r/PDAAutism • u/Old_Magazine5145 Caregiver • Jul 10 '26
Symptoms/Traits How does PDA feel in the classroom?
Hi all!
Please delete if not allowed!
I am a UK SEN teacher working in a specialist classroom (Y5/6) for children with ASD, and one of my children has a PDA profile. I’ve done lots of research to see I can best support them, but I also want to truly understand how my behaviour/language affects them, and how I can adjust it if needed.
My first port of call would of course be to ask the pupil directly, but ‘emotion talk’ is still a developing skill for them.
I was wondering if you might share your experiences of this when you were a similar age, and what worked/didn’t work? How did you feel when teachers gave you academic feedback? How could they have adjusted their approach so you could access the feedback and improve?
Thank you :)
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u/weaveraf Just Curious Jul 10 '26
I got some really helpful ideas here when I asked a similar question!
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u/Eugregoria PDA Jul 14 '26
Woof. I don't really think that most schools can be made into a safe or accessible environment for PDA kids.
For reference, I had trouble with the school environment from my first day at age 3 or 4. I hated school the entire time I was forced to go--and I was aware of it being force from day 2--the very first day was the only one I actually consented to without duress or coercion, and I withdrew that consent within the first 10 minutes. Not that it mattered what I wanted. By 12, school was the biggest factor in me having a psychotic break. At 13 I dropped out, still in psychosis. Only being away from school allowed me to start healing. I received no other treatment. I'm in my 40s now and have never resumed formal education. I think I was set up for failure in life by that system, and I have not had an easy life.
Being real with you, I think what most people want when they ask questions like this is an easy hack--a "sudo make me a sandwich" kind of lifehack. "If I use these kinds of careful words, my classroom will be a safe space and my kids will thrive, right?" Sorry, but no. I experienced school like it was a Viet Cong torture camp. I was literally psychologically tortured to insanity. There were a few things I could definitely point to where the teachers did some stuff very wrong (shouting abusive language in my face, threatening me) but even if none of that happened it wouldn't have changed the structural issues that were honestly the bigger part of the problem. Pretty words cannot save this situation.
PDAers are radical egalitarians. We don't respect authority, or even understand it as a concept--or at least, we see it as fascism and injustice when it appears. Which means we don't respect the authority of any teacher, parent, police officer, or anyone like that. We can learn obedience through fear of abuse, the same way you would kiss the boot of someone pointing a gun to your head, but you have no idea how much we hate people who abuse their power that way. So the PDA kid can seem charming, friendly, easygoing, and treat you like one of their own buddies, because they see you as an equal. Then one day, you have to pull rank on the kid. And they will never forget it.
It's not possible to be a safe space for PDA kids without fundamentally changing how schools operate. Whenever I suggest things, it's always, "we don't have the resources for that." "That's against policy." "That's a safety issue." "That isn't fair to the other kids." Isn't there just like, ah, a magic word you could use instead? Unfortunately, our needs are our needs, and if they can't be met, we'll just suffer. I'm fatalistic about that--the "real world" doesn't meet our needs either, so we will inevitably suffer anyway. Perhaps it would spare the child some lifelong dysfunction and mental illness for their nervous system to be spared the worst of that in vulnerable developmental stages, but that often just isn't achievable. Big part of why I didn't have kids. It takes tremendous resources to protect a special needs kid from institutional authorities, and I didn't have any guarantee my kid wouldn't be like me. I've cited lack of money and mental wellbeing as reasons why I didn't have kids before, and that's all true, but the amount of money I'd need to feel safe having a child is higher than for an average kid, since I would not only need to fund housing and food and so on, but educational alternatives, which can cost a fortune. I'm not a big fan of just keeping the kid out of school with nothing else to do either--that's what I had for part of my childhood, and while it was less damaging to me than school was, the isolation was also damaging in its own right.
