Jul 14, 20244 min read

What are common strengths of Autistic PDAers?

Members of the Yequana tribe of the Amazon performing ceremony. — Credit: Alcida R. Ramos (1989)

In her remarkable book The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost (first published in 1975), Jean Liedloff describes the infant and child-rearing practices of the Yequana tribe of the Amazon. At the time of Liedloff's visits, the Yequana had minimal contact with the outside world, and maintained a pure hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Liedloff’s argument is that Yequana children - and adults - were living “on their evolutionary continuum.” In other words, life outside the womb matched what their bodies and brains expected from a million years of human evolution. We in the industrial world, by contrast, are living “off our continuum.”

I first read the book when I was pregnant, but rereading it now as a parent to a PDA child I am blown away by the near-exact correlation between what Liedloff saw as the norm in raising children in a foraging society and what we in the West call low demand parenting and PDA accommodations.

Yequana kids are intrinsically trusted and have near-total amounts of autonomy within the container of the group. Babies are fully integrated into life, spending a year “in arms,” where they cue their mothers when they need to sleep or eat. Toddlers' and children’s learning is contextual, purposeful, and hands-on, and there is nothing in the way of their instinct to participate in what the community needs. Learning is all by doing, mimicking, moving, making, walking, listening, experimenting.Children are not on a schedule, and simply duck in & out of mimicking adults or engaging in free play outside the rigid control of anyone. They choose their playmates of all ages. There is no violent conflict between children, and from toddlerhood the children naturally keep themselves safe. Parents co-regulate, influence by example, & collaborate with their children’s innate nature to be contributing social mammals. There are no rewards, punishments, narrations, coersions, or pushing kids towards developmental milestones. And there are no meltdowns, power struggles, burnout, anxiety or depression.

In Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About The Lost Art of Raising Happy, Healthy Little Humans, Michaeleen Doucleff takes her toddler with her to live with the Hadza in Tanzania, the Maya in Mexico, and the Inuit in the Arctic.

While many of these families have modern technology and kids go to school, they are also heirs to unbroken chains of ancestral wisdom on child rearing with remarkably similar principles to the Yequana. While neurodivergence, disability, & different rates of development exist across human populations, both Liedloff and Doucleff report that the kinds of parent-child power struggles, mental health crises, and meltdowns so common for us Westerners are near non-existent in the populations they visit.

In one of the many lines in these books that made my PDA parent jaw drop, Doucleff explains that “These parents have a relationship with their kids based on cooperation instead of conflict, trust instead of fear, and personalized needs instead of standardized developmental milestones.”

Sound familiar?

What we in the West are calling PDA accommodations may be us doing our best to reclaim a relationship with our children and ourselves that is as ancient as our species.

In fact, the evidence suggests that all human nervous systems (not just PDAers) evolved for deep autonomy within social groups in which we have relationships based on mutual trust. While I am convinced PDA is an underlying neurology that exists across the world, I do think the disabling aspects of our threat response are not “natural” to us, but the result of living with our particular nervous systems in a high demand/low autonomy culture.

Let me be very careful here, though, to make two points: First: I am certainly not claiming that all disability is socially constructed. If you are PDA with accompanying cognitive or physical disability, those disabilities don’t change based on cultural context. Second, I want to be very, very clear that Western parents do not cause their PDA child’s disability. We are fighting uphill to support our kids against an entire cultural context that is disabling them.

Why am I telling you all this before I share my nice long list of common PDA strengths?

Well, first because I have an enduring special interest in evolution, cultural anthropology and evolutionary psychology and I’m thrilled to bring these passions into conversation with PDA. But I’m really telling you so you know how much I believe in PDAers’ strengths and our innate ability to thrive.

Can we thrive as effortlessly as a Yequana child in 1975?

Probably not.

But are there accommodations that can get us closer to our evolutionary continuum even within a Western cultural context?

Absolutely.

Do I believe that many of these accommodations would be healthy for all children & adults?

Yes. And so do Liedloff & Doucleff.

Does any of this evolutionary context change my belief that PDA is best understood as a nervous system disability for those of us reading this post? No.

But I do want to argue that we as PDA adults & parents of PDAers can use this evolutionary perspective to help us TRUST. Trust that the innate nature of PDA humans is to learn, grow, & thrive & that we need to collaborate & accommodate, not push, for this nature to manifest. When we are in the right environments, our strengths will shine.

Common strengths of Autistic PDAers when we feel safe:

In the realm of Creativity:

Creative problem solver

Fixer, tinkerer, crafter, maker, artist

Imaginative

Great at role play

Out-of-the-box thinker

Often completes tasks in novel ways

Creative use of language

Develops new systems

Silly sense of humor

In the realm of Leadership: