All the ways my PDA son is NOT autistic

Ok, to be honest, he's very autistic presenting. It probably helps that he love trains, talks about trains, squeals with delight when we ride trains, and just generally waves his autism flag high and proud. He's adorable.

But this week I read Elizabeth Newsom's 2003 article for the first time where she definitively made the case for PDA being a developmental disorder that is distinct from autism but shares overlapping traits. As I understand it, she'd named PDA over a decade earlier and had been working on it for much of her career. But the 2003 paper was based on thorough quantitative data and was the first to lend true legitimacy to PDA being an actual, real thing (not just bad parenting).

I've been thinking about how she thought PDA to be separate from autism and how my son certainly has some traits that could have jeopardized his autism diagnosis had his doctor known about them:

1. He doesn't avoid shared attention. Instead, he DEMANDS it. "Mama, are you looking? Are you looking mama? Mama! Mama! ARE YOU LOOOOOKING?". I'm sitting right next to him looking at the exact same thing he's looking at the whole time.

2. He doesn't live in his own head. If anything, he seems to want to live inside my head. As an introvert I find this somewhat painful.

3. He does well with back-and-forth conversation. So long as he gets to choose the topic of conversation (trains, haha). But his conversations are real, reciprocal conversations. He's not lecturing the person he's talking to. He wants their input and he listens and responds to what they say.

4. He doesn't do better with structure and routine. Ok, he does. But only if he comes up with the routine. Anything else he sees as an attempt to control him.

5. He is capable of role playing and imaginative pretend play. I'm pretty sure he thinks there's a real life talking, thinking Thomas train out there on the island of Sodor.

I know the current thinking is that PDA is a profile of autism, but after reading this paper I'm more and more thinking of my son being autistic AND PDA. Either way, I'm so grateful to Elizabeth Newsom. The 2003 paper seems to have been her final professional contribution, a culmination of decades of work with autistic children. She died in 2014.

A couple of other interesting things. She found the male to female sex ratio for PDAers to be an equal 1:1. Very different from typical autism. Also, my favorite quote from the paper: "IQ in these children tends to be meaningless because of the severe demand avoidance". Haha, good to know PDAers have always been too clever to let on how smart they really are!