What’s actually happening in the nervous system when we lower demands
If you’re parenting a neurodivergent child in burnout, you’ve probably come across low demand parenting somewhere along the way.
Maybe you’re trying it right now, or you’ve been doing it long enough to call yourself a veteran. Either way, most of us who’ve lived this long enough know it helps.
What’s less talked about is why.
What’s actually happening underneath the surface that makes lowering the demands work?
Lowering demands has been one of the biggest shifts in my parenting.
And one of the hardest.
I grew up in a family where hard work and achievement were deeply valued.
Children were expected to listen to adults, stay quiet, contribute, push through, and keep going even when things felt difficult. Those beliefs stayed with me, shaping how I understood responsibility, success, and what it meant to be a good parent.
I’m also someone who naturally carries a lot.
A typical overfunctioner in a crisis, I take things on. I hold things together. Asking for help has never come easily, especially when it feels like I might be inconveniencing someone else.
So when I first began learning about lowering demands, it felt deeply uncomfortable. A part of me worried I was being irresponsible. That I was lowering my standards, or that things might fall apart or I would ruin my children if I loosened my grip.
But burnout changed everything.
When my child went into burnout, the strategies I had always relied on stopped working.
The pushing, the encouraging, the trying to keep things on track- none of it helped.
And slowly, I began to understand something important. When a nervous system is overwhelmed, even small expectations can feel impossible.
Lowering demands wasn’t giving up. It was creating safety.
At first, I let go of a few obvious things. But over time, I became more curious about the invisible expectations we were carrying. The unspoken “shoulds” and the quiet pressures. I started questioning the rules and the roles I lived my life by.
Had these been my idea?
Was this just something I inherited and was repeating because things had always been done this way?
What actually mattered right now?
What could wait?
And in that softening, something shifted. There was more space for connection. For rest and for healing.
Why Low Demand Parenting Works
There’s a reason this isn’t just a soft and fluffy, nice idea that happens to work for some families. It’s rooted in how the nervous system actually responds to stress.
Every demand, however small, is a form of stimulus.
Clinical psychologist Andrew McDonnell, who developed what’s known as the low arousal approach, found that things like demand, noise, refusal, and even surprise act as triggers for physiological arousal, the body’s stress response switching on. Once that response is activated, the parts of the brain responsible for thinking clearly, reasoning, and flexibility come offline. This isn’t a character flaw or a choice. It’s what a stressed nervous system does. And for a child already living close to their capacity, in burnout, it doesn’t take much to tip the system over.
This is also where polyvagal theory helps explain what we’re aiming for.
A nervous system can only access connection, learning, and genuine growth from a state of safety. When we lower demands, we aren’t lowering our belief in our child. We’re reducing the stimulus load enough that their body can come out of a stress response and back into a state where safety and eventually connection becomes possible again. That’s the actual mechanism. Not permissiveness. Physiology.
That’s also why this work asks so much of us as parents too.
We’re often the ones regulating the environment around a dysregulated nervous system, and research into low arousal approaches consistently shows that a caregiver’s own calm has a direct effect on how much a child’s stress response settles.
The Piece About Low Demand Parenting Many Parents Miss
As I have learned more about low demand parenting, I found something I didn’t understand at first, and what I think most parents miss when they first hear the term “low-demand parenting.“
It’s easy to hear “low-demand” and think about it only in terms of demands. Or to make it mean doing less. Fewer chores, fewer expectations, fewer battles at the dinner table.
And that’s part of it. But it isn’t the part that actually changes anything.
The part that changes things is autonomy.
Every demand we place on a child, spoken or unspoken, is really asking the same underlying question.
“How much say do you have in this?”
A direct instruction removes choice in an obvious way. But so does a look, a sigh, a question that needs an answer. Even praise can quietly ask a child to keep performing the thing they were praised for.
We live in a world that assumes adults already know best, and that children should simply fall in line with what we decide.
It’s built into the rules we’ve inherited.
Adults sit above children in the societal hierarchy almost without question. Many of us grew up absorbing the idea that we’re owed a child’s respect and compliance simply by virtue of having lived longer, not because we’ve earned it through how we show up for them.
When I started paying attention to how much say my child actually had in their own day, I understood why lowering demands alone hadn’t been enough.
I had been softening the volume of my expectations without ever handing back the steering wheel. And for a child whose nervous system is already overwhelmed, having no say in what happens to you is its own kind of demand, sometimes the heaviest one in the room.
Restoring a sense of control isn’t a nice extra layered on top of low demand parenting. It’s the thing that actually makes the rest of it work. It’s what tells the nervous system it’s finally safe to stop bracing.
Why I Started Looking at This Through a PDA Lens
My child isn’t formally diagnosed with PDA, pathological demand avoidance, sometimes described as a pervasive drive for autonomy. And in many countries (including mine), PDA is not a formal diagnosis.
But looking at burnout through that lens changed how I understood everything that was happening in our house.
PDA adults describe autonomy not as a preference but as something closer to a survival need, one that can sit above even the basics like eating or sleeping when it’s threatened.
Kristy Forbes, an autistic PDA advocate who has spent years writing from her own lived experience, talks about a lack of agency feeling life-threatening for a PDAer, and about healthy autonomy being what allows emotional growth and identity to develop at all.
That reframed something for me. My child wasn’t being difficult when a request landed like a threat. Their body was responding to something very real.
You don’t need a PDA diagnosis for this lens to be useful.
A child in burnout, whatever the cause, is often living in a similarly overwhelmed nervous system, one where the smallest ask can tip the whole system over. Looking through a PDA lens asks a better question than most parenting advice ever does.
