SUPPORTING CHILDREN with PDA | In-house Training

In-house training: We can arrange training at your organisation. Email us.

Understanding demand avoidance and building capacity

When everyday requests, expectations and even offers of help become difficult to tolerate, children and families can find their lives increasingly restricted. Professionals face complex decisions about reducing demands, supporting autonomy and helping children develop their capacity to navigate everyday life.

This practical workshop explores persistent demand avoidance in children and adolescents, including those described as having a PDA profile. Participants will consider how anxiety, sensory and executive functioning needs, uncertainty and experiences of pressure may contribute to avoidance. The focus is on understanding each child and developing support that makes life more manageable while creating opportunities for coping, confidence and participation.

A central theme is distinguishing helpful accommodation, which supports access and coping, from accommodation that unintentionally maintains avoidance. SPACE principles concerning anxiety and family accommodation, together with neurodiversity affirming practice and Non Violent Resistance approaches to adult responses, inform this clinical synthesis. PDA is not a standalone DSM or ICD diagnosis; the workshop distinguishes research, lived experience and practice knowledge.

Core content

Understanding PDA and persistent demand avoidance. Explore terminology, lived experience and current evidence. Consider different explanations for avoidance and the importance of individual formulation.

Recognising demands and adapting support. Identify direct, implied and self-imposed demands. Adapt environments, communication, timing and expectations, using genuine choice and collaboration to support

autonomy and engagement.

Helpful and unhelpful accommodation. Examine when reducing demands enables access and recovery, and when adult responses may maintain anxiety driven avoidance. Consider patterns over time, current capacity and necessary disability adjustments.

Building capacity through supported participation. Identify goals that matter to the child and plan manageable opportunities to practise communicating needs, negotiating alternatives, problem solving and coping with uncertainty or frustration.

Navigating escalation and supporting families. Respond to distress and aggression, maintain safety and consider sibling and caregiver needs. Help adults stay steady, agree priorities and review when to maintain, adapt or extend a plan.

Participants will be able to identify contributors to demand avoidance; adapt support to individual needs; evaluate the function of accommodation; plan supported opportunities to build capacity; and coordinate responses that support safety, autonomy and family wellbeing.

Designed for psychologists, counsellors, social workers, educators, allied health practitioners and professionals supporting children and families. The day combines accessible theory, clinical examples, communication practice and case planning. This is a standalone workshop; prior attendance at the neurodiversity workshop is not required.