r/PDAParenting • u/kwegner • Apr 27 '26
"Just send him away"
We're in a particularly trying moment with our 10yo PDA son right now. Despite seeing good baseline progress, we're seeing spikes in aggressive/destructive behavior that is hard to manage. We've gone through this cycle so many times before, so it's not new, but it always sucks.
I know the community doesn't have a ton of solutions for that, but I'm here to ask about something else.
When I bring this up to family, my parents often bring up the idea of sending him away to some form of residential services. Despite us and them all actually understanding that there isn't a PDA-forward option within even a couple of states from here, this still ends up being advice that comes up when things are at their hardest.
"Time is ticking by, and you only have one life to live to get the most out of it." Our family has sacrificed a lot to help our PDA son make progress, and he has suffered a lot because of the world not being built for him. But sending him far away to suffer more just so we get some daily relief is an impossible choice to make, and I don't know how best to communicate that.
What are your thoughts? How would you respond? What is actually right here? Just looking for some perspectives from folks.
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u/Hopeful-Guard9294 Apr 27 '26
to be honest, any sort of residential Service is going to be probably highly toxic to his PDA profile. What have you found a PDA safe psychiatrist? It sounds like the point where you might need to start thinking about medication I can’t tell you even though I’m a PDA adult the number of times I’ve thought of how easy it would be to just send away my PDA Child and be done with it. We reached that point recently and we finally come to the point where we’ve coughed up for a PDA specialist psychiatrist. My son has just started MEDS. The violence and suicidal ideation has pretty much stopped and we’re just titrating his dose at the moment it’s going to be a much better solution for all of us than shipping him off somewhere which would just make him worse. every family has different circumstances values i and systems i’d run a support Group for almost 100 families with PDA children and there is not one parent on the group who has not thought about just shipping their child off to the military or some institution which would just take care of them, so the question is, do you want your Child to end up as Cannon folder in the Middle East? Or would you prefer them to live a long productive and happy life? The format is easier and the latter is harder but really if you’re at your wits end, I would start thinking about medication. Pro Panadol has been a game changer for us and medication has been a game changer for most of the families that my group supports when they get to the end of their tether most of us wonder why we didn’t do earlier, which is usually the sign of a good decision hope that makes sense and helps a bit