Behaviour Isn’t the Problem for Your Autistic or PDA Child— The Environment Is

A connection-first look at sensory load, nervous system safety, and how altering and being aware of our sensory environments drastically affects how we support our PDA and Autistic children. 

In this episode of The Attuned Spectrum Podcast, I want to help you understand why sensory environments matter so much more than the behaviour you’re seeing — especially when you’re parenting an autistic or PDA child.

This episode is Part 3 of a 4-part Attuned Parenting Foundations series, where I’m walking you through the core shifts that change everything when you move away from behaviour-based approaches and toward nervous system safety and connection.

In this third part, I focus on sensory environments and why they are often the missing piece. When we focus on behaviour without understanding what a child’s nervous system is processing underneath, we end up feeling stuck, frustrated, and exhausted. Not because we’re doing anything wrong — but because we’ve been looking in the wrong place.

I break down sensory input, sensory load, and sensory output, and explain how these layers quietly build throughout the day before ever showing up as a meltdown, shutdown, or explosion. I also talk about why traditional behaviour strategies don’t work for PDA children, and why PDA is not manipulation or defiance, but a nervous system disability rooted in safety and autonomy.

Using everyday examples — like brushing teeth — I show how sensory experiences and demands can stack up and drain a child’s capacity long before bedtime arrives. Many of the biggest sensory stressors are invisible: background noise, lighting, transitions, masking, and internal sensory demands like hunger or tiredness.

When we begin adjusting environments instead of trying to control behaviour, things start to shift. Not through compliance or power struggles, but through safety, connection, and nervous system support.

If you’d like to explore your child’s sensory profile more deeply, the Attuned Parenting Foundations course is currently free and includes 30 days inside the Attuned Parenting Community.
You can find the link in the show notes or visit chantalhewitt.com/course.

Chapters

• 1:32 Understanding Sensory Environments
• 5:43 The Role of Sensory Input, Sensory Load and Output
• 8:33 Invisible Sensory Stressors
• 10:14 FREE (for now!) Attuned Parenting Foundations Course
• 11:18 Example of Sensory Experience Autistic vs. PDA Autistic
• 13:48 Small Shifts to Try TODAY
• 15:06 Don't Forget Their Invisible Sensory Load

Transcript

Chantal Hewitt (00:00)

I want you to walk away understanding why sensory environments and understanding their impact matters so much more than the behavior that you are seeing. The sensory environment and your child's sensory needs, they come before the behavior. They're the precursor to the behavior that you are seeing.

Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 11 of the Attuned Spectrum podcast. I'm Chantal your host. This is part three of a four-part series based on my

Parenting Foundations course, a neurodiversity affirming framework for supporting autistic and PDA children without behaviour charts, power struggles or burnout.

If you are parenting an autistic or a PDA child and you find yourself thinking I feel like I'm doing everything but nothing is working for them then this episode is for you.

The goal of today's episode is simple. I want you to walk away understanding why sensory environments and understanding their impact matters so much more than the behavior that you are seeing. The sensory environment and your child's sensory needs, they come before the behavior. They're the precursor to the behavior that you are seeing.

I want you to walk away and be able to see how these realistic shifts can dramatically impact your child's nervous system and their behaviour that you may be finding quite challenging in your day to day.

Why behavior is never the starting point. This is so important to talk about.

I see this often in the work that I have done within education, within educators and with teachers and their development. And unfortunately, the trainings for teachers are just not there. Our education systems do not understand how to support neurodivergent children. The reason why I'm mentioning education is because a lot of the challenging behavior that you might see at home

also is something that I'm sure you hear that the teachers could be seeing at school or in their early education centre, daycare environment.

and they do not know or are not trained as so many professionals aren't even in the space of autism and identifying autistic traits and PDA, pathological demand avoidant traits in children.

They are not trained to understand that PDA, pathological demand avoidance, its clinical term, is a nervous system disability.

What it is not, it is not manipulation, it is not bad behavior on purpose or bad behavior, I should say. And what this tells us is that Our homes, schools, expectations and routines were never designed to support our PDA child's nervous system. They just don't fit.

That is not your fault and that is not your child's fault. But you can do something about it. It starts with you.

So when we focus on behaviour without understanding what the body is processing that actually leads to this demand avoidance or has an impact on demand avoidance, then we hit a wall. As parents of PDA children or a PDA child, you aren't doing it wrong, but it's because you're looking in the wrong place to find the supports. Traditional and more mainstream supports will not actually support your PDA child.

