At Peace Parents Podcast

What does a year of applying the PDA lens actually look like in a real family? Justin joined the Paradigm Shift Program in the summer of 2025 and is back a year later to share what shifted, what is still hard, and what he has learned along the way.
Justin is a father of two, works in cybersecurity, and lives in Ohio. His 13-year-old PDA son spent years in a specialized school before school refusal led the family to unschooling. In this episode Justin shares how he tracks his son's indicators using an app he built himself, how he navigated the screen time question through the 4S Framework, and the creative accommodation strategies - including fart pills! - that have made daily life genuinely more workable.
Key Takeaways

How Justin Found PDA and What the First Year of Applying It Looked Like | 00:01:35 Justin first encountered PDA through social media, and it was a video about equalizing after school that made things click. Before that, the best explanation he had for his son was that he was a very independent kid who could not take no for an answer. Years of consequences and putting a foot down made things worse, and his son eventually hit burnout. What changed for him after the Paradigm Shift Program was not one dramatic shift but a series of small parenting changes: putting shoes on for his son instead of asking, using declarative language, doing the fart pill game twice a day instead of twice-daily battles over medication.

Tracking Indicators With a Custom App: What the Data Showed | 00:17:09 Justin built his own app to track his son's indicators every day, including activation levels, swearing, connection signals like sitting on his lap or info dumping, and accommodations like safe nervous system presence. One pattern he identified through tracking was that loose teeth reliably raised his son's baseline activation, something he would not have connected without the data. He shares the tracking log with his son's therapist as a way of showing progress that is otherwise hard to describe. The trend line on panic attack and meltdown frequency, intensity, and duration over twelve months - all of which have improved - is the clearest evidence for him that the approach is working.

Screens, Safety, and the 4S Framework | 00:26:06 Working in cybersecurity made screens a particularly fraught topic. Justin researched parental monitoring tools and now uses one called Qustodio, which applies consistent limits across all devices and sends alerts for concerning language in Roblox chats. What shifted was not removing screen time but understanding it through the 4S Framework: his son's Roblox game development is simultaneously a screen, a special interest, and a social connection tool. Giving him more regulated access while monitoring content allowed the relationship with screens to become a genuine strength rather than a daily battleground.

The Fart Pills and the Scrub Daddy shower: Creativity After a Year of Practice | 00:14:52 Two examples illustrate what a year of accommodation practice can look like. His son's twice-daily medication had become a twice-daily fight until Justin gamified it: the pills became fart pills, his son plays a capybara hiding in a cave, and taking the pills makes the farts weapon-level. The battle dissolved. For showering, Justin told his son's Scrub Daddy sponge incorrectly that you put shampoo in dry hair and get in the shower with clothes on, then let his son correct and teach the right way. His son was in the shower within five minutes. Both strategies layer humor, equality, play, and novelty together, which Justin describes as exhausting but very effective improv.

Advice for Parents Who Are Where Justin Was a Year Ago | 00:38:12 Justin's advice is not to try to do everything at once. When he looked at the full picture of constraints, accommodations, and nuance, it felt impossible. What helped was making one small change, watching how it landed, and building from there. Putting shoes on for his son instead of asking him to put them on was a small change with an immediate impact. Learning declarative language and noticing that his son would respond to statements when he would not respond to ten direct questions was another. He also names having a larger purpose, wanting the best outcome for his son, as what helped him stay with the approach even when it was hard.

Relevant Resources

Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where Justin developed the tools and frameworks he describes applying across the past year, including cost-benefit decision making, the 4S Framework, and creative accommodation strategies.
Understanding PDA — Free class where I teach the nervous system disability framework, the four S framework, and the foundational concepts Justin describes applying throughout this episode.
Tracking Progress — Free class on the three dimensions I teach parents to track: nervous system activation, basic needs access, and connection and engagement, all of which Justin built into his custom app.
School, Screens and Siblings — Free class directly relevant to Justin's experience navigating school refusal, unschooling, and the screen time question through a cost-benefit lens.
Mentioned in this episode:
Free Live Workshop
I'm offering a free live workshop this month: "Supporting your PDA child or teen through burnout without breaking yourself in the process."
Free Live Workshop Registration