“Not how do I get compliance?” but “How much choice does this child actually have right now, and what happens in their body when that choice disappears?”
Amanda Diekman, who writes and speaks widely on low demand parenting and parents a PDA child herself, describes this work as dropping demands to restore calm and find real connection with the child in front of you, not the child you expected to have.
That’s the shift. Not a technique for better behaviour, but a way of meeting a nervous system where it actually is.
The Demands We Don’t Always See
I can understand why many parents find low-demand parenting daunting. Technically, everything can be a demand.
Once you start looking for demands, you start seeing them everywhere.
And, no, that isn’t you overthinking it.
Demands are far more varied than a straightforward instruction because demands aren’t always what we think.
They are the direct and most obvious ones.
Brush your teeth. Get dressed. Come to the table. These are the demands most of us picture first.
However, when we start widening our lens, we notice the indirect ones, which are harder to spot because they’re rarely phrased as a demand at all.
A question that needs answering. A tidy room that implies it should stay tidy. Even something as gentle as “it’s a nice day for a walk” can land as an expectation to go outside. Or a parent’s disapproval of their child’s gaming, communicated through a look, body language or “you’re not going to play that game all day, are you?” can be heard as “I think you should be doing something better with your time.”
Then there are internal demands, the ones that come from inside a child’s own body. Hunger, thirst, needing the bathroom, waking up in the morning, feeling sick or willing themselves into the shower. No one asked anything out loud, but the cost is still real.
There are demands nested inside demands. Going to the supermarket isn’t one ask. It’s picking appropriate clothing, getting dressed, getting in the car, tolerating the drive, tolerating the other people in the store, lining up at the checkout, speaking to a stranger behind the till, all stacked inside what looked like a single simple errand.
This is before you take into account the extra weight of social expectations and unspoken rules.
And there’s uncertainty itself, which might be the heaviest demand of all. Not knowing what today looks like, how long something will take, what happens next. For a nervous system already trying to predict threat, not knowing can cost more than knowing something hard is coming.
This is what I was reaching for in those quiet questions I kept asking myself. What actually mattered right now? What could wait? What is the cost?
I wasn’t just editing a to-do list. I was learning to see the invisible weight my child was carrying, and asking, with real curiosity, how much of it was mine to lift. Because the truth is that parents, by no intentional fault of our own, can be one big walking demand.
If This is Where You Are
If any of this is landing, I want you to know there’s nothing wrong with you for not seeing it sooner.
Many of us were not taught to look for demands this way. We’re taught to ignore limitations, push through. Abandon your needs, don’t look weak or inconvenience others.
We’re taught to look at and correct behaviour, not understand what’s underneath it.
This month inside From Burnout to Balance, I’ve opened a low-demand parenting channel.
Short videos, a few minutes each, no order required, dropping through the month starting with exactly what we’ve talked about here: why we lower demands in the first place, the different shapes demands can take, and the ones hiding in plain sight that we don’t always think to name.
There’s no rush and no right time to come and find it. It’s there when you’re ready, at whatever pace your family can hold right now.
References and Further Reading
On PDA and autonomy, from lived experience
Kristy Forbes, InTune Pathways — autistic and PDA advocate writing and teaching from her own lived experience, with a strong focus on radical acceptance and autonomy as a core need, not a preference.
https://www.kristyforbes.com.au
Kristy Forbes, PDA resources and courses
https://www.kristyforbes.com.au/pda
Amanda Diekman, Low Demand Parenting — author, autistic adult, and parent of a PDA child, writing and podcasting on dropping demands to restore calm and connection.
https://www.amandadiekman.com
Amanda Diekman, Low Demand Parenting, the book
https://www.amandadiekman.com/book
On the low arousal approach and why lowering demands regulates the body
PDA Society, Low arousal approaches — a plain language guide to Andrew McDonnell’s work, including the evidence that adult emotional regulation directly influences a child’s anxiety and behaviour.
https://www.pdasociety.org.uk/what-helps-guides/pda-approaches/low-arousal-approaches/
McDonnell, A. A., Page, A., Bews-Pugh, S., Morgalla, K. A., Kaur-Johal, T., & Maher, M. (2024). Families’ experiences of the Low Arousal Approach: a qualitative study. Frontiers in Psychology, 15.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1328825/full
Studio3, The evolution of the low arousal approach — McDonnell’s own account of how and why the approach was developed.
https://www.studio3.org/post/the-evolution-of-the-low-arousal-approach
On co-regulation and the parent’s nervous system
Feldman, R. (2012). Parent-infant synchrony: A biobehavioral model of mutual influences in the formation of affiliative bonds. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 77(2), 42-51.
The foundational study behind the biobehavioral synchrony model, showing a caregiver’s own physiological state shapes a child’s developing regulation.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
The theory behind why safety, read through tone, face, and body, is what allows a nervous system to settle.
Abby Medcalf, What is co-regulation? How your nervous system affects every relationship you have — a readable summary of the research above, good for a reader who wants the plain version first.
https://abbymedcalf.com/what-is-co-regulation/
A study on parenting stress specifically, and how it affects the parent-child regulatory bond in real time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6684640/
About The Author
Tanya Valentin is a neuro-affirming family coach, AuDHD parent, author, and podcaster based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She supports parents of Autistic, ADHD, and PDA children through the long middle of burnout recovery.
Drawing on lived experience and trauma-informed practice, her work explores grief, identity, nervous system recovery, and the quiet return to self-trust.
She is the founder of From Burnout to Balance, a membership community for parents navigating neurodivergent family life, and the author of Tiny Anchors: Small Moments of Care for Parents in Burnout.
