Why 'Just Try Harder' Doesn't Work: Understanding Demand Avoidance in Neurodivergent Kids

A parent gently asks their child to put on their shoes for school, a seemingly simple, everyday request. Instead of cooperation, the child becomes visibly distressed. Perhaps there’s a torrent of excuses – “My legs don’t work today!” or “The shoes feel spiky!” Maybe they try to change the subject with sudden enthusiasm for a forgotten toy, or perhaps the situation escalates into a full-blown meltdown. This daily dance of requests and resistance leaves parents feeling exhausted, confused, and often, judged by onlookers who might think, “They just need firmer discipline.” This scenario is an all-too-common reality for families navigating the complexities of demand avoidance PDA.

For some neurodivergent children, these routine requests are not minor inconveniences to be brushed aside; they trigger a profound, almost visceral, internal alarm. This is not a conscious choice to be “difficult” or “defiant.” It is often a manifestation of an intense, frequently invisible, internal struggle. The purpose of this post is to shed light on Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), a specific and often misunderstood profile of neurodivergent demand resistance. We will explore why the common refrain to “just try harder” or to implement stricter consequences is not only unhelpful but can be deeply harmful when understanding PDA kids. The aim is to shift the narrative from blame to understanding, and from frustration to informed empathy.

The “invisible struggle” is multi-layered: it encompasses the child’s internal battle with anxiety and overwhelm, the parent’s struggle with confusion and exhaustion, and often, the family’s struggle against societal misunderstanding and judgment. The immediate, often instinctual, parental or educator response to escalate pressure or consequences when faced with resistance stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the behavior’s root cause, setting up a detrimental cycle from the very beginning.

What is Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)? More Than Just Saying “No”

Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) is increasingly understood as a distinct profile on the autism spectrum, though its precise diagnostic categorization continues to be discussed among researchers and clinicians. In many regions, PDA is not yet a formal standalone diagnosis in major diagnostic manuals like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which can create significant hurdles in accessing appropriate support and fostering widespread understanding.

The central and most defining characteristic of PDA is a pervasive and often extreme demand avoidance that permeates various aspects of an individual’s life. This is not the occasional reluctance seen in many children; it is a consistent, deeply ingrained pattern of resisting and avoiding what are often termed the “ordinary demands of life”.

Crucially, the concept of a “demand” in the PDA context is far broader and more nuanced than a simple, direct instruction. Demands can encompass:

Direct Demands: These are explicit requests or commands, such as “Time for bed,” “Please brush your teeth,” or “You need to do your homework”.

Indirect or Implied Demands: This category is vast and often a source of misunderstanding. It includes subtle expectations, questions that require an answer (as answering is a demand), praise (which can imply an expectation to repeat the praised behavior), rewards (which are conditional on performing an action), visual schedules, social niceties, or even someone making an assumption about the child’s preferences.

Internal Demands: Perhaps the most perplexing for outsiders, these demands originate from within the individual. The body’s own signals, such as hunger, thirst, tiredness, or the need to use the toilet, can be perceived as intolerable demands. Even a personal desire to engage in an enjoyable activity can become a demand that triggers avoidance if it starts to feel like an obligation or internal pressure. As Riko Ryuki, an autistic adult with a PDA profile, notes, even a favorite food can be rejected if the presentation or expectation around it feels like a demand.

The sheer breadth of what constitutes a “demand” for a child with PDA means their world is constantly filled with potential triggers, far more than a neurotypical person might perceive. This can create a state of chronic hypervigilance and hyperarousal, as if navigating a perpetual minefield of expectations.

Children with PDA often employ a range of sophisticated, and sometimes seemingly manipulative, social strategies to avoid these demands. These are not just simple refusals but can involve elaborate excuse-making (“I can’t put my coat on, the dinosaurs need it to keep warm”), distraction tactics, attempts to incapacitate themselves (“My legs have stopped working!”), persistent negotiation, procrastination, or even using humor or charm to deflect the request. These “social strategies” are often remarkably creative and can appear socially sophisticated. However, they are typically manifestations of profound anxiety and a desperate attempt to regain a sense of control, rather than calculated, unemotional manipulation. This creates a paradox where a child might seem socially aware in their avoidance tactics yet struggle with deeper social understanding and genuine connection.