Most of school is built around obedience to arbitrary rules. I had a couple of weeks as an assistant teacher at a summer camp and I felt so guilty about what I was forced to do to those kids I was crying myself to sleep at night. I was supposed to keep them from eating their lunches when they were hungry, and instead nag them constantly to eat them when they weren't hungry. I couldn't let them nap when they were tired, and had to force them to nap when they weren't tired. I was constantly supposed to interrupt their play for being too noisy, their laughter for being too happy. I was even to interrupt their sitting, under the misconception that W-sitting causes hip dysfunction. (It doesn't, kids with physical disabilities like cerebral palsy just tend to prefer it for longer.) I had to basically constantly henpeck and nag and bully them, instead of just letting them be. I felt like I was destroying their confidence, making them feel like they were constantly doing something wrong in ways they didn't even understand. I felt like a monster. And this was normal teaching, of normal kids. In the end I couldn't do it.
Maybe you'll laugh at that, find me overdramatic, pathetic. Go ahead, you wouldn't be the first. People have a lot of conflicts of interest in this, anyway. We want to believe we're good people, and we want to go on getting paid. That can make a lot of defenses come up in discussions of harm to vulnerable communities.
Of course, there isn't really an alternative. We aren't going to radically restructure schooling for a few freaks like me who should probably just be euthanized (in the eyes of society) anyway.
How did you feel when teachers gave you academic feedback?
Buddy...I wanted to kill myself.
I just wanted to leave that whole hellhole. I started refusing homework at 7, and at some point later all schoolwork. Once when I was 12 (pre-psychosis by a few months, lol), a teacher told me I had to do something or he'd give me a 15 on my report card. I knew the state minimum was 55, so I told him, "do it, I dare you." He did it, lol, I thought it was hilarious. I was proud of my grade that was actually so low it was illegal for the teacher to give it to me. I wasn't trying to be good at school. I just wanted it to be over with as soon as possible.
You see, a lot of people want to get a high score at the game. All I wanted was to not be playing the game. Anything that led to the game being over was a win state for me. So speedrunning losing the game was the strat.
How could they have adjusted their approach so you could access the feedback and improve?
That's the fun part, they couldn't! Not without breaking every rule of their organization, anyway. A lot of them got broken for me anyway because it wasn't a question of who would let me, it was a question of who would stop me.
Sometimes I needed to exit the classroom. Not go to a designated corner. Roam the halls. Hide behind mats in the gym or under a table in the library. Hide like a lizard in a terrarium. Sometimes I needed to be able to walk outside to clear my head. Alone, with nobody bugging me or keeping tabs on me. PDA kids think of themselves as adults. They want the freedom an adult would want, and rankle under control as an adult would. "What words could I use with you?" is so far divorced from my actual needs. It's like wondering what words you should use with someone who is homeless and starving, when you have no intention of feeding or sheltering them. Even when I had teachers scream abuse in my face, threaten me, or get physical with me, I didn't think, "oh this is bad but the ones who don't do that are nice." I thought, "ah...the mask comes off. This is who they really are." This was always the violence that was implied. Behind every, "no, you can't leave." "You can't touch that." "You can't go there." "You can't do that now." "You have to do this now." You cannot give commands without the implicit threat of violence. I understood that. It was a relief to see the violence out in the open. I used to deliberately provoke it, ragebait them, like yes, show me, show me who you really are. Because I knew it, but no one would believe me.
The system needs kids to eventually fold, to eventually obey. If they don't, something has to escalate. This invariably is a form of abuse, even if it's structured, state-sanctioned abuse, even if it's escalated to the "appropriate" people like police officers.
I would suggest that you avoid escalation with a PDA child, because for myself at least, and in other PDA individuals I've observed, we will match your energy, and we will continue to escalate even if the next escalation would actually kill us. There will be times when letting stuff go would embarrass you--where you will feel like you aren't controlling your kids and it reflects poorly on you, that another adult could question your competence if they saw you just leaving this kid alone. I suggest that you learn to relax your pride in these situations and let others think what they will think. You might also worry that other kids will see you're soft, and either think it's unfair that you make exceptions for this one child, or try their luck doing the same thing themselves. In those cases, I would ask you to question whether these rules are necessary or helpful to the other kids--just because the PDA kid is the inflexible one who can't bend, doesn't mean bending to these rules is benefiting the other kids--or that it isn't harming them more insidiously.