When I first started learning about PDA six years ago, so much of what I encountered was focused on behavior. What I was not seeing discussed was something I kept observing in my own family, and have since seen in thousands of families I have worked with: the way cumulative nervous system activation can disable a child or teen from accessing the things they need to stay alive.
In this episode, an excerpt from the Understanding PDA Masterclass, I walk through what basic needs struggles actually look like across five domains: toileting, sleep, hygiene, eating, and safety. I share why I conceptualize PDA as a nervous system disability, how the survival drive for autonomy can override other survival instincts, and why paradoxically the most effective intervention for a basic needs struggle is often to stop focusing on it directly.
Key Takeaways

Why PDA May Be a Nervous System Disability, Not a Behavioral Disorder | 00:00:00 I define PDA as a survival drive for autonomy and equality that consistently overrides other survival instincts, including the instinct to eat, sleep, stay safe, maintain hygiene, and use the bathroom. This is what makes it distinct from other neurotypes and what led me to begin theorizing it as a nervous system disability. This also makes it distinct from "a behavioral problem". The challenges our children face are physiological, and this is part of what I am researching with the University of Michigan.

The Fire, the Traffic, and the River: When Autonomy Overrides Safety in the Moment | 00:03:30 On a night of camping when my son was four and a half, he kept moving toward the campfire the more we told him to stay back, to the point where I had to physically restrain him from running into it. I have heard similar accounts from families of children running toward oncoming traffic or accelerating into a lake when told to move away. These are extreme examples that I share to show how the survival drive for autonomy can override the instinct to stay safe in real time. They are not defiance. They are a nervous system response that has overridden the instinct that should have protected the child.

Five Basic Needs and What Struggles Can Look Like | 00:06:32 Toileting struggles can include regression to diapers, UTIs from withholding, accidents, and refusing to use the toilet. Sleep struggles can include a non-twenty-four-hour cycle, intensifying bedtime resistance, and needing to co-sleep at eleven or twelve years old with no prior history of it. Hygiene can include refusing tooth brushing, bathing, nail cutting, or hair cuts. Eating can present as extreme restriction, similar to ARFID but without the body image component, or as compulsive eating. Safety struggles can range from running toward traffic or fire to self-harm, suicidal ideation, or harming others. Two PDA children can have the same root cause and look dramatically different across all five domains.

The Paradox: Focusing on the Basic Need Often Makes It Worse | 00:11:09 When my son stopped eating, every instinct told me to find strategies to make him eat. I went to feeding therapy. I tried every approach in the moment. But for a PDA child, focusing attention and gentle pressure on eating registers as a loss of autonomy and can intensify the avoidance. What I have seen across thousands of families is that bringing down cumulative nervous system activation across all domains, not in the moment of the basic need struggle, is what allows the control to release and the need to become accessible again. That is the paradigm shift.

Doubt, Fluctuation, and Why Basic Needs Must Be Part of the PDA Profile | 00:09:34 Because basic needs struggles fluctuate, parents are often doubted or doubt themselves. A child may brush their teeth at the beginning of the week and refuse by Friday. They may eat one food for months and then drop it. They may have had no toileting issues and then regress at age eight. This fluctuation is a feature of the cumulative model, not evidence that the disability is inconsistent. Basic needs have largely been left out of the behavioral literature on PDA. I believe they belong at the center of the profile, because if a child cannot access safety, sleep, eating, hygiene, or toileting, their health and survival are at risk.

