 How can I explain PDA to my seven-year-old in an age-appropriate and positive way? Does the child know that they're autistic already, knowing that PDA is exclusive to autistic people so they are one and the same but you know expression and presentation can be different? Do they know already that they're autistic? What is their autistic identity and culture already like? And they're quite young so I think that it's really really normal and common place and almost a rite of passage for children and teenagers to reject any kind of labels or identity that we put onto them. If our children don't want to hear about PDA or they don't want to hear about autism they don't even want to read anything that you've found for them especially PDA as this is PDA nature to reject anything that you show us. So if you're trying to show your child a video on YouTube of a PDA or look at this it's really positive they may still reject it because that is their PDA nature it's very normal for our children to not be interested in learning about being a PDA because it's a label that we are putting onto them. If a person is ready and willing to learn about PDA then I think the complexity in this is the groundwork that we do as the adults. How do we consider autism as a foundation? How are we talking about autism already? How are we considering autism? What are the conversations we're having within our family culture? That is the groundwork. If we are immersed with narratives that are doom and gloom or narratives that are centered around medical disorder then it's going to be very hard to convince our child that any form of neurodivergence is a positive thing. So really putting in the groundwork first and making sure that our family culture is already one of positive identity and culture. What kind of language do we use if we're teaching our children or telling our children that they're PDA is? If they're ready and willing and they want to learn more about it I would probably put them on the path of finding YouTube channels from other young PDAs. It might be that we just casually say yes you are a PDA autistic and the language is not great because we've still got a long way to go and then we leave it at that and we trust that because our child is a PDA and they are autodidactic in nature which means they're self-led in their learning and interest driven that they may go away and figure it out for themselves. It may take time but the more that we bring it up and talk about it the more we may create resistance around that. So knowing that we need a very different approach as PDA maybe just mentioning it once is enough. Bringing it up all the time or insisting that we read about it or talk to people that a PDA can create resistance around the topic. I had very honest conversations with my children because we are a completely PDA autistic family as well. A positive autistic identity doesn't mean denying the fact that there is disability or that there are struggles and this is really important. Positive doesn't mean we ignore the fact that being a PDA is really really hard and that we live inside systems that don't often cater for us or even believe in our experience. I have ongoing evolving discussions with my children but the way that we do that is that I tell stories about my own experience. We just own our own experience. It's a form of declarative communication. Whenever we're talking about things together I never say oh you should or why don't you read about this thing. I just tell stories. I remember when I was eight and I could not for the life of me look up from the floor because I was so incredibly anxious and that was a part of my PDA profile. Sharing experiences like that normalizes even the really tricky hard parts about being a PDA out because we don't just want to celebrate it like there's nothing hard about it. We want to neutralize the terminology where PDA is and this is another variation of human being.