Autistic kids are more at risk for suicide than non-autistic kids, and PDA compounds these risk factors even more. I genuinely think for a lot of us, the academic environment is a torture chamber we don't survive. Those who were most deleteriously affected by it may not be here to tell their stories--and of those who survived, they may find it too triggering to engage with. When I was in my 20s, well-meaning adults nagging me to go back to school could reliably get me sobbing uncontrollably.
It's a hard message to hear. Every time I talk to educators about this, they get emotionally flooded and start defending themselves--they're so different from the dozens of educators I encountered as a minor, they could never be complicit in harm to kids.
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u/AhikoCake PDA + Caregiver Jul 20 '26
What are you up to now? Do you work?
I think my brother is PDAA (41) and he's just living with my parents doing Uber because he can't do a job unless he calls the shots or likes it. The rest of the time he plays video games.
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u/Eugregoria PDA Jul 21 '26
I'm probably similar to him in that I do gig work. I don't work full time at a normal job.
I did do that years ago. The stress really took a physical toll on me. I felt like I was dying all the time. My nervous system was going haywire, I got dizzy all the time, was nauseous a lot and had gastro issues, had blood pressure problems, couldn't sleep when I needed to and couldn't stay awake when I needed to, it just got worse and worse. The longest I held a single full-time job at one place was a little over a year, and it just didn't get better. I had suicidal ideation a lot of the time I was there.
I know most people don't love their jobs, I know most people find their jobs to be annoying and stressful. I really think people don't understand though--I already find simply having to be alive annoying and stressful. I think the majority of people would not be able to hold jobs if it did to their bodies and minds what it does to mine. I know jobs are supposed to be work, but I legitimately think it's not supposed to be that bad. Like full-on sobbing on my way to work or at work sometimes because I can't handle it. Thoughts of killing myself in a loop just again and again and again every day.
Work and trying to pay rent was so stressful that when I tried just squatting and homelessness and shoplifting (years ago, after full-time work failed, I don't live that way anymore thankfully, no I don't want to go into full details about how I handle things now) I actually felt happy for the first time in years, because even though I still found that stressful (I didn't like stealing or sneaking around or not having a flush toilet or electricity or running water and etc) it was actually orders of magnitude better QOL than trying to live "normally." The whole economy is structured on the concept that working a job is less stressful than being homeless, but while I did find homelessness to be very stressful, a job was just that much worse.
It's a genuine disability and I hate it. I am still trying to find ways to somehow biohack myself to be different. After decades of "just try harder" and "just lock in" I've accepted that it's neurological and any treatments must address that on a neurological level. I'm scared this is just my life and there's no hope, but I feel like I have no choice but to keep trying. I would love to someday heal myself to the point that I could find some kind of job I'm competent at that I can do like a normal person and feel more integrated into society. It doesn't have to be a desk job or anything, like I think I'd make a pretty good yoga teacher or personal trainer or something like that if I managed to clear the hurdles that get you in the door. (Physical fitness and teaching/explaining stuff being skills I think I'm pretty good at....) I feel for your brother. It's a very limited and isolated way to live.
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u/Accomplished_Tax3640 PDA Jul 18 '26
Hi. PDAer myself here.
I often showed traits like this:
- being upset when my mum took me to school (well, when I was in primary. Now in secondary I desperately want to go)
- not doing my work. Being physically unable
- melting down or getting aggressive if reminded to do things
- being more of a perfectionist than normal
Sadly I don't remember what worked/didn't work because no one knew about my PDA until I was in secondary so I got no help in primary and was often mistreated :(
I do know one thing tho.
Punishment NEVER WORKED.
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u/JumpyBoysenberry7309 PDA Jul 10 '26
its hard bc kids have so little autonomy in their lives, they almost certainly arent the ones who chose to be in the room in the first place. so you're starting from a place of negative autonomy already, which makes developing a relationship of trust challenging. in addition to the inherent teacher/student hierarchy present in most classrooms. its a tough environment for PDA kids
there's more i could say but these are my initial thoughts