Relevant Resources

Understanding PDA — The free masterclass from which this episode is excerpted, covering the full nervous system disability framework and basic needs indicators described here.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout threshold at which basic needs struggles tend to intensify and become most disabling.
Tracking Progress — Free class on the three dimensions I track with families, including basic needs access as a primary indicator of whether cumulative nervous system activation is coming down.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the basic needs framework, cost-benefit decision making, and the full accommodation toolkit are taught across twelve weeks of live coaching.
Mentioned in this episode:
Free Live Workshop
I'm offering a free live workshop this month: "Supporting your PDA child or teen through burnout without breaking yourself in the process."
Free Live Workshop Registration

There is a lot of noise in the PDA space right now, and some of it is making parents doubt themselves and feel more confused rather than less. So I am re-airing this episode from May 2025 because I think it will help you feel more confident in the path you are on.
In this episode I share a story from a feeding support group that crystallized for me why PDA is a distinct experience, not one that can be folded into autism, ADHD, or anxiety strategies without losing something critical. I walk through two examples of content I have seen in the PDA space that would have sent me spiraling five years ago, and I close with a Buddhist concept called the near neighbor enemy that gave me the strength to say something I know is controversial.
Key Takeaways

The Support Group Story and What It Clarified | 00:01:39 Shortly after moving to Michigan, my husband and I organized a babysitter and drove to a support group for families of Autistic children with feeding challenges. All the other children played in another room with their special interests. One non-speaking child sat calmly with a car magazine. Others played with trains and Legos while their parents talked. I wept on the way home, because I knew with certainty there was no version of that scenario that was possible for my son. He could not have gotten in the car. If he had come, he would have needed undivided attention the entire time and any lapse would have produced a meltdown or destruction of the other children's things. The behavioral feeding therapy that had worked beautifully for these families would have produced panic attacks for mine.


PDA Becoming Trendy and What That Is Costing Families | 00:10:56 As PDA awareness has grown, I have noticed content that lumps PDA strategies in with ADHD or Autism approaches and presents them as interchangeable. Two examples I have seen recently: correcting behavior an hour after a meltdown once a child is regulated, and movement breaks every few minutes to help complete homework. Both of these may work beautifully for ADHD children. But for a PDA child who is still well past their threshold of tolerance, going back an hour later to discuss the behavior will most likely push them straight back into activation. A parent trying either of these strategies with a PDA child and seeing them fail is likely to conclude they are doing it wrong, when the issue is not implementation but neurotype fit.


PDA Is Not an Anxiety-Driven Need for Control | 00:16:36 When PDA gets folded into the anxiety frame, it leads to recommendations about building frustration tolerance and increasing exposure. That is often exactly the right approach for anxious children. I have panic disorder myself and have worked hard on my own exposure and frustration tolerance. But PDA is not anxiety. It is a survival drive for autonomy rooted in the way the nervous system perceives safety and threat, and it can disable access to basic needs in a way that anxiety alone typically does not. Treating them as equivalent leads families toward strategies that do not fit and away from the ones that do.


The Near Neighbor Enemy: Why Sameness Undermines Compassion | 00:18:14 A concept from Buddhist practice helped me find the courage to say something I knew was controversial. A near neighbor enemy is something that resembles a value but undermines it. The near neighbor of love is control. The near neighbor of fierce compassion is sameness, the idea that calling different things the same is itself a form of compassion. When we call PDA the same as Autism, ADHD, or anxiety in the name of inclusion, we erase the specific logic, the lived experience, and the sense of belonging that PDA families need and deserve. Difference is not division. It is precision.


Why This Distinction Has Brought Peace to Thousands of Families | 00:19:31 The premise of my work is that PDA is a distinct neurotype with its own nervous system logic and its own approach to accommodation. That premise, not a technique or a strategy, is what has shifted things for my family and for the thousands of families I have worked with. When a parent finally has the right logic for their child's brain, they stop blaming themselves for strategies that were never going to work. They stop doubting their observations. And they start making decisions that actually fit the situation they are in.