That is because your PDA child's nervous system is different. It perceives commands, demands, instructions, requests, questions, things that you feel are not demanding of them. It perceives them

as threat to their safety, as a threat to their autonomy and then the more challenging behaviour comes in. We looked a lot more at this in the last episode where we talked about our nervous system for a child and PDA and burnout. Now this episode, this is that third foundation, this is how the sensory environments also come into play.

You have your first foundation which is you is the parent regulating yourself in order to co-regulate your child. Foundation two is understanding burnout and nervous system exhaustion and nervous system safety of your child. So you have your nervous system to consider you are the co in the co-regulation.

Then their nervous system and that is the big thing that is often misunderstood. And then we have this third foundation, this third pillar and that is how to see that their sensory environments drastically impact their nervous system as well. And in turn that impacts the behavior that we're seeing and that we're struggling with a lot of the time. And the troubling part is...

that a lot of this challenging behavior it can quite easily be adjusted if parents and caregivers and those who support your child truly understand the impact of sensory input and then that output that external behavior and what that looks like for your child and then how to adjust accordingly.

When we focus on behavior without understanding what their body is processing, then that's where things get really tricky. Not because you're doing it wrong, but because you've been looking in the wrong place with the wrong supports. But today, that changes.

I do want to talk a little bit about sensory input, what that is, what sensory load is, and then what sensory output is. There is an important distinction because this is where things usually get a bit muddled and once it's explained it might click for parents and those who support your child.

sensory input is what your child is experiencing in the moment through their senses and there are eight, eight senses.

The sensory load is the accumulation over a period of time that might weigh down the child and their nervous system and how they sensorily experience the world around them.

in all children just like autism is a spectrum, PDA perhaps is a spectrum as well where we see some children having a lot of PDA traits or more intense PDA traits and then others not so much. Just like that spectrum, every child's sensory profile is different. So one child might be very sensitive to loud noise whereas another child might need that loud noise over and over again to regulate. So if you look at those two

situations you have the one who avoids noise or it's too much sensory input for them it can cause them to be dysregulated a lot of things within their environment increase that sensory load then that dysregulation happens if you look at someone who needs that noise so needs extra input of noise so they're hyposensitive not hypersensitive

then they'll be looking for more of that. So whether it could be banging on something, it could be listening to something really loud, it could be yelling at the top of their lungs. Those are just some examples there.

You may notice that your PDA child has a much lower threshold for sensory load throughout the day. Whether that's actually a different sensory threshold or it could be that accumulation within their nervous system of those demands being placed upon them throughout the day then add in the sensory environment that isn't supporting them in their well-being then they will hit burnout and meltdown so much quicker.

What looks small and manageable to us as adults for our children could actually be very overwhelming for their nervous system. This is just a little side note, but it is so important that we honour and validate that it is big for them, that something that feels very loud or needs to feel louder, while we can feel uncomfortable by it and we can voice that and model that as well because we are different and we have different needs than our child does,

it doesn't mean that we don't validate how they are feeling in that moment. That is so important for them and their felt safety.

Then we have sensory output. That is your challenging behavior that you see. And when that builds up in the nervous system and it comes out of nowhere or a meltdown or an explosion, please just keep in mind that this third pillar, this sensory environment, this sensory overload that they could be experiencing or under load, where then they're seeking out all these sensory opportunities and experiences,

that could be the missing thing as well that's causing their behaviour to be challenging for adults around them.

Many of the biggest sensory stressors that our child feels are invisible. So these are things like background noise, visual clutter, multiple people talking at once. Transitions can be very overwhelming for their senses. Masking all day at school. There's a huge amount of sensory experience within that that could be affecting your child.

Chantal Hewitt (08:56)
Then we have internal sensory demands, your interoception. Those are things like your hunger, your thirst, needing to go to the toilet, how tired you are, and regulating temperature, feeling emotions.

When we look at how these sensory needs and if they are not met or under met, how they will impact your autistic or your PDA child. They drain their capacity. So every person will have a capacity before things are too much. When you have a neurodivergent child or an autistic child or PDA autistic child, that threshold is much different. Obviously it's different

for all children and all people, no matter their neuro-type But what I'm getting at here and what is so important to understand, if

autistic children, our PDA autistic children, if they are in a world that does not support understanding where their threshold is already so much lower than someone who is not PDA or not autistic, then they already do not have an upper hand. They already are in a situation where they will be drained so much more easily, not to mention all of the things that I mentioned before, the masking all day,

taking in different sensory environments and keeping that all in that all makes such a difference and this kind of all comes back to the fact that our environments are not actually supportive of different sensory needs and they need to be.

