Reflections
Essays from Kristy Forbes exploring PDA, autistic experience, parenting, identity, care, systems and the ordinary moments that shape family life.
Your Caring Is Not the Problem: Supporting a Child Through PDA Burnout
One of the things I've observed throughout my years of working with PDA families, and experienced in my own life as a parent, is just how readily parents are held responsible for their children's distress.
We're told th...
Making room for life when crisis keeps returning
Some families experience a crisis, move through it, and eventually return to the life they knew before.
And then there are families for whom crisis is something that keeps returning.
There may be periods of relative ca...
I Stopped Reading Only the Outside and I Started Trusting What I Couldn’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...
Our Family Culture Does Not Need to Make Sense to Outsiders
Families like mine are watched closely.
How we eat, sleep, learn, wash, leave the house, spend time together and speak to one another is often measured against a very particular idea of what family life should look l...
I Stopped Waiting for Things to Get Easier
There have been many times in our family where life felt so hard and stayed feeling so hard for much longer than I expected it to.
I would spend weeks thinking that once we got through a particular thing, once everyo...
I Have Never Trusted the Panic Around Screens
I have never trusted the panic around screens.
Screens aren't harmless. But every child's relationship with gaming, YouTube, social media, streaming, chatting, scrolling, or online worlds is also not automatically un...
I Stopped Getting Up to Play. I Started Playing From the Floor.
There was a long stretch of years where I believed I was failing my children because I couldn't get up.
I'd absorbed all the messaging about play. Get on the floor. Follow their lead. Be animated, be available, enter...
Am I more than neurodivergent?
In order to identify as neurodivergent, I have first had to understand what I diverge from.
Most people hear the term neurodivergent and hear that I am diverging from ‘typical’.
Typical neurobiology.
But typical does not ex...
I never want to forget.
This is an image of me, deep in the trenches, around a decade ago.
My husband would message from work each day and ask how 'things' were.
Some days, I couldn't speak. I'd send pictures. This was one of those days, and ...
Our child is struggling with demand avoidance and cannot complete simple, familiar tasks.
I've been reflecting on a powerful concept we discussed in our recent Q&A from inTune with PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance).
The art of living in the now, especially when supporting our children. I relate to this dee...