Relevant Resources

Understanding PDA — Free class where I teach the nervous system disability framework and the unique logic of the PDA nervous system that distinguishes it from autism, ADHD, and anxiety.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout period I describe, and why strategies designed for other neurotypes can deepen rather than relieve burnout in PDA children.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the distinct logic of the PDA nervous system is practiced as an embodied skill across twelve weeks, with live coaching and a community of families who share the same experience.
Mentioned in this episode:
Free Live Workshop
I'm offering a free live workshop this month: "Supporting your PDA child or teen through burnout without breaking yourself in the process."
Free Live Workshop Registration

Seven years ago I created a huge spreadsheet trying to find the cause of my son's meltdowns. How many hours outside, how many minutes on screens, how many calories eaten, and much much more. But I couldn't find a consistent pattern. Something that triggered him one day might be barely noticed another. The problem was, my logic was wrong.
In this episode, an excerpt from our free Understanding PDA Masterclass, I explain why the standard ABC framework of antecedent, behavior, consequence fails for PDA children and introduce the cumulative nervous system activation model: how drops build in the bucket over weeks, months, and years toward a tipping point, and why what you do this week may determine whether your child can brush their teeth three weeks from now.
Key Takeaways

Why the Spreadsheet Did Not Work | 00:00:00 When my son went into burnout, I tracked everything: screen time, calories, sleep, fresh air, meltdown frequency. I was looking for the antecedent - the thing that happened right before the blowup - that would tell me the cause. What I now know is the reason the spreadsheet could not find the pattern is that the logic of the PDA nervous system is not event-based. It is cumulative. The antecedent is not the primary cause. It is the tipping point.

The ABC Framework and Why It Does Not Apply to PDA | 00:01:45 The ABC framework - antecedent, behavior, consequence - is the foundation of most behavioral approaches in schools, therapy, and parenting. For some neurodivergent children it can be useful: the fluorescent lights went on, the meltdown followed, the consequence was leaving the room. For PDA children, the same surface-level event can produce completely different responses on different days, because the behavior is not caused by that event in isolation. It is caused by the cumulative level of nervous system activation that has been building in the system toward a threshold of tolerance over days, weeks, months, and in some cases years.

TDrops in the Bucket Toward a Threshold | 00:03:19 I use a glass of water to illustrate the threshold of tolerance: the point at which cumulative nervous system activation tips past the window and begins to disable basic needs. Every subconsciously perceived loss of autonomy or equality is a drop. With a PDA child, we may have fifteen drops before we have even finished breakfast. Those drops build continuously, which is why burnout can feel sudden, especially for internalized PDA teens who masked successfully for years before suddenly being unable to leave their room. My son's escalation into burnout felt like an autistic regression because it was so rapid, but looking back, the drops had been building in the system for years without anyone seeing it.

Why Behavior Fluctuates and Why That Makes It Hard to Trust the Disability Framework | 00:09:40 A PDA child may be able to brush their teeth at the beginning of the week but not by Friday. My older son's test scores drop between the start of the school year and the end, not because he has lost the skill or knowledge but because cumulative activation has made it harder to access. When things fluctuate like this, parents can doubt whether what they are seeing is really a disability, because the inconsistency does not match how we think disabilities look. This fluctuation is actually a feature of the cumulative model: accommodation brings activation down, and the child moves away from their threshold. Activation builds it back up.

Two Out of Three Is Enough | 00:12:58 You do not have to accommodate perfectly for this model to work. Every accommodation removes a drop from the bucket. Every activation adds one. If your co-parent is not yet on board, your accommodations are still helping, just more slowly. If your child is in a school that is adding drops while you remove them at home, progress will be slower but not impossible. The practical implication is that what you do this week, this month, in the next three weeks, is directly connected to what you will see in basic needs access, nervous system reactivity, and connection and engagement a month from now.

