Even as a PDA adult I’m not immune from misunderstanding my PDA kids. My oldest I relate to the most as we both are sarcastic, cutting, blunt, but very subdued with our distress. My middle PDA child however is VERY expressive with his distress, passive with his words. A meltdown for him looks like running around cracking incessant jokes while poking or hitting his siblings.
The cacophony itself is triggering for me, but also so foreign to my way of coping it’s easy to judge reactively.
For example the other day the 7 year old and 4 year old were playing well together for hours. As expected when they were burned out on each other my 7 year old started baiting, teasing, and hitting while playing in the bath. In my immediate fluster I relied on the old reliable guilt trips, “Why are you doing that??” and “Don’t hit him! If you’re tired go take a break!” I picked up his dripping body and dropped him on the couch, my body language radiating my disapproval and frustration.
I hate when I do that, especially because I feel like I do it to him a lot more than the others. It so happens that even though I identify my 7 year old as PDA and I feel guilty that I should intuitively understand his needs, it takes me awhile to get to that place mentally. Most of his traits are very different than my own.
After the experience in the bath I wrestled inside with how I could do better. Under pressure, when spiraling, I defaulted to how I was parented by relying on disapproval to get desired behavior. I walked myself mentally through the things I knew to be true about my son’s behavior.
First, I knew he was not hitting because he was growing up to be a “bad person”, he only struggled to meet his because he was overwhelmed. Second, I could see the events leading up to the hitting and could almost predict them: they played for hours, eventually their tolerance would cross a line, and they inevitably would need space from each other. That’s exactly what happened.
Essentially I deduced that my son and I both struggled with the same issue: Not knowing how to diffuse a stressful situation because we were overwhelmed and didn’t have a mental plan for how to help ourselves.
I got my moment of redemption in record time as the next day almost the exact same series of events took place: the two youngest boys played together for hours, ended up in the bath, and eventually I heard them fighting.
This time I took a different route. I felt calm when I went to the bathroom and let my 7 year old know, “When you start to feel upset and want to hit your brother, I think that means you need to take some time apart from him and get your rest.”
Amazingly he said, “Ok” and picked up his toys and grabbed his tablet and calmly headed to the couch.
I support Gentle Parenting for PDA kids, but sometimes we have to do extra work to gentle parent ourselves. Like our kids, we lack the tools we need to interact with a situation with compassion because we haven’t been shown by our own caregivers what that looks like, who also didn’t know because they weren’t shown… because their caregivers didn’t know because they weren’t shown…
Be sure to show yourself some compassion today.