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The term ‘pathological demand avoidance’ was first coined in 1983. In recent years, diagnostic tools have emerged to enable practitioners to identify, name and treat pathological demand avoidance and, at least in the United Kingdom, there is an increasing number of children who attract this label. In addition to what are defined as the core ‘deficits’ of autism, including assumed difficulties in social communication, difficulties in social interaction and restrictive interests, children with pathological demand avoidance are thought to have an extreme anxiety-driven need to control their environment and control the demands and expectations of others. This article will argue that we must exercise extreme caution in accepting the validity of pathological demand avoidance and will suggest that it can be seen as an attempt to psychiatarise autistic children’s resistance, which, in so doing, restricts their agency. First, it will draw on the arguments put forward by some autistic scholars who have claimed that pathological demand avoidance is better understood as rational demand avoidance – an understandable and rational response to the circumstances that one finds oneself in. Second, it will consider the intersection between autism and childhood. When one of the defining characteristics of pathological demand avoidance is an inability to recognise and, presumably, respect social hierarchy, children’s competencies as social actors and active meaning makers of their world can easily become pathologised as defiance. Finally, the article will address the intersections of autism, childhood and gender. Girls are much less likely to be diagnosed as having an autism spectrum condition than boys are, with a ratio traditionally estimated at approximately 1:4. However, pathological demand avoidance diagnoses are fairly evenly spread between boys and girls. It will be argued that it is girls’ resistance to the ordinary and everyday demands of her as a girl and her subsequent rejection or transgression of those expectations that is being pathologised.

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The term 'participation' is often used to refer to children and young people's involvement in decision-making processes but it also denotes the individual decisions that they make about their everyday lives. With regards to sexuality, children and young people are routinely excluded from policy formation and decision-making processes, due to assumptions about their sexual immaturity and lack of competence.

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In spite of the rhetoric of children’s participation in the public sphere, in their everyday life interactions young children’s rights continue to be denied or given entitlement on the basis of assumptions about the social category to which they belong, and opportunities continue to be missed to make links between the everyday and the societal, political and legal contexts by those wishing to further children’s participation rights. Drawing on the sociology of Norbert Elias, particularly his concept of “habitus” and “drag effect” we will explore the dissonance between the public and private status of young children’s rights and suggest ways that this might be remedied. The paper will conclude by arguing that it is important to work towards young children’s increased participation rights in their everyday lives because adults must acknowledge young children’s moral competence to participate in decisions about their everyday lives in order to develop children’s agency to do so.

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