It is vital to reiterate that demand avoidance PDA is fundamentally different from willful defiance or oppositional behavior. It stems from a neurological difference that creates an intolerable feeling of anxiety and a loss of control when faced with expectations. The ongoing debate and lack of universal diagnostic recognition for PDA in some regions contribute significantly to the cycle of misunderstanding. Without a clear diagnostic framework readily available to all professionals, caregivers and educators often lack access to appropriate information and support, leading them to default to traditional (and, as we will see, ineffective) methods.

The Engine of Avoidance: Deep-Seated Anxiety and the Need for Autonomy

To truly grasp why “just try harder” is an unhelpful directive for children with a PDA profile, we must look beneath the surface behaviors and understand the powerful internal forces at play. The resistance seen in demand avoidance PDA is not about the task itself, but about the overwhelming, often unbearable, anxiety-driven demand avoidance that the perception of a demand provokes.

Anxiety as the Primary Driver

This is the absolute core of PDA. The child isn’t choosing to resist; they are reacting to an intense internal state of anxiety triggered by the demand. Lived experience powerfully illustrates this. Ben, a young child, described it as “a great big whoosh of NO!”. Tally, the protagonist in the book Can You See Me?, prefers the term “demand anxiety” because, as she puts it, “I literally have no choice in it whatsoever”. Tony, an adult with PDA, likens the experience to “having claustrophobia. The anxiety keeps rising steadily until it becomes a non-negotiable, panic-driven need to flee from the source of the demand”. Another child, Z, simply stated, “I’m scared, everyday I’m scared”, highlighting the pervasive nature of this anxiety.

This anxiety is often not just situational stress related to a specific demand but can be a pervasive, high baseline state of hypervigilance, making individuals acutely sensitive to even minor or unintentional perceived threats to their autonomy.

The Unrelenting Need for Control and Autonomy

This is not a childish desire to be “the boss” or a manipulative ploy for power. For individuals with a PDA profile, the need for control and autonomy is a neurological imperative, deeply intertwined with their sense of safety and predictability. For them, autonomy often equates to safety; a perceived loss of autonomy, however small, can trigger a profound threat response. As neurodivergent advocate Jo Richardson articulates, “The single most important thing to a PDA individual is their autonomy; to decide things for themselves and be in complete control of what they do and where they are going”.

Connection to Other Neurodivergent Experiences

The intense anxiety and need for control seen in PDA often overlaps with other neurodivergent experiences:

• The Weight of Fitting In: The Unseen Exhaustion of Masking - How the pressure to conform creates anxiety.
• The Echo of Past Rejection: Impact on Future Friendships - Understanding how past experiences shape current behaviors.
• Supporting Executive Function Skills - Challenges with planning and organization that can compound anxiety.

The PDA Society also describes a “need for control, often driven by anxiety or an automatic ‘threat response’”. This intense need for control is often a direct compensatory mechanism for the profound and frequently unmanageable internal anxiety. If the underlying anxiety could be significantly reduced or effectively co-regulated, the overt and sometimes rigid need for external control might lessen.

When “Helpful” Hurts: Why Traditional Parenting and Teaching Methods Fail

Understanding the anxiety-driven need for autonomy in PDA is the key to recognizing why conventional parenting and teaching strategies often don’t just fail but can actively cause harm. These methods are typically designed to address behaviors perceived as willful or learned, making them fundamentally mismatched to the neurological underpinnings of PDA.

The “Just Try Harder” Fallacy – A Deeper Dive

This ubiquitous piece of advice is particularly damaging for a child with PDA. It implies that the difficulty lies in a lack of effort or willpower, completely overlooking the involuntary, anxiety-fueled nature of their demand avoidance. It invalidates the child’s genuine internal struggle, essentially blaming them for their neurobiology. When a child is already operating at their maximum capacity to cope with overwhelming anxiety, being told to “try harder” can increase feelings of shame, inadequacy, and being misunderstood.

Direct Instructions and Unyielding Expectations

For a child with PDA, direct instructions (“Put your toys away now”) and rigidly enforced expectations are often perceived as immediate threats to their autonomy. This perception triggers an instantaneous spike in anxiety and a corresponding urge to resist. The more direct, forceful, or non-negotiable the demand, the greater the likelihood of an escalated avoidance response, which can range from sophisticated verbal diversions to intense meltdowns.

