What it's about:

In this very first episode of The Low Demand Parenting Podcast, I share the story behind my journey into low demand parenting. It all started when my middle child faced autistic burnout during the pandemic, and I realized that traditional parenting approaches were breaking us down. Through this episode, I explain how letting go of expectations and embracing trust, connection, and safety changed everything for our family. I also give a glimpse into what future episodes will cover, including interviews, mailbag questions, and more real-time reflections on parenting, neurodiversity, and behavior.

00:00  Introduction to the Podcast

01:26  The Beginning of Our Low Demand Journey

02:09  A Turning Point: The Breaking Day

04:09  Understanding Autistic Burnout

05:36  Discovering Low Demand Parenting

07:44  The Origins of Low Demand Parenting

09:52  Developing the Low Demand Method

10:48  The Core Principles of Low Demand Parenting

12:54  Addressing Common Concerns

13:52  The Importance of Safety and Connection

15:37  Conclusion and Future Topics  

Ready to Start Dropping Demands?

If you’re ready to dive deeper into low demand parenting, I’ve got some great FREE resources to help you get started!

• Quiz: Why is Everything So Hard? – This quick, insightful quiz will help you understand why parenting might feel so overwhelming right now and give you personalized steps to lighten the load. Take the quiz here.


• Free Chapter: Low Demand Parenting – Curious about my book, Low Demand Parenting? Download the first chapter for free and start your journey toward more ease and joy. Get the free chapter here.

Transcript:

This is a new podcast, and so we are going to be exploring in this episode more about how I came to be talking to you in your earbuds about low demand parenting, about my own journey, and what is low demand. In future podcasts, we're going to have all kinds of great stuff. We're going to have some of my favorite interviews with parents and professors and brilliant thinkers.

All around the questions of parenting, behavior, and neurodiversity. There's also going to be some mailbag episodes where you can send me your questions and I will reply directly to you. As well as some of my own thoughts, as they're evolving in real time, about what it means to practice this radical and beautiful parenting style.

Our story with Low Demand started five years ago. When my middle kid was five, turning six, we started kindergarten process for him. I'll note in particular that this was during the pandemic, and so everything with school was The option for online kindergarten was terrible. He hated the fact that he couldn't go to the playground, that his experience was so different from his older brothers.

He hated the fact that he wasn't making friends and that every single Zoom room was chaotic and overwhelming. We tried school environment, after school environment, and everyone crumbled. And then one day I was desperate, so desperate for this school to work out. And. He was telling me with his body and his energy, no, this is not for me today.

And I leaned on the dominant parenting narrative that I had been handed, which is to see this moment as anxiety and to push through. If we avoid something, then anxiety wins and it's only going to get worse. So he needs to face that. this today or else tomorrow is going to be 10 times harder and it's only going to snowball.

And so I picked him up and I cooed nice words in his ear like, I love you, I support you, you can do this. And I passed him off into his teacher's hands. She had to fully restrain him in order to keep him inside the school area. And I turned and walked away as he screamed at me to come back. And I share that knowing that many of you have had not just one, but dozens of moments like this, and we have two.

It just happens that this was the before and after day for us. This was the day that broke everything. If it didn't break everything, would we have gone on like this? What would have happened? I don't know. This is our story, and this is how it happened. That day when I came to pick him up, he was So angry with me, he began to bang on the windows of the van and scream on the way home.

His teacher reported that he'd had a great morning. He bounced back just fine. See you tomorrow. You know, from her vantage point, all was good, but I could tell immediately as soon as I hit the lock on our van doors that something was very, very wrong. For days, he didn't speak. He didn't leave his room. He communicated with growls and bangs and kicks and screams.

He knocked things out of my hands and cried every time I came close. He was like a wounded animal and it began what I now know of as autistic burnout. He was just barely six years old. We entered the very hardest months of his life. And of course, by extension, mine, his burnout would last for over a year in which he hardly spoke eight or communicated with us and in which he lost so many of the skills that he developed in his first five years of life up to that point.

I had been a gentle, understanding, compassionate, but fairly standard parent. I followed the same playbook, I read the same blogs, I went to the same psychologists, I drank the same Kool Aid. But staring at my six year old as he broke every rule of good childhood and challenged me on every assumption I held on good parenthood, I knew that I was looking at a crucial question.

Can I love him just like this? Is he enough just like this? What am I willing to let go of? What am I willing to let break and even to let die in order for something new to be born? And I just, I couldn't look at my precious one and see a failure. I could only see beauty. Honestly, this is where low demand comes from.

My deep hope is that you have not watched the light go out of your child's eyes. If you have, you're in the right place because man, there's so few places we can go, but if you haven't, my deep hope is that low demand can be a beautiful adventure into the unknown. It doesn't have to come out of desperation or a breaking point.

That's just my story. But we get to freely choose this deeply respectful, compassionate partnership with our children where we trust them to lead us forward into a genuine relationship and into a new way of parenting that isn't built on power, it isn't built on proving ourselves. It isn't about following the rules and showing the world that we're a good parent.

I believe that a good parent is someone who sees, respects, and loves their child just as they are. That's what I learned to do the absolute hard way. Just one note, we'll have whole episodes about burnout in the future, but one note is that I don't see burnout as a failure or even as a kind of Popped balloon anymore when I think about that period and when I help others to reimagine what the burnout period is existing in their lives in order to do, I think of it as a metamorphosis.

It's more like a worm spinning a sack, turning into goo and emerging a butterfly than it is about falling in some sort of deep, dark hole and then clawing your way out. It feels, it feels like a deep dark hole, like, oh my gosh, that is 100 percent the emotional experience of what's happening. But the life change that's emerging through burnout is actually about deep rest.

It's about unlearning and relearning. It's about becoming something new. So what exactly is low demand and how did that become the way forward? Low demand comes, it's origination, it's, it's origin story is from the community around pathological demand avoidance, which is currently, as the time of recording this podcast in 2024, understood as a, a subtype or a profile of the autism spectrum, although there's definitely some interesting research happening around the overlap between autism and ADHD and how those two things impact PDA.

The PDA community is the origin story for low demand. And in those early days of burnout, when we were first getting a diagnosis for what was going on, and I first heard about pathological demand avoidance, people would mention in Facebook groups and in blogs to practice low demand parenting. And it kind of intuitively made sense, like give the kid a break, let them off the hook.

Don't push so hard. Just let them go. Like, let it all go. And, and that made sense. And I tried that, but y'all, it was so hard. It was excruciating for me. I felt like