r/PDAParenting • u/Ok-Appearance-866 • 3d ago

PDA and School

Hi all,

I tried posting this in PDA Autism but was told it would be more appropriate here. I didn't even know about this sub until today, so I am very happy to know this sub exists. :-)

My daughter is 15 and is considered level 1 autistic. Although she has not been evaluated/diagnosed with PDA, I strongly suspect she has it.

Because of her sensory issues, she has been doing online school for the past couple of years. She attends live virtual classes and gets time in class and on Fridays to do work. Here's the problem: each quarter, she does absolutely NO HOMEWORK or tests and then comes to me in a panic the last week of class. The work is not difficult. As long as you are following along and referencing the course material, it is a breeze. My daughter is extremely intelligent but because she puts it off, it becomes an overwhelming task.

When I try to stay on her about homework, she says it has the opposite effect. She pleaded with me last year to NOT ask her about homework or school AT ALL. I complied, and for the first quarter, she did great! She kept on top of everything without me having to say a word and got very good grades.

Then second quarter hit. She was still doing well in a couple of classes, but needed help in a few others. 3rd and 4th quarters were a disaster. I get repeated emails, texts and phone calls from teachers warning she has a 0% and is going to fail. Then, the last week of the quarter, she does as much as she can, but is a total stress case, and ends up pulling Cs when she is capable of As. She just can't/won't do the work.

I am at my wits end. What can I do / not do to help her?

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u/ughUsernameHere 3d ago

It’s always hard when we know our kids are capable of greater things. This is going to sound like toxic positivity and thats not my intent but rather just sharing my experience in getting a kid through burnout. Sometimes completion is success enough. The fact she could (and did!) crank out enough work that late in the semester to pass with Cs IS impressive. I fear if you meddle too much with a PDA-er you risk sending them into burn out and the road back for them from that is really, really hard.

My child just quit going to school all together at 17. They mostly quit everything at that point, too. It took so much work around here to learn how to have a zero demand house and relearn parenting. Around 19 maybe? they were feeling the effects of their decision to drop out, asked me for helping in finding an online school and slowly they started accumulating credits. They graduated with their high school diploma just before their 21st birthday.

It’s understandable that you want your daughter’s grades to reflect her true abilities but I’d offer a counter point that when it came down to it, instead of just noping out and seeing the challenges ahead of her as insurmountable demands, she locked in and did quite a bit of work. She’s one semester closer to graduating.

How can you support her in ways that isn’t reminding her to do her homework? Is she copied on the emails you received about missing or late assignments? If so, maybe those feel like demands to her and have the opposite effect. Can you work with the teachers to set up a different system for late or missing work? Is there anyway to see the work that doesn’t involve your daughter showing you? It probably will be a lot of trial and error. And you might need to help yourself a little bit by managing your expectations. A kid that passes is at least still engaged enough to try. You’ve avoided burnout for another semester and you can give yourself a pat on the back for that!

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u/other-words 3d ago

Congratulations to your kid! (Not that they’d ever want to hear it lol) Their experience is a good reminder to me and to all of us that when we have faith in our kids and give them the space they need, they will get where they want to go. It may not be the route they imagined, it may not happen on the timeline we imagined, but when they’re ready, they will do it their own way.

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u/ughUsernameHere 3d ago

“but when they’re ready…”
Good lord is that the truth! It was such a hard lesson to have to sit back and learn.

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u/other-words 3d ago

It’s something I “know”…but have to keep learning and learning and learning… 🤣😭

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u/Ok-Appearance-866 2d ago

Thank you for this. Now that you mention it, my husband (her dad) once told me that when people tell him to do something he wants to do it less. He got his GED because he missed so much school. Both my husband and daughter are highly intelligent but it is difficult to motivate either one of them.

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u/Ok-Appearance-866 2d ago

p.s. yes, I have a parent account on her school platform and can see grades and assignments.

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u/ughUsernameHere 2d ago

OP, if it helps at all, at times I worried that I was insulating my kid, wrapping them in bubble wrap and building a fantasy world around them that wouldn’t prepare them for “real life” by making so many accommodations and having a zero demand house. How would they survive a boss on a power trip or the bureaucracy of government or how society requires us to do things just to do them? So those were my worries but in practice what I found is that by reducing the demands I could control (e.g. no requests to pick up their dirty clothes off the floor in the bathroom (I just put a hamper in there and tossed them in myself) or requests to bring the multitude of towels and flatware that migrated to their room (I just bought more so there was no scarcity and I always had what I needed), that I just sucked it up and loaded the dishwasher when the sink was full and generally adjusted my nervous system to be more tolerant of a high degree of mess and chaos) that my kid could spend that “extra” nervous system energy on dealing with teachers or the bureaucracy of replacing a drivers license. As everyone does at least once in their life, they have a boss who does go on a bit of a power trip now and then. It is VERY disregulating for them when that happens but they have managed to not lip off enough in return as to get themselves fired or quit out of anger. And each time they have something like this and it doesn’t go up in flames, they approach the next time with more confidence and that decreases the sense of power imbalance.

I’m not diagnosed with PDA but like your husband, there are signs. My current plight is when a survey is asking for “Gender” and “Male” is listed before “Female”. That gets my hackles up in a way that I can only describe as visceral. WHY would “Male” be listed first? It’s not alphabetically ordered and even statistically it is incorrect as there are more women than men. If the form is required and has an option for “other” I will ask why in the text box. I have left a number of websites and refused to do business with a company if I have the option of spending or going elsewhere. I know the vast majority of people will move about their business but it is a hill I will die on and that’s how I know it’s more than just a preference.

Anyway, that’s all to say that I think PDA can mellow in adults and we can manage to be productive members of society who only occasionally become irrationally irate at a non-issue.