Furthermore, children with PDA may not intuitively respond to typical social hierarchies (e.g., “the teacher is in charge,” “parents know best”). As such, demands can feel arbitrary, unexpected, and intensely jarring, rather than reasonable requests within an accepted structure.

Traditional Tactic	Assumed Reason for Child’s Behavior	How a PDA Child Experiences It	Resulting Impact
Direct Command (“Do this now!”)	Testing boundaries, needs clear instruction	Threat to autonomy, overwhelming anxiety spike	Increased resistance, meltdown, shutdown, avoidance.
Reward Chart for Compliance	Needs motivation, learns via reinforcement	Another demand, pressure to perform, feels manipulative/conditional	May ignore, find loopholes, short-term compliance at best, erodes intrinsic motivation.
Time-Out/Consequence for Non-Compliance	Needs to learn actions have consequences, defiance	Punishment for anxiety-driven inability, feels unfair, escalates distress	Increased anxiety, resentment, damaged trust, no new skills learned.
”Just try harder”	Laziness, lack of effort	Invalidates internal struggle, feels blamed for neurobiology	Shame, reduced self-esteem, feeling profoundly misunderstood.

This table starkly illustrates the mismatch: traditional methods are designed for behaviors perceived as willful, whereas PDA behaviors are primarily involuntary, anxiety-driven neurological responses. Applying solutions for “won’t” to a “can’t” situation is inherently flawed and ultimately harmful.

Shifting the Lens: Towards Empathy and Effective Support

Recognizing why traditional methods falter with demand avoidance PDA is the first step. The next, more constructive step involves a fundamental shift in perspective – moving from an approach centered on compliance and control to one rooted in empathy, understanding, and collaboration.

Empathy as the Cornerstone

The absolute starting point is genuine empathy: striving to understand the child’s internal experience of profound anxiety and their non-negotiable need for autonomy. This means consciously moving away from interpreting their behavior as willful defiance or manipulation, and instead seeing it as a direct communication of distress, overwhelm, or a desperate attempt to feel safe in a world that often feels threatening.

Collaboration, Not Control

Successful approaches invariably involve working with the child as a partner in finding solutions, rather than imposing strategies on them. This involves:

• Negotiation: Being open to finding middle ground and acknowledging the child’s perspective.
• Collaboration: Involving the child in problem-solving and decision-making, which fosters a sense of agency and ownership.
• Respecting Agency: Recognizing and honoring their need for control, where safe and appropriate.

Further Reading on Supporting Neurodivergent Children

These resources offer additional strategies for supporting neurodivergent children:

• Building a United Front: Co-Parenting Strategies for Neurodiverse Families
• Beyond the Diagnosis: How a Child’s Neurodivergence Shapes the Whole Family Dynamic
• Supporting Social-Emotional Development in Neurodivergent Children

Conclusion: Beyond “Trying Harder” to “Understanding Better”

The journey of supporting a neurodivergent child who experiences extreme demand avoidance is often challenging, confusing, and isolating. However, the core message to take away is that Pathological Demand Avoidance is a complex, anxiety-driven neurodivergent profile. The intense resistance to everyday demands is not a matter of choice, a sign of poor character, or a lack of effort on the child’s part. It is a deeply ingrained neurological response to perceived threats to their autonomy and safety.

This understanding illuminates why the common advice to “just try harder” and why traditional discipline or teaching methods are not only ineffective but actively harmful. Such approaches fail to address the root cause – the profound anxiety and the overwhelming need for control. Instead, they often escalate the child’s distress, erode precious trust between child and caregiver, and can inflict lasting damage on the child’s self-worth and mental health.

The path forward lies not in escalating demands or tightening control, but in shifting our own lens. It requires a commitment from parents, educators, and professionals to move beyond simplistic solutions and invest in deeper understanding and empathy. It means recognizing the validity of the child’s internal experience and courageously adapting our approaches to meet them where they are.

Ultimately, understanding PDA kids and the broader spectrum of neurodivergent demand resistance is the critical first step. When we move from demanding that a child “try harder” to committing ourselves to “understand better,” we open the door to more compassionate, effective support. We begin to create environments where these unique children can not only cope but can begin to feel safe enough to lower their shields, explore their potential, and truly thrive.

Related Resources

• Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA): Beyond Traditional Approaches
• School Anxiety in Neurodivergent Children: From Refusal to Re-engagement
• More Than Fidgeting: The Essential Role of Stimming in Neurodivergent Regulation