PDA Parenting with Danielle Jata-Hall

I for one, I'm really glad that you wrote Just Another Bedtime.

I suppose when we were talking about PDA there, you referenced kind of maybe parent shame being judged.

I suppose for any parents listening, if you feel OK to chat about it, do you want to talk maybe a little bit about your own experience? And just as a parent myself to four autistic children, two of a PDA profile, I have definitely felt shame and maybe judgment at times where, say, two of my children and two of my boys have high support needs.

One has a PDA profile, one doesn't.

But I would think that sometimes I'm misjudged for, or maybe it's my own personal self-reflective, maybe ableism even I have of my own approach, that sometimes I feel that I'm being judged of like, how can one of, say two of my boy, two of my children manage particularly okay in certain scenarios and one particular boy that presents a very particular way, they'd be like, you know, is that just for attention? Or like, oh, could you just tell him to get on? And I'm like, he really can't, like this is really difficult.

So I do feel that shame and that difficulty sometimes.

Do you feel that yourself or if you're happy to talk about it, what has been your experiences?

The first issue is that it becomes controversial because we are doing something against the grain of what we're being shown.

You know, traditional parenting has come along through the ages.

And if you're doing something different straight away, people think that it's not going to work or it's the wrong thing to be doing.

So you're kind of met up with that wall of resistance anyway.

um parent blame has been through my entire existence and and um part of the work that i've done i worked with another author called alice running and we did a joint project on um parental blame and we kind of um surveyed over a thousand parents in fact a thousand parents had responded to the survey within about 36 hours and we had to shut the survey down because we weren't going to be able to deal with the level of information and you know dissect the data anyway just to explain that you know what we were seeing is reoccurring problems and there can be more types of parent blame depending on what your situation is so your social situation um If you're a person of colour, if you are single parent, if you're neurodivergent yourself, which is most of us, you know, lots of these factors can create more chance of us being parent blamed.

And I had multiple ones there.

I was single.

So obviously I was separated from my ex-husband at that point.

So that was seen as the reason why my children were the way that they were.

I've had to take the blame for multiple things.

And from being also neurodivergent myself, people didn't like the fact that I was.

would research and perhaps know more information than the professionals in front of me, not because I'm amazing, but because I had that kind of passion for I've got to find out this information, I've got to do better, you know, and it's sort of that hyper focus that we all have.

So, yeah, lots of those kind of factors.

And we're also another common occurring problem is if you've got more than one child, like you're saying that who are neurodivergent and then they present slightly different.

So you're often being told that they're being, you know, they're copying their brothers or sisters or, you know, in my my sense, it was.

You know, mum's making this up, mum's fabricating it.

So then I became into the typeset of fabricated and induced illness.

And once that becomes named across professionals, they almost look for evidence to prove that is happening.