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While many educators use Declarative Language on a regular basis, some parents may not have even heard of it—until they are told they have a child with something like PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance or Pervasive Drive for Autonomy). If you are not familiar with declarative language, it is when you make a comment or statement about a situation rather than a direct command. For example, in imperative language you might say “Give daddy a hug,” but if you wanted to use declarative language instead, you might say “Oh look! Daddy just came home.” This gives the child the space to come to their own conclusion about what they might want to do in response to the situation.
Declarative language is often recommended to parents with the best of intentions—they have just learned how the kid is wired and the experts are trying to give helpful strategies to manage life at home. But often we are so focused on meeting the needs of the child that we can forget about the parent’s wiring and overwhelm and anxiety levels at the time we are making this recommendation. If they have an autistic child with a PDA profile and the family is recently coming to terms with this, chances are high that things have been rather stressful at home. Their child may have frequent meltdowns and may be violent towards them or other kids in the family or with classmates at school. The child has not been responding well to conventional parenting advice and so the parent may be feeling constantly judged by other parents because their child is so ‘poorly behaved.’ Now the parents are being asked to completely change the way they communicate with their child, as though they can simply flip a switch and use a brand new communication style. And if you’re in a hurry? Too bad! Now you’re not supposed to ask Johnny to just put his shoes on. Instead, let’s take an hour to sit and wonder out loud about what we might want to be doing to get ready to go… Then you have to factor in the overwhelm. Remember that when we are already in a state of overwhelm, we are not in the best place to learn new things. If your house is burning down and someone starts to give you a lesson on investment strategies, you are not likely to retain anything you have been told. And yet we still are prone to introducing declarative language to parents in a very academic way that does not always take into account where the parents are at when they are getting this information. I remember the first time I read about declarative language for PDA. I saw one of those infographics that is supposed to make everything simple and easy to digest. But almost immediately, I felt annoyed. As an autistic person, I tend towards very literal thinking and a direct, straightforward communication style. As soon as I saw phrases like “disguise all demands” and “phrase any requests indirectly” I wondered if the whole thing had been created by someone who was manipulative and passive aggressive. “That’s not how I communicate,” I remember thinking, and more importantly, it didn’t sound like a communication style I had any desire to emulate. Luckily, that was just my first impression and I was not in a state of complete overwhelm at the time, so I dug into it further and started to get a more accurate sense of what it was really about. But it still took some practice to master given my innate bluntness and tendency towards a no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point communication style. My literal thinking also got in the way. To me, the term ‘declarative’ did not make immediate intuitive sense. As one of my clients put it later ‘it sounds like it would be the opposite of what it is—like you are declaring something for all the world to hear.’ As many autistic people are direct communicators and literal thinkers, I think this is a pretty common clash that people initially face with declarative language. It is asking more of us than it is of people who are more comfortable with indirect communication. It is a stronger demand on parents who may have some demand avoidance issues of their own. Lately I have just been calling it the “I wonder” communication style, because defining that way it seems to be easier for my clients to remember how to use it. And starting a sentence with “I wonder” doesn’t feel sideways or manipulative—instead it registers as thoughtful and curious. Then there is the whole idea of modeling. In Linda K. Murphy’s book Declarative Language Handbook, she recommends things like admitting your mistakes out loud in front of your kids and then troubleshooting out loud what you will do to correct the mistake. “Oops, I forgot to get food ready ahead of time for dinner tonight. Let’s see…what are some things we could eat that don’t need much prep time?” Now personally, I love this idea and resonated with it right away. But I am a more talkative person (at least with people that I like). I have found that this can also be a big ask for my clients who prefer to keep their thoughts to themselves though, especially if what you are asking them to speak out loud is something that they did wrong. People don’t always want to draw attention to their mistakes. I still think that if a child is getting triggered every time they make a mistake and they find it unbearable to ‘mess up’ in any way, it is incredibly helpful to have a loved one modeling that it’s ok to make mistakes and to show them how to step through that and make it right again. But consider that a child’s tendency to find mistakes unbearable may have actually been influenced by a parents discomfort with making mistakes. So asking a parent to start doing that may be intensely triggering the parent. They may feel really exposed by doing so. Again, it can be a BIG demand to make of them. So taking all of this into consideration, I think the thing to remember is that it is not just all about the child. The parents are going through a lot and have perhaps been masking their own neurodivergence for a lifetime (often without even knowing they were doing so). There is so much to process and rethink. You can’t just tell them what to do for their child all at once and think that is enough. The information is usually best delivered in small pieces to accommodate for the overwhelm and processing time many parents will need to start incorporating the ideas. You need to be sensitive and attentive to what is triggering the parents as they start using declarative language and adjust your pace accordingly. Let them know it’s ok to just try it out here and there in ways that feel the most natural to them, and to take breaks from it when they need to. We all need to go at our own pace!
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