I Stopped Reading Only the Outside and I Started Trusting What I Couldnā€™t See
Some of the most confusing moments in my parenting have come when I’ve been sitting across from a teacher, therapist or another adult who tells me my child is doing really well.
They’re participating. They’re smiling. They’re chatting. They look confident, funny, outgoing and completely fine.
Meanwhile, I know what happened before we got there. I know how much support it took to leave the house, what their body was communicating in the car and how long it may take them to recover afterwards. I know the version of my child who comes home and can no longer speak, move, eat, tolerate another person nearby or hold in everything they’ve been carrying.
For a long time, the outside evidence confused me. If other people could see a child who was coping, I wondered whether I was getting it wrong. Maybe I was being too protective. Maybe I was reading too much into things. Maybe the distress at home was a separate problem that needed correcting.
Eventually I stopped allowing the visible half of my child’s experience to overrule everything I knew about the invisible half.
What they’re carrying is often invisible
A lot of PDA children can look confident, silly, loud, capable or outgoing while their nervous system is working incredibly hard underneath.
Humour can be a way through. Performing can be a way through. Being outrageous, entertaining everyone, taking charge of the room or appearing unusually confident can all exist alongside fear and internal flooding.
We can easily mistake the strategy for the state of the nervous system.
I’ve seen a child make everyone laugh while struggling enormously. I’ve seen children hold a conversation, complete the activity and do exactly what was expected of them, then collapse when they reached the place where their body could finally stop.
The visible behaviour gave one version of events. Their body gave another.
I had to learn that the outside isn’t the inside. What appears easy may have required every bit of capacity a child had available. What looks like confidence may be a child finding the only role that allows them to remain in the room.
Reading only the outside misses most of the story.
“But they look fine at school”
Many families know this sentence.
A teacher reports that a child is doing beautifully. They don’t seem anxious. They follow instructions, complete work, laugh with other children and don’t show any of the behaviour the family is describing at home.
The family leaves feeling disbelieved, blamed or quietly investigated. If the difficulty only happens at home, the assumption is often that something about the parenting or home environment must be causing it.
But home may be where the performance ends.
A child can hold themselves together through a school day because the demands, expectations and consequences are immediate. They may be scanning constantly, copying the children around them, anticipating what comes next, suppressing the urge to escape and trying desperately to preserve belonging.
They may also enjoy parts of school. They may love their teacher, want to learn, laugh with friends and have genuinely good moments. Distress and enjoyment can exist in the same day. Wanting to be there doesn’t automatically give a nervous system the capacity to manage everything being asked of it.
Then the child comes home.
There may be withdrawal, rage, distress, sleep, frantic movement, controlling behaviour, an urgent need for screens, food refusal or an inability to tolerate the smallest question. Sometimes there are hours of release after a day that everybody else described as successful.
Looking fine and being fine are completely different things.
The internal war
One of the hardest things for other people to understand about PDA is that wanting to do something does not always make doing it possible.
A child may want to go to school, attend the party, see a friend, perform on stage, join the family outing or make the adult they love proud. At the same time, their body may experience what is required as a threat to autonomy and safety.
That conflict can be brutal.
I’ve watched children desperately want the experience in front of them while being unable to move towards it. I’ve watched them agree, prepare, become excited and then reach a point where their whole system says no.
From the outside, the change can look manipulative or oppositional. Adults may think the child has changed their mind, is trying to control everyone or simply needs a firmer push.
Inside, there may be a raging war between desire and capacity.
Both are real. The child who wants to participate is real, and the child who cannot meet the demand is real. We don’t have to choose one and dismiss the other.
The absence of visible distress
We often wait for distress to become visible before we believe it.
We look for tears, shaking, refusal, panic, hiding or somebody saying clearly that they cannot cope. If a child is laughing, talking or complying, we decide the situation must be manageable.
PDA children don’t always show us distress in recognisable ways. Some become funnier, louder or more animated. Some become extremely agreeable. Some move into a role and play it brilliantly. Some disconnect from what they’re feeling until they’re somewhere else.
Their body is still doing the work.
This is why I’m cautious about measuring capacity by completion. Finishing the school day doesn’t tell me what it cost. Attending the event doesn’t tell me how much recovery will be needed. Answering the question doesn’t tell me whether words were freely available.
The absence of visible distress is not the absence of distress.
Reading the aftermath
Often, the clearest information arrives afterwards.
The crash. The withdrawal. The explosion. The sleep. The tears that seem to come from nowhere. The demand for sameness, control, silence, food, movement or a familiar screen.
We can treat the aftermath as another behavioural problem, particularly when the child appeared fine during the thing itself. We may decide they’ve saved their worst behaviour for us, that they’re taking advantage of home or that we need to be more consistent so they learn they cannot unravel the household after meeting expectations elsewhere.
I see it differently now.
The aftermath tells me how much the day cost.
It helps me understand that the cheerful child who walked through the school gate may have been using everything they had. It reminds me that collapse is not proof they could have tried harder. It may be proof that they already did.
This doesn’t mean every difficult moment has one explanation. Children are whole people. There can be hunger, pain, illness, conflict, disappointment, sensory overload, lack of sleep and all the ordinary complexity of being human mixed through it.
The aftermath is still information.
When I read it with curiosity, I can ask better questions. What was required today? What had to be held in? Where were the moments of uncertainty, social performance or lost autonomy? Was there any recovery time built in? What does the body need now?
Believing what I cannot see
Trusting the invisible changed how I parent.
I stopped needing my child to demonstrate distress in a way that convinced everybody else before I responded to it. I stopped treating another adult’s observation as more reliable than the full pattern I was living beside.
I could listen when my child said something was hard, even if they had done it before. I could believe the exhaustion that appeared at home, even if the report from school was glowing. I could make space for recovery without turning it into a reward that had to be earned through visible suffering.
Sometimes that meant reducing what came after school. Sometimes it meant not asking questions as soon as we got in the car, bringing familiar food, lowering noise, cancelling the extra thing or allowing hours with no expectation of conversation.
It also meant talking with teachers and professionals about cost, rather than only asking whether the child completed the task.
What happened before? How much prompting was required? Did they become louder, sillier, unusually compliant or very quiet? What happened during transitions? How did they seem at the end? What did the following day look like?
A child’s capacity cannot be measured from a single moment viewed by a single person.
Parenting the whole child
I parent the whole of my child, not only the half that is visible to other people.
That includes the child who is laughing and the child whose body is flooded. The child who wants to join in and the child who cannot. The one who copes at school and the one who collapses at home.
I don’t need to deny the visible experience in order to honour the hidden one. The laughter may have been real. The enjoyment may have been real. The distress was real too.
This is one of the most important shifts I’ve made as a parent. I explore the invisible. I take the aftermath seriously. I trust the patterns that reveal themselves across hours, days and weeks, not just the moment another person happens to witness.
The world may only see the outside.
We know there is always more.
Kristy Forbes | inTune Pathways