Five Tips For a Lower Demand Halloween With Your Pathologically Demand Avoidant Child | Ep. 185
At Peace Parents PodcastShow Notes
Halloween is exciting. It is also activating. And if your child is in burnout, near their threshold, or simply wired in a way that makes novelty and sensory overload feel threatening rather than fun, even a holiday you love can become a source of dread for the whole family. In this episode I share five tips for navigating Halloween with a PDA child or teen, drawn from seven years of doing it imperfectly in my own home. I cover what to do if your child cannot access the holiday at all this year, how to think about autonomy and demand lowering as two distinct accommodations, why traditions still count even when they look like chaos, and why letting go of please and thank you on the doorstep may actually be the most effective thing you do all night. Key Takeaways
If Your Child Is in Burnout and Cannot Access Halloween, That Is Enough | 00:03:23 Last year my younger son William was deep in burnout, spending most of his time under a blanket in a darkened room. I expected that Halloween, with all its novelty and dopamine, would pull him out. It did not. Even wanting candy and a holiday was not enough to override the perception of my expectation and the absence of a window of tolerance. What I ended up doing was bringing the candy bowl up to his room so he could trick or treat from his bed. He was fine. The grief I felt walking back downstairs was mine, not his. If your child cannot come downstairs this year, bring the holiday to them in the smallest possible way: a pumpkin outside their window, a few pieces of candy on their nightstand. That is enough, and it will not always be like this.
Autonomy and Demand Lowering Are Not the Same Thing | 00:06:32 These two accommodations are easy to conflate because they sound similar, but the distinction matters in practice. Autonomy is about giving a child the felt sense that they are in the decider role: which costume, whether to trick or treat at all, how many houses, when to stop. Demand lowering is about removing something they are physically capable of doing but cannot access right now, like walking three blocks home after running house to house for twenty minutes. Pulling them in a wagon, giving a piggyback ride, or driving around the block to get them home is not coddling. It is recognizing that the cumulative activation of a stimulating evening may have used up what looked like plenty of capacity twenty minutes ago.
Traditions Count Even When They Look Like Chaos | 00:09:39 Every year my mother brings a gingerbread house to decorate. Every year my sons eat the frosting, shove candy in their mouths, make an enormous mess, and barely place a single piece of candy on the house before losing interest. For years I felt like the tradition had not happened. But my older son, now almost twelve, asks every year when Nana is coming with the Halloween gingerbread. It is in his implicit memory as safety, as family, as something we do. The pressure I put on it to look a certain way was the only thing that ever threatened it. Whatever version of the tradition your family does this year, even if it is unrecognizable compared to what you imagined, it is landing somewhere.
Why Please and Thank You at the Door Is Worth Letting Go | 00:13:07 For years I walked behind my older son on Halloween and said thank you to the neighbors handing out candy, because making him say it was the difference between him being able to move between houses and not. I was not teaching him bad manners. I was managing the cumulative activation of being in a costume, in the dark, running between strangers’ houses, while I silently narrated my expectation that he perform politeness on demand. He now says please and thank you, often without prompting. I did not explicitly teach him. When his nervous system had enough room, the skill was already there. Letting go of the doorstep performance was not giving up. It was choosing the holiday over the lesson.
The Five Tips in One Place | 00:14:41 First, if your child is in burnout,
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