecting the child to change to fit the world,
- concrete accommodations such as putting shoes on an eight-year-old or creating an elaborate sleep routine for a teenager.
Diekman uses a very strong metaphor and speaks about accommodation. Just as we give glasses to a person with impaired vision. Just as we provide a wheelchair to a person who cannot walk.
We do not say: “try harder to see.”
We do not say: “practice walking more.”
Changing the environment is not spoiling. It is adapting to the way someone’s nervous system works.
Systemic and political dimension
Near the end of the talk, a question appears:
“How are these kids supposed to survive in the real world?”
Amanda says: that is a real question. Especially for people living on the underside of power in marginalized communities. She acknowledges her own privilege as a white, privileged American woman and says the future must be intersectional.
This is not only a parenting model. It is a proposal for changing power relations from power-over to collaboration.
And then comes a sentence that lands like a manifesto:
“PDAs deserve to live.”
If we continue to build systems on coercion, shame, and control, some of these people will not make it safely into adulthood.
What stays with me
This talk felt deeply existential to me, and because of that, difficult. It was not a discussion about “gentler parenting.” It was a discussion about survival - and about whether we are ready to change the environment instead of trying to “fix” the child.