The Family Experience of PDA: An Illustrated Guide to Pathological Demand Avoidance

by Eliza Fricker, Eliza Fricker (Illustrator), Ruth Fidler (Foreword by)

Overview

Eliza Fricker gets it. Describing her perfectly imperfect experience of raising a PDA child, with societal judgements and family pressures, she knows how easy it is to feel overwhelmed, resentful and alone. The Family Experience of PDA's comedic illustrations explain these challenging situations and emotions in a way that words simply cannot, bringing some much-needed levity back into PDA parenting. Humorous anecdotes with a compassionate tone remind parents that they are not alone, and they're doing a great job. If children are safe, happy, and you leave the house on time, who cares about some smelly socks?
A light-hearted and digestible guide to being a PDA parent covering everything from tolerance levels, relationships and meltdowns to collaboration, flexibility, and self care to dip in and out as your schedule allows to help get to grips with this complex condition. This book is an essential read for any parent with a PDA child, to help better understand your child, build support systems and carve out some essential self-care time guilt-free.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787756779
Publisher:	Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Publication date:	11/18/2021
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.43(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Eliza Fricker is an illustrator and a designer based in Brighton, UK. She has a child with PDA.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Ruth Fidler; Introduction; Tolerance Levels; Meltdowns; Relationships; Sensory; Anxiety; Collaboration; Flexibility; Prioritising; Positives; Self Care

Editorial Reviews

This book is the perfect tonic for frazzled loved ones of children with PDA. Perfectly imperfect, quirky and always en pointe, Eliza will make you nod and smile with her descriptions and illustrations whilst also providing you with a tonne of practical ideas without once seeming preachy.

Dr Pooky Knightsmith

In The Family Experience of PDA Eliza Fricker shares her heartfelt insights through an accessible illustrated volume that will be helpful to parents as they support, encourage, and manage their children who may have features of PDA. The book through words and pictures provides the important lessons she has learned about the sensitivities and regulatory capacity of her child. Eliza shares the basic principles that enabled her child and family to feel safer and to mutually enjoy daily interactions. We learn the power of softening the edges of restrictive parenting, which may function in more resilient children with higher thresholds to be reactive but is disastrous with a child with feature of PDA. We learn that a gentler less demanding, accepting, and positive playful parental strategy will lead to more cooperative behaviors and mutually rewarding co-regulatory interactions.

Stephen W. Porges