Jacks PDA Panda Pin

An extremely dear to my heart piece of jewellery I created is this PDA Panda for my wee man Jack.

Jack is a PDA Autistic and it’s a not so well known profile of the Autism spectrum. PDA stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance. The Panda is the emblem for the PDA society and i wanted to make a bit of jewellery to help raise awareness of this small but significant part of the spectrum hence why I made a panda with a wee heart as we know our PDAers have THE biggest heart hidden underneath.

The word pathological is very important here in that it’s a neurobiology- the brain is wired to go to a threat response to ANY demand – social, direct, internal body demands, expectations etc etc the list goes on to what a DEMAND is. In essence PDAers find the world and it’s environment a hard place to exist in. The environment is KEY to supporting a PDAer and that’s why the Panda is used to represent PDA as the Panda will only thrive in the right environment tailor made to suit its needs. You can see how hard this is for a PDAer to exist in a “normal/neurotypical” society.

The wonderful PDA Society where i first got pointed to when i first discovered this small unknown part of the spectrum and it was a light bulb moment for me and instantly knew this was Jack! Nothing up until that point made clear sense until I came across the PDA society explaining how different the needs are of a PDAer.

The acronym for Panda details how we support a person with PDA :

P – Pick Battles

A – Anxiety Management

N – Negotiation and Collaboration

D – Disguise & Manage Demands

A – Adaptation (mainly humour for jack!)

 30% of continued sales will be donated to the PDA society who support SOOO many families across the UK.

To find out more about PDA please see the website www.pdasociety.org