10/01/2025
When school goes wrong for your PDAer, it can feel like a free fall.
You start September with sharp pencils, crisp routines, and quiet hope. Maybe this year will be different. Then the cafeteria noise, the homework pile, the alarms, the transitions—all of it stacks up faster than anyone expected. By late September you’re fielding calls, triaging morning panic, carrying a child who can’t get out of bed, or watching the glazed look of shutdown slide across a face you love.
If that’s you: you are not failing. Your child is not failing.
This is school refusal through a PDA lens—and it makes sense.
For PDAers, “refusal” is often school can’t. Demands saturate the day: social (“line up, share, smile”), academic (“finish it, fix it, faster”), sensory (fluorescents, noise, itchy clothes), and relational (decode hidden rules, please the adults). It isn’t one thing; it’s the sum total. A nervous system in threat mode does what nervous systems do: it resists the place that’s hurting it.
We also know this isn’t rare. Research consistently shows autistic students experience higher non-attendance driven by anxiety, sensory load, and a lack of support. UK PDA data suggests roughly 70% aren’t attending consistently or are struggling to do so. And bias compounds this: Black and brown neurodivergent kids are more often labeled “disruptive/defiant” instead of supported—and marginalized parents (Black, brown, q***r, trans, poor, immigrant) are less believed and more often blamed, while white, wealthy, cis/het parents are more readily trusted.
That’s not misbehavior—it’s inaccessibility.
What doesn’t help? Trying to “consequence” a child into regulation. Sticker charts, attendance contracts, “tough love”—these raise stakes and shame, but they don’t increase capacity. As Ross Greene says, “Kids do well if they can.”
If they aren’t, they can’t (yet).
So what does help?
Name the truth out loud. “School feels really hard for your body right now. That makes sense. We’ll figure this out together.”
Prioritize safety before attendance. A body in fight/flight/freeze isn’t learning anyway.
Build tiny, doable steps. Later start, shorter day, one preferred class, a quiet landing place, a real break if needed. Alternatives (tutoring, online or home learning, deschooling time) are lifelines—not failures.
Shift the question. From “How do I make them go?” to “What would make school feel safe enough to learn?”
In next week’s blog, we will dive deeper into school-based accommodations for PDAers and how to advocate for them in the school system. But for now, remember what learning really is. It doesn’t only happen in classroom seats and worksheets and obedience. It happens in Minecraft world-building, Pokémon stat debates, noticing injustice and asking hard questions. It’s cultivated through nurturing curiosity and space for real safety.
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. You don’t need a 10-year plan. You just need the next small step toward regulation, trust, and connection. Once those are in place, real learning—the kind that sticks and sustains—becomes possible again.
If you need it today: take a breath, lower the bar, and choose the next small, possible step toward real felt-safety for your kiddo. You can build from there.