If you are interested in going further into exploring these eight senses within your child, even within yourself, and would like a free sensory profile, please head on over to chantalhewitt.com/course This is still free at the moment. This is 30 days of Attuned Parenting Foundations. You also get 30 days free inside the Attuned Parenting Community where you can connect with others, ask questions and...

make sense of what you learn and what you're going through. I'm also very active in that community. I'm there throughout the day, and making sure that you feel resourced, supported and connected in your autism and PDA journey with your family. So again, that link is in the description and in my bio.

and I'm not sure how much longer it will be free for, so please, if you have been listening and you've been thinking of joining, I do encourage you to get it now while it's still free.

As a little example, I want to break down a sensory experience for an autistic child and then that same sensory experience for a PDA autistic child and I will use brushing teeth. I know a lot of children do not like brushing teeth. It is different when you are looking at teeth brushing from a sensory lens. Is it because they just don't want to brush their teeth because they don't want to?

and because they have to because their parents said it, do they go into a meltdown or a panic attack after they are made to brush their teeth or asked to brush their teeth? So with an autistic child, the sensory experiences that they could be feeling are the feel of the toothbrush in their hand could be the toothpaste, the texture, the temperature on their tongue, mouth, teeth. It could be the lights in the bathroom. It could be the noise of siblings or parents in the bathroom as well.

All of these things matter. Now, if you look at it, if your child is also PDA, we add in the demand avoidance. And this is where they have been asked to brush their teeth or it's a demand within the household, the rules that before bedtime or in the morning when they wake up, they're expected to brush their teeth. Obviously, this is still important, but just knowing that that in itself is not only just a sensory experience for your PDA child,

It is also a massive amount of demands, whether you are saying them gently or not.

So where this all kind of comes into play now is that when we understand that we have sensory overload, that leads to meltdown accumulated over time, which then can lead to burnout. However, we now can step in and adjust the environments to support our child's sensory profile.

When sensory load and demands stack up, one on top of the other, over time, the nervous system really struggles to recover. This is when we start to see increased meltdowns, shutdowns, skill regression, exhaustion, and eventually burnout.

And just keeping in mind that this behavior that you might be seeing, it isn't manipulation, it isn't defiance, it isn't your child trying to get their way. It is them communicating to you that their sensory needs are not being met.

And perhaps it is a cue that their nervous system has been running on empty because their sensory environment has not been as supportive of their sensory needs as it could be.

If this resonates, please know that this does explain a lot and it isn't your fault. You may not have had the tools to understand and support your child's sensory profile and sensory needs.

Small shifts that you can do today, right now honestly, you can put these in place today and see if they do make a difference for your child. Can you observe where their sensory needs may not be being met? Can you also observe what environments they feel safer in or that you feel their sensory needs are either met or not met in?

And can you offer and respond to that unmet need with something that can support their sensory need? For

if all the lights are normally on in your house and you notice that they might be reacting a little bit to that because it's too much because it's too bright maybe you notice there's a big increase of meltdowns when there's lights on in the house can you try putting lamps on can you try dimming the lights that could be a huge factor in why they're having a meltdown again that's just an example because i can relate to that one but

Understanding your child's needs is so important.

If you take anything from this episode, what I would love for you to walk away with is an understanding that behavior is communication and behavior isn't the problem. The problem is that our sensory environments are not set up for our autistic or PDA autistic children and their nervous systems and what they need to support their own sensory needs.

That sensory load, it accumulates quietly and then it can be quite big and you may have that invisible load there, but it's been there the whole time. So noticing that sensory load and that accumulation and what you can do to minimize that impact for your child. Meltdowns are nervous system overload and sensory environments play a big part of that. Environment shape

regulation and how your child regulates.

When we support your child's nervous system through their sensory environment, behavior changes naturally because their stress response is lower. They feel safer. They are less anxious and their sensory needs are being met.

If this episode resonated and you want structured support, the Attuned Parenting Foundations course is still available for you.

You get lifetime access to this course and 30 days free inside the Attuned Parenting Community where you can ask your questions, troubleshoot in real time and feel less alone in this journey. You can find everything in the show notes and head on over to chantalhewitt.com/course

Please stay tuned in the next and final episode of this series, the Attuned Parenting Foundation series. I'll be pulling everything together and sharing what comes next once you have these foundations in place. Thank you so much for watching on YouTube or for listening on your preferred podcast platform. And as always, I will see you next week.