So how do we tell whether a person has Autistic Demand Avoidance or PDA?

On one side you have the neurotypical parents and families of autistic children, and on the other you have the online community of adult autistic people, many of whom are parents to autistic children.

Because I feel like my eyes are on fire.  The intensity and intimacy is overwhelming.  My brain can’t process everything you are saying when I look at you.  Eye contact makes me feel physically overwhelmed. 

The purpose of this piece was not to make light of the distress and fear a neurotypical parent feels when a child is diagnosed as autistic. Instead, it is to demonstrate, creatively, the perceptive differences which often create tension between autistic and neurotypical parents.

If you are considering an in-home (or out of home) Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) program for your very much loved autistic son or daughter, please consider the following.

You see, I was an ABA therapist. My official title was Behavior Technician which in itself is really telling. I was hired off the street with no background in child development, no knowledge of autism or ABA…

ABA was never designed to help autistic people.
It was designed to suppress a person’s autism and try to make them compliant, neurotypical-acting robots.

Ableism is the fact that on average, autistic people die 30 years younger than non-autistic people, with suicide as the second leading cause of death…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the prevalence of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS)
in adults and children who were…

I don’t want my child, your child, any child to ever feel that her body is not her own. To know that nobody has the right to force her body to do anything. And I can now see how…