Girls who ‘can’t help won’t’

Fidler, Ruth

doi:10.4324/9781351234429-12

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Thoseractices identified by researchers and clinicians as helpful in EDA include increasing certainty (Stuart et al, 2020) or developing ways to manage uncertainty, increasing demand tolerance, teaching alternative skills (Grahame et al, 2020), masking demands, promoting interests, offering choice (Duncan et al, 2011), using agreed upon rewards, using low demand, avoiding reinforcing avoidance, using low arousal, picking battles, using indirect language, focusing on non-verbal cues, managing adult expectations (Eaton and Weaver, 2020), avoiding head-on confrontation (Fidler and Christie, 2015), using variety, mystery and novelty, complex language, anxiety reduction strategies, role-play, visuals to depersonalise demands, providing a safe space, building self-awareness and self-esteem and having a keyworker system who is calm and where the relationship is based on trust, intuition, flexibility and adaptability (Christie, 2007). Fidler (2019) notes an emphasis on whole-school wellbeing is important. O'Nions and identified that in the specific context of completing an assessment with a child, psychologists benefit from being adaptable, following the child's lead, inviting the child to help, and including humour and choice.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practicing psychologists’ accounts of demand avoidance and extreme demand avoidance in children and adolescents

Haire,

Symonds,

Senior

et al. 2023

Front. Educ.

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The construct of pathological or extreme demand avoidance (EDA) is used to describe the experience of avoiding demands and having an extreme need for control. However, the EDA construct is contested by researchers and educational psychology practitioners. To investigate the utility and validity of the construct of EDA, this qualitative study explored psychologists’ experience and conceptualisation of demand avoidance and extreme demand avoidance, and their approach to working with children and adolescents who avoid demands. Online semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 psychologists (female = 9) working in private, education and disability services. Thematic analysis yielded six themes: (i) reason for the psychologists’ involvement, (ii) psychologists understanding of child’s presentation, (iii) psychologists’ focus in supporting the child, (iv) challenges for psychologists, (v) enablers for psychologists and (vi) success for psychologists. Results indicated that psychologists do not view the construct of EDA as necessary for their work and achieve success with children who avoid demands by drawing on range of approaches focusing on the underlying needs of those children.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practicing psychologists’ accounts of demand avoidance and extreme demand avoidance in children and adolescents

Haire,

Symonds,

Senior

et al. 2023

Front. Educ.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Pathological demand avoidance: What and who are being pathologised and in whose interests?

Moore

2020

Global Studies of Childhood

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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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Girls who ‘can’t help won’t’

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Practicing psychologists’ accounts of demand avoidance and extreme demand avoidance in children and adolescents

Practicing psychologists’ accounts of demand avoidance and extreme demand avoidance in children and adolescents

Pathological demand avoidance: What and who are being pathologised and in whose interests?

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