What Is Demand Avoidance?

Episode 81 with Rebecca Perkins.

"I can take demands all the time, but if someone asks in just slightly the wrong way, my brain is like, 'Nope, I won’t do it.'"

Rebecca is a neurodiverse speaker, writer, and educator based outside of Melbourne, Australia. She is the CEO and founder of My Spirited Child, an advocacy hub that provides strategies and support to parents, carers and educators of neurodivergent children, and to neurodivergent adults themselves. She also co-founded the National PEKE Centre, a resource center for neurodivergent families with individualized treatment plans, therapies and services located in Cranbourne, Australia. The center is an absolute dream for anyone who finds the diagnosis and treatment process to be overwhelming and confusing (which is basically all of us, right?). 

Rebecca and I talk all about our own difficulties in school as undiagnosed children, how the education system fails neurodiverse children, which is ultimately what led her to start advocating for her own neurodiverse kids. We also discuss why so many of us think we’re failures even though we’re often achieving at Energizer-bunny levels.

We also talk about demand avoidance in relation to Autism and ADHD, and why it’s chronically misunderstood and misdiagnosed in so many neurodivergent children.

And Rebecca gives one of my favorite answers yet for renaming ADHD, so stick with us to hear that later in this episode!

Rebecca is doing amazing work in Australia — she was recently a speaker at the Victorian ADHD Conference, which was a massive success. She’ll be appearing next at the Queensland ADHD Conference coming up on May 14th at the Unidus Conference Centre.

Website: MySpiritedChild

Instagram: @rebeccalperkins

Find the transcript of this episode at www.womenandadhd.com/transcripts

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a Women & ADHD listener, you’ll receive 10% off your first month of BetterHelp when you use this link: betterhelp.com/womenadhd

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