Rebuilding Capacity: Supporting PDA Children Through Burnout

In this session, PDA educator and advocate Kristy Forbes answers questions from host Mick Olds about supporting PDA children through burnout. Kristy is a PDAer, a former classroom teacher, and a parent of PDA children, and she speaks from all three. The conversation was recorded asynchronously, with the questions and Kristy's answers recorded separately.

Kristy starts by describing PDA as much more than demand avoidance: a highly attuned nervous system that reads any loss of agency as a threat, and a drive she calls equity seeking, a need for a fair relationship rather than power over anyone. She explains why burnout comes so easily, from the sheer number of everyday and self-imposed demands to masking, fawning, and years of quietly coping, and why a child who seems fine at school may be paying for it. She walks through early warning signs and argues that the answer is taking load off rather than adding interventions, drawing on her own family's decision to remove screen limits. She is candid that recovery is not linear, that a child who sleeps all day may be resting in the only way that feels safe, and that going back to life as it was before burnout is not the goal.

Therapists, educators, and parents will come away with ways to spot burnout early, a reason not to spend a child's capacity the moment it returns, and questions about how they hold the power they have. Grounded in Kristy's lived experience as a PDAer and a parent, this session is honest, compassionate, and validating.