Safety, Connection & Play: Parenting Children with PDA profiles
An eight-week live online programme for parents of demand-avoidant children aged 5 to 12
Parenting a demand-avoidant child can feel like living in a minefield. Teeth, dressing, meals, screens, bedtime, getting out of the door: every ordinary request can turn into a standoff, a meltdown, or a child who simply cannot. The reward charts made things worse. Being firmer made things worse. And somewhere along the way, somebody has probably suggested that you are the problem.
This profile is usually called PDA, Pathological Demand Avoidance, though many families prefer Persistent Drive for Autonomy. Whatever you call it, the standard advice fails these children, because the standard advice is built on pressure, and pressure is exactly what their nervous system cannot tolerate.
You are not the problem, and your child is not naughty. What you are living with is a nervous system that experiences everyday demands as a threat. Everything in this programme starts from there, and it works towards one outcome: a more confident way of parenting that supports your child and brings safety and calm back into your home.
What this programme is
This is a live group coaching programme built on three things: knowledge, exploration, and expert coaching. Each week you get a printable module to read in your own time, 30 to 45 minutes, done whenever you get the chance. That’s the knowledge. The live 90-minute session is the exploration: what is actually happening in your home and, with expert coaching, how to use what you are learning to change how you parent. Not tweaks around the edges. A more confident parenting style that supports your PDA child and creates safety and calm within the family home. The material is yours to keep, and by the end it builds into a handbook you can come back to whenever you need it.
Across the eight weeks we cover:
- Why your child’s “no” is really “I can’t”: demand avoidance as a nervous-system response
- Co-regulation, masking, and the after-school explosion
- The family demand audit: which demands stay, which change shape, which can go
- Communication that invites instead of instructs
- Play, humour and novelty: the tools that actually work between 5 and 12
- Meltdown, shutdown and crisis, including with siblings in the house
- Boundaries that genuinely matter, and repair when it goes wrong
- Your own capacity: exhaustion, grief, judgement, and advocacy with schools
Each session includes time in the full group and in small breakout groups. Between sessions you choose one small experiment to try at home. Or you choose not to.
A programme about reducing pressure on your child should not pile pressure on you. Everything here is genuinely optional. That is not a nice sentiment, it is the method.
What this programme is not
This is not group therapy, a diagnostic pathway, or a crisis service. It’s a group coaching programme, grounded in clinical knowledge and lived experience.
This is not behaviour management. It is not about making your child comply. It is about understanding what drives the refusals, the explosions and the shutdowns, so you can respond with more clarity, less self-blame, and more steadiness.
Who this programme is for
Parents and carers of children aged 5 to 12 who:
- resist or avoid everyday demands, even things they want to do
- hold it together at school and explode at home
- go from calm to crisis in seconds, over things that look tiny from the outside
- get described as controlling, defiant or manipulative by people who do not understand them
- have been through the sticker charts, the consequences and the parenting courses, and it all made things worse
A formal diagnosis is not required. PDA is barely recognised and waiting for a label your child may never officially receive is not a plan.
About me
I’m Marion Pilling, a UK-trained consultant psychotherapist and accredited coach specialising in autism, ADHD and demand-sensitive profiles.
I hold a professional diploma in psychotherapy and counselling, a Postgraduate Diploma in CBT, and an MA in Autism from the Tizard Centre at the University of Kent. I’m a trained autism assessor, a member of the International Coaching Federation, and registered in France as a specialist consultant. I’ve worked in this field for over 25 years, as a psychotherapist, researcher and coach.
I’m also a late-diagnosed AuDHD woman, and the parent of two now-adult autistic children. For the first 13 years I raised them as a single parent in France. There was support, but not the right support: psychiatrists and psychoanalytic therapists whose approach was about changing my children, not understanding them. I had to learn the hard way, and it was very hard.
My assessment and one-to-one therapy and coaching clients come mostly by word of mouth, families passing my name to other families. What I bring to this isn’t theory alone. It’s decades of sitting with families, understanding how their children work, and knowing what actually helps when everything else has failed. I can only see so many people one to one, so I built these coaching programmes to reach more families, and so that other parents don’t have to go through what I went through.
“Working with Marion has been an incredibly positive and transformative experience for me as a parent. Her 8-week parental coaching course gave me not only practical tools but also a deep sense of support and understanding. She helped me make sense of my daughter’s PDA profile and autism, and guided me in recognising what lies behind her difficult days and behaviours. Marion gave me strategies that were compassionate, realistic, and effective, from de-escalation techniques to low-demand approaches that reduced conflict at home.
Equally important, Marion reminded me that my own wellbeing matters too. Through her guidance, I’ve learned how to manage stress, prevent burnout, and take care of myself so I can show up as a calmer, more confident parent.
Marion went above and beyond: she listened without judgment, tailored everything to my situation, and always offered encouragement at the moments I needed it most. I am deeply grateful for her expertise, warmth, and dedication. I would wholeheartedly recommend Marion to any parent navigating the challenges of raising a neurodivergent child.”
T.N., parent
The details
- Eight weekly live sessions on Zoom, 90 minutes each
- Tuesdays, 19:30–21:00 CEST, from 1 September to 20 October 2026
- A maximum of eight parents
- Weekly printable modules that build into a handbook you keep
- Self-chosen experiments, never homework
- Cameras can stay off, always
- Lifetime access to all materials
- Sessions are recorded, with replays sent to participants
The cost
€595 as a one-off payment for the full eight weeks, at the founding cohort rate.
Prefer to spread the cost? Pay in three instalments instead. Details are on the sign-up page.
The first instalment secures one of only eight places, so it’s non-refundable, though it carries over to a future cohort if something changes and you can’t take part. The rest is refundable up to four weeks before we start.
I also keep one or two supported places each cohort for families who genuinely can’t manage the full fee, so if that’s you, please ask rather than count yourself out.