Relevant Resources

Understanding PDA — The free masterclass from which this episode is excerpted, covering the full nervous system disability framework including the cumulative activation model and threshold of tolerance described here.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout threshold I describe, including why escalation into burnout can feel sudden even when the activation has been building for years.
Tracking Progress — Free class on how to track the three dimensions that reflect cumulative nervous system activation over time: nervous system reactivity, basic needs access, and connection and engagement.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the cumulative activation model is applied practically, with live coaching to help parents identify where drops are being added and removed in their specific family system
Mentioned in this episode:
Free Live Workshop
I'm offering a free live workshop this month: "Supporting your PDA child or teen through burnout without breaking yourself in the process."
Free Live Workshop Registration

When autonomy is low, meaning has to be high. That is what I learned during the two years I spent as a full-time caregiver for my older son, isolated in our home, and putting myself physically between him and his eighteen-month-old brother when things got bad.
In this episode I share how I found a sustaining "why" during that period, and how other families I have worked with have found theirs. I also introduce a practical tool I call the "hang your hat on the day" goal: a way of redirecting from goals that depend on another person's behavior to goals that are entirely within your own control, so that you can give yourself genuine credit for what you are doing every single day.

Key Takeaways

When Autonomy Is Low, Meaning Has to Be High | 00:00:00 Parenting a PDA child or teen introduces an almost constant rock-and-a-hard-place dynamic: every choice has a cost, and there is no option that gives you genuine autonomy without a trade-off. When you want to go to the gym, there is a cost when you come back. When your partner takes over for a few hours, there is a cost to their energy level. That sustained low autonomy is depleting in a way most people around us will never understand, and what I have found, from my own experience and across the families I work with, is that meaning is the variable that makes it sustainable. We need a "why" that gets us through the day.


How I Found My "Why" in the Basement | 00:01:46 I was in the basement of our home in Michigan, putting myself between my older and younger sons when things got violent, feeling my own violent rage moving through me that I want to name as normal rather than shameful. My older son needed constant undivided attention and dopamine or he would go after his brother, and I was isolated, sensory overwhelmed, and out of resources. I had been reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and had a seed planted about the idea that a clear why makes almost anything endurable. In that moment in the basement I realized: my entire doctorate had been on nonviolence and grassroots peace building and there I was, finally practicing it. Not theoretically. In my own basement. That was enough meaning to sustain me through that period.


What Other Families Have Found as Their Why | 00:06:27 The meaning does not have to be mine. Across the thousands of families I have worked with, the sustaining whys have included: healing intergenerational trauma, becoming the parent they wished they had, practicing becoming a less judgmental person, learning non-reactivity as a skill, learning about disability and neurodiversity in a way that changes how they move through the world, and healing themselves through the relationship with their child. None of these are about outcomes for the child. They are about what the parent is becoming through the practice of showing up, which is the only part any of us actually controls.


Why Goals That Depend on Your Child Will Undermine You | 00:08:29 One of the most consistent patterns I see across the families I work with, and in myself, is attaching goals to things another person has to do: my child will go back to school in the fall, my child will be independent by this age, my partner will come on board if I explain it clearly enough. When these goals drive our sense of progress, we are setting ourselves up for a particular kind of suffering, because we have no control over another person's nervous system or choices. The shift I ask parents to make is not to stop wanting those things. It is to stop basing today's measure of success on whether they happened.


The Hang Your Hat on the Day Goal | 00:10:06 This is the practical tool that helped me through the most acute period of caregiving and that I return to now in harder seasons. The hang your hat goal is the one thing within your own control that you can point to at the end of a day and say: I did that. Some days it is "I showed up more regulated than I would have a year ago." Some days it is "I stayed in the PDA lens for most of the day even though I fell back into the old pattern at bedtime." Some days it is "I brushed my teeth, I ate enough to stay alive, and I did not scream at my kids." All of these count. None of them depend on what your child did. And giving yourself genuine credit for what you did, even when no one else can see it, is one of the most sustainable things you can do for your own nervous system over the long term.


Relevant Resources

Finding Meaning — Free class where I go deeper into the meaning-making framework described in this episode, including how to identify a sustaining why that is true for your specific life and journey.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout period I describe, including the two years of intensive caregiving that led me to Viktor Frankl and the hang your hat goal.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where meaning-making, the hang your hat goal, and the full accommodation framework are practiced together across twelve weeks with live coaching and a community of families in the same season.
Mentioned in this episode:
Free Live Workshop
I'm offering a free live workshop this month: "Supporting your PDA child or teen through burnout without breaking yourself in the process."
Free Live Workshop Registration