Recognizing autistic burnout

What it's about:

In this very first episode of The Low Demand Parenting Podcast, I share the story behind my journey into low demand parenting. It all started when my middle child faced autistic burnout during the pandemic, and I realized that traditional parenting approaches were breaking us down. Through this episode, I explain how letting go of expectations and embracing trust, connection, and safety changed everything for our family. I also give a glimpse into what future episodes will cover, including interviews, mailbag questions, and more real-time reflections on parenting, neurodiversity, and behavior.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast

01:26 The Beginning of Our Low Demand Journey

02:09 A Turning Point: The Breaking Day

04:09 Understanding Autistic Burnout

05:36 Discovering Low Demand Parenting

07:44 The Origins of Low Demand Parenting

09:52 Developing the Low Demand Method

10:48 The Core Principles of Low Demand Parenting

12:54 Addressing Common Concerns

13:52 The Importance of Safety and Connection

15:37 Conclusion and Future Topics  

Ready to Start Dropping Demands?

If you’re ready to dive deeper into low demand parenting, I’ve got some great FREE resources to help you get started!

• Quiz: Why is Everything So Hard? – This quick, insightful quiz will help you understand why parenting might feel so overwhelming right now and give you personalized steps to lighten the load. Take the quiz here.
• Free Chapter: Low Demand Parenting – Curious about my book, Low Demand Parenting? Download the first chapter for free and start your journey toward more ease and joy. Get the free chapter here.

Transcript:

This is a new podcast, and so we are going to be exploring in this episode more about how I came to be talking to you in your earbuds about low demand parenting, about my own journey, and what is low demand. In future podcasts, we're going to have all kinds of great stuff. We're going to have some of my favorite interviews with parents and professors and brilliant thinkers.

All around the questions of parenting, behavior, and neurodiversity. There's also going to be some mailbag episodes where you can send me your questions and I will reply directly to you. As well as some of my own thoughts, as they're evolving in real time, about what it means to practice this radical and beautiful parenting style.

Our story with Low Demand started five years ago. When my middle kid was five, turning six, we started kindergarten process for him. I'll note in particular that this was during the pandemic, and so everything with school was The option for online kindergarten was terrible. He hated the fact that he couldn't go to the playground, that his experience was so different from his older brothers.

He hated the fact that he wasn't making friends and that every single Zoom room was chaotic and overwhelming. We tried school environment, after school environment, and everyone crumbled. And then one day I was desperate, so desperate for this school to work out. And. He was telling me with his body and his energy, no, this is not for me today.

And I leaned on the dominant parenting narrative that I had been handed, which is to see this moment as anxiety and to push through. If we avoid something, then anxiety wins and it's only going to get worse. So he needs to face that. this today or else tomorrow is going to be 10 times harder and it's only going to snowball.

And so I picked him up and I cooed nice words in his ear like, I love you, I support you, you can do this. And I passed him off into his teacher's hands. She had to fully restrain him in order to keep him inside the school area. And I turned and walked away as he screamed at me to come back. And I share that knowing that many of you have had not just one, but dozens of moments like this, and we have two.

It just happens that this was the before and after day for us. This was the day that broke everything. If it didn't break everything, would we have gone on like this? What would have happened? I don't know. This is our story, and this is how it happened. That day when I came to pick him up, he was So angry with me, he began to bang on the windows of the van and scream on the way home.

His teacher reported that he'd had a great morning. He bounced back just fine. See you tomorrow. You know, from her vantage point, all was good, but I could tell immediately as soon as I hit the lock on our van doors that something was very, very wrong. For days, he didn't speak. He didn't leave his room. He communicated with growls and bangs and kicks and screams.

He knocked things out of my hands and cried every time I came close. He was like a wounded animal and it began what I now know of as autistic burnout. He was just barely six years old. We entered the very hardest months of his life. And of course, by extension, mine, his burnout would last for over a year in which he hardly spoke eight or communicated with us and in which he lost so many of the skills that he developed in his first five years of life up to that point.

I had been a gentle, understanding, compassionate, but fairly standard parent. I followed the same playbook, I read the same blogs, I went to the same psychologists, I drank the same Kool Aid. But staring at my six year old as he broke every rule of good childhood and challenged me on every assumption I held on good parenthood, I knew that I was looking at a crucial question.

Can I love him just like this? Is he enough just like this? What am I willing to let go of? What am I willing to let break and even to let die in order for something new to be born? And I just, I couldn't look at my precious one and see a failure. I could only see beauty. Honestly, this is where low demand comes from.

My deep hope is that you have not watched the light go out of your child's eyes. If you have, you're in the right place because man, there's so few places we can go, but if you haven't, my deep hope is that low demand can be a beautiful adventure into the unknown. It doesn't have to come out of desperation or a breaking point.

That's just my story. But we get to freely choose this deeply respectful, compassionate partnership with our children where we trust them to lead us forward into a genuine relationship and into a new way of parenting that isn't built on power, it isn't built on proving ourselves. It isn't about following the rules and showing the world that we're a good parent.

I believe that a good parent is someone who sees, respects, and loves their child just as they are. That's what I learned to do the absolute hard way. Just one note, we'll have whole episodes about burnout in the future, but one note is that I don't see burnout as a failure or even as a kind of Popped balloon anymore when I think about that period and when I help others to reimagine what the burnout period is existing in their lives in order to do, I think of it as a metamorphosis.

It's more like a worm spinning a sack, turning into goo and emerging a butterfly than it is about falling in some sort of deep, dark hole and then clawing your way out. It feels, it feels like a deep dark hole, like, oh my gosh, that is 100 percent the emotional experience of what's happening. But the life change that's emerging through burnout is actually about deep rest.

