When School Goes Wrong for Your PDAer

The first weeks of school can feel like a free fall.

You start September with sharp pencils, crisp routines, and nervous hope. Maybe this year will be different. Maybe this will be the year your child adjusts smoothly, when mornings don’t feel like battlefield negotiations, when their teacher doesn’t call by day three, when you don’t already dread the lunchroom meltdowns or the afternoon collapse.

But sometimes, by late-September, it’s already falling apart.

The alarms and backpacks, the cafeteria noise, the piles of homework, the relentless schedule — they all stack up fast. Your child may be crying, raging, hiding, refusing to get out of bed. Maybe you’ve seen the glazed look of shutdown, the desperate panic of a nervous system in threat mode. Maybe you’ve whispered to yourself, “I don’t know how much longer we can keep doing this.”

If that’s you right now, I want you to hear this: you are not failing. And your child is not failing.

This is school refusal through a PDA lens — and it makes sense.

Why School Feels Impossible

For PDAers (Pathological Demand Avoidance or Pervasive Drive for Autonomy, a neurodivergent profile where a person is wired for autonomy and perceiving threats in the demands and expectations of daily life), “school refusal” isn’t about stubbornness or laziness. It’s about survival.

In low demand land, we define a demand as anything that is “too hard” for this person at this time.

Every part of the school day can become saturated with demands:

• Social demands: sit here, line up, take turns, smile, share, be kind, be cool, raise your hand.
• Academic demands: finish the worksheet, remember the directions, try harder, not like that, do it again, hurry up and wait.
• Sensory demands: sit still, fluorescent lights, wear a uniform, loud hallways, itchy clothes, walk in line.
• Relational demands: navigating peers, meeting teacher expectations, decoding hidden rules, understanding the in-crowd, joining clubs.

What looks like school avoidance may actually be protection for a vulnerable person who is close to losing it. The child or teen’s nervous system registers school as “too hard” — not just sometimes, but relentlessly. And so their whole being resists going to a place that is tearing them apart.

Research backs this up. Studies show that autistic students have far higher rates of school refusal, with anxiety, sensory sensitivities, and lack of accommodations as the main drivers. Research in the UK by the PDA Society confirms this: Around 70% of PDA learners are not attending school at all, or struggle regularly to do so. This isn't misbehavior—it's systemic inaccessibility. 

And this inaccessibility only compounds with further marginalization. Teachers are much more likely to label Black and brown neurodivergent kids as a behavioral problem, with their actions judged as “intentional” or “disruptive,” while their white peers are more often rightly recognized as expressing neurodivergent distress and needing accommodation and support. Similar patterns of disbelief and distrust are at play for parents–with wealthy, cis, het, white parents more often believed and trusted, and black, brown, queer, trans, poor, and immigrant parents more often to be disbelieved and blamed.

Importantly: traditional behavioral strategies (stickers, consequences, attendance contracts) don’t reduce anxiety — they often increase it.

Why Consequences Don’t Work

When parents ask, “How do I get my child to go?” what they usually mean is, “How do I make school doable without constant meltdowns?” And I wish there were a quick fix. But here’s the truth: you can’t consequence your way into regulation.

Shame, punishment, or “tough love” only deepen the distress. Ross Greene, author of The Explosive Child, reminds us: “Kids do well if they can.” If they aren’t doing well — if they can’t get dressed, get out the door, or stay all day — it’s not because they won’t, it’s because they can’t.

Another important lens comes from researcher Hilary Dyer’s work on school refusal, which highlights that avoidance behaviors are maintained not by “manipulation,” but by overwhelming anxiety . For PDAers, demand-avoidance amplifies that anxiety. Trying to force attendance often worsens symptoms over time.

What Helps Instead

So what do we do when school feels impossible?

1. Name the truth out loud. Tell your child: “School feels really hard for you right now. That makes sense. We’re going to figure this out together.”
2. Focus on safety first. Regulation is more important than attendance. A nervous system in fight/flight/freeze can’t learn anyway.
3. Get curious about alternatives. That might mean shortened days, online or home learning, creative tutoring, or sometimes a full break from school. None of these are failures. They are lifelines. 
4. Shift from “compliance” to “connection.” Instead of asking “How do I make them go?” try asking “What makes them feel safe enough to learn?”

In next week’s blog, we will dive deeper into concrete school-based accommodations for PDAers and how to advocate for them in the school system.

What Learning Really Means

One of the most powerful shifts in low demand parenting is remembering that learning is not confined to traditional curriculum or teachers in classrooms.

Your child is learning when they build in Minecraft. They’re learning when they argue passionately about Pokémon stats. They’re learning when they notice injustice and ask hard questions. These may not look like “school subjects,” but they are the foundations of critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and emotional resilience. Affirming that all of our kids, teens, and young adults are curious, creative, natural learners can help lessen the panic that we have to force them into a model that may harm them. Even when your kid needs to attend a traditional environment, small tweaks to the traditional model can go so far in making the schooling environment safer and more supportive for your learner to grow.

Take Heart

If school has already started to unravel, you are not behind. You are not alone.

School refusal is one of the hardest, most heart-breaking challenges PDA families face. It’s also one of the most important places to practice a low demand approach. Not because it makes school magically easy — but because it helps you keep your connection intact while you navigate this very real, very hard terrain.

You don’t have to have it all figured out today. You don’t need a 10-year plan. You just need the next small step toward safety, trust, and connection.

Because once those are in place, real learning — the kind that sticks and sustains — becomes possible again.