Caroline Foran

I don't know what it is.

Like, we've been very lucky.

Maybe it's that we're just so focused on him.

But I feel very grateful that from what I hear, it can be very hard when PDA is a hard thing to wrap your head around.

And the approach that it requires, the way to parent a PDA child is not easy.

Like, it requires a real, like, throwing out the rule book.

And that's hard for some people to do who were raised a certain way, who believe kids should be parented a certain way, regardless of diagnosis.

Yeah, and that's what you're dealing with all the time.

But I'm so lucky that through the worst of it, my husband and I have always been on the same page completely.

Like there's never been anything where he's like, oh, I don't know.

Like we both know it so intimately now.

We've been... We know the ramifications of doing it the way we've been told to do it for years.

And we're like, no.

So we are like...

so strong in terms of him but yeah of course it's hard like we don't we don't get to have a date night but do you get to go on holidays can you take him abroad or yeah does he play with other kids at all so we'd have play dates like where like friends of mine with their kids would come over but like I would be massively involved in the play so he would need me to kind of facilitate that play otherwise he would just be on top of me so people would say oh we come over the kids can play and we can have a cup of tea I'm like

That won't happen.

Because another thing with PDAs, if the child doesn't feel like they have your focus or attention, that can really activate their sense of, I don't feel safe here.

So like if we bump into people in the park and he wasn't expecting it and it wasn't planned and the grown-up starts chatting to me...

He can tolerate it maybe on a good day, but some days it's literally like a hand over the mouth being like, stop talking.

Hand over your mouth.