It's about unlearning and relearning. It's about becoming something new. So what exactly is low demand and how did that become the way forward? Low demand comes, it's origination, it's, it's origin story is from the community around pathological demand avoidance, which is currently, as the time of recording this podcast in 2024, understood as a, a subtype or a profile of the autism spectrum, although there's definitely some interesting research happening around the overlap between autism and ADHD and how those two things impact PDA.

The PDA community is the origin story for low demand. And in those early days of burnout, when we were first getting a diagnosis for what was going on, and I first heard about pathological demand avoidance, people would mention in Facebook groups and in blogs to practice low demand parenting. And it kind of intuitively made sense, like give the kid a break, let them off the hook.

Don't push so hard. Just let them go. Like, let it all go. And, and that made sense. And I tried that, but y'all, it was so hard. It was excruciating for me. I felt like I had, you know, those early cartoons where the, the character runs off the cliff and they get like five or six steps through midair. And then they suddenly realize there's nothing underneath them and they just plummet.

Yahoo! That is what it felt like to me. Like I got five or six steps out on just like, let it go. And then suddenly I felt like I was free falling and I needed more support. And so I did what I always do. I'm a deep researcher. I'm a book lover. I went and Googled low demand parenting. I need the book. I need the expert.

I need the method. Tell me how to do this. And so. Didn't exist. Not only did a book not exist, there wasn't even a standard definition for what it meant to be low demand. And here I was reading, this is the only parenting style that works for PDA ers. And there wasn't, there was no map, there was no road, and I was desperate.

One of the amazing things about being autistic and desperate is that my pattern seeking brain took over and I was like, well, I guess we're going to figure this out here together, you and me, little kiddo. And so day by day, as I read my kid's cues, what made him perk up and made his eyes sparkle and what made him shut down and withdraw, what made me feel steady and safe.

Sturdy and capable and what made me feel terrified and I noticed and I put the pieces together and I created patterns and soon enough I was like, okay, there's a method here before too long. I wrote the method down and that's the core of what became the low demand parenting six step method and the book that I wrote, which is the book.

I mean, it's just my contribution. There are so many other beautiful teachers and writers who are also sharing about what low demand means to them, but that's what we learned. So the way I understand low demand parenting is that it is a radically attuned method of parenting that takes our kids real lived capacity and adjusts our expectations around them.

Instead of expecting them to meet our expectations. It says that our kids do well when they can. Thank you, Ross Green of The Explosive Child. And if they do well when they can, then that means that they're already doing as well as they can given this particular moment. And so it's up to us to shift, to meet them where they are.

And then when our kids are met, when they're seen, when they're genuinely accompanied, that creates the relationship that leads them to stretch and to grow. I'm just going to say it plainly. We don't have to push our kids in order to grow. We don't have to punish them for not getting it right or dangle some really cool carrot out there to make them more motivated.

They're already fully intrinsically motivated to meet our expectations. They want to so And they just can't. Low Demand takes that really seriously and says, Well, if they can't, then why are we still expecting it? When I teach about Low Demand now, I like to say that Low Demand is a tool, or maybe it's a whole toolbox, that you get to choose.

You get to use. It doesn't have to be the sum total of your parenting approach, in fact, it never will be. I like to say that it's necessary, but not sufficient. You will always need other tools in addition to this, and there's no reason to be a perfectionist or an absolutist about it. For one thing, perfection is a myth.

It's just not possible. And so, also, though, it's not always the right tool. There are absolutely times where holding an expectation is really the right path. Dropping demands, lowering demands, adjusting demands is a tool that you get to pull out and use anytime. It's important to say, because everybody asks me in every interview and every podcast and every conversation with a neighbor, they're like, isn't this permissive?

Here's something. I guarantee an entire podcast episode on the entire idea around permissiveness, how it's gotten so wonkified in our current culture, and, well, all of my thoughts on why it is not a helpful category for our parenting. But that aside, let's just take the standard idea around permissiveness, which is that it's bad parenting.

It's weak, it's unhelpful, our kids are running the show, and most importantly, that it hurts kids. I think that's what people are really asking. Isn't this hurting kids? And to that, I can confidently say, no. And there's a ton of research to back that up. Over the last 20 years, relational neuroscience and polyvagal theory have looked really deeply at the nervous system and the brain and how we respond to each other and what makes us feel safe.

And these amazing scientists have been able to prove what countless parents have also experienced in their own relationships with their children, which is that safety, trust, and connection are the magic ingredients to unlocking our brain and body's full potential. When we don't feel safe, And I mean deeply safe on a psychological level, on a felt safety level, like we are deeply seen, nourished, respected, trusted, and central to the story.

When we don't feel that kind of safe, our brain and body starts an elaborate process of shutting down. We literally can't think our way through a situation, we can't learn, we can't problem solve when we don't feel safe. Safety is necessary. And then on top of safety, we build trust and connection. And that those are the essential elements that enable us to do well in the world.

This has been proven! In science, and of course it means that the whole series of rewards and punishments, it's just not effective, it's not necessary, and it's counterproductive, especially for those who have sensitive brains and bodies or who've experienced trauma, for whom that whole process of being manipulated and punished is just one more wound on top of an already gaping hole.

Thanks for watching! We're going to talk so much more about trust and connection and how it is the magic sauce to low demand. It's not actually letting go of the expectations that creates the transformation. It's the relationship that's possible when we let those things go. It's the stuff that's left over when we let go of what doesn't matter and we hold tight to what does.