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Low-Demand Parenting: Dropping Demands, Restoring Calm, and Finding Connection with your Uniquely Wired Child
"Low-demand parenting requires radical acceptance. It says to the kid right in front of you, I see you, just as you are. - You are ok here. I love you right here." Parent to neurodivergent children and autistic adult, Amanda Diekman, outlines a parenting approach that finally lowers the bar for the whole family, enabling the equilibrium of the home to be restored. Low-demand parenting allows you to drop the demands and expectations that are making family life impossible and embrace the joyful freedom of living life with low demands. It can be a particularly effective approach for children with high anxiety levels including neurodivergent children. Amanda talks from experience and teaches you how to identify what the big, tiny and invisible demands are for your own child and gives you the step-by-step instructions on how to drop them. Full of practical resources and scripts that are easy to implement in busy everyday life, this book is your flashlight and your map to parenting your uniquely wired child. It will not tell you where to go, but it will help you find your way so you and your family thrive.
160 pages, Paperback
Published July 21, 2023
13 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 5, 2023
This book is SO rich!! I’m an OT and this book is going to the top of my resource list for families struggling. We so often focus our interventions on changing the child and the emphasis in this book on changing the environment and task demands is the missing piece of supporting so many of our neurodivergent kiddos (and beyond!).
Amanda is a truly gifted writer and her authenticity she shares online is just as powerful in this book. Full of practical examples and ways to apply to your own specific difficulties. I can’t wait for my hard copy to arrive!!
Amanda is a truly gifted writer and her authenticity she shares online is just as powerful in this book. Full of practical examples and ways to apply to your own specific difficulties. I can’t wait for my hard copy to arrive!!
December 18, 2024
I took notes, with page numbers, as I read. They are appended below.
16 My kids are doing their best, all the time. I am doing my best, all the time. Hard disagree. Sometimes I am overwhelmed or overstimulated and I act in ways my better self doesn't want. Those times, I am doing my best, despite falling short of my own expectations. Sometimes I know I'm being unreasonable, bitchy, unnecessarily mean, deliberately rude, or intentionally lazy. I make a choice to engage in behaviors that are not "my best." I am not doing my best, on purpose, because I have decided to do something else instead. It is absurd to think anyone is always one thing or the other. Nobody does their best all the time. That's nonsense.
17 radical acceptance. Yes, this is in line with Biblical theology. We don't have to "do our best" to be loved an accepted exactly as we are. We are beloved the way we are created. Radical acceptance of our children is a reflection of Our Father's radical love for them.
21 connection and trust are the core of good parenting. I also agree with this. We teach our children how to be in the world, and how to be the best version of themselves. To do that well, we have to deeply understand who our children are, and they have to believe that we are looking out for their real best interests.
32 healthy, firm boundaries. She keeps saying boundaries and then describing rules. "In control" of what? Of whom? Boundaries are around ourselves and our own behaviors. It's good to have firm boundaries, or else you end up being a punching bag, even if only unintentionally. A "firm rule" is telling another person what they can or cannot do, a "firm boundary" is telling another person what YOU will or will not do. Autonomy for everyone means you ALSO get autonomy, which includes boundaries like, "If you are screaming, I need to go in a different room" and "I will not pay for a Wi-Fi hotspot."
64 Meeting your own needs. Your child doesn't have to do anything differently. This is spectacular advice. To the extent possible, absolutely, figure out how to get your needs met in ways you can control. And you can't control other people.
68 House rules I do a lot of explicitly stating "house rules" so I agree with the concept of making your expectations explicit. A lot of my house rules aren't actually rules, but 4 of her "rules" aren't rules, either. And she's not internally consistent in this section. Her complaint about "we keep each other safe" being a demand makes me roll my eyes. "I won't let you hit another person" is a boundary, and a reasonable one at that. And yes, it contains the expectation that everyone deserves to be physically safe. But that's, again, a very reasonable expectation. And please, "Ask for help if you need it" is a demand, too. So why does she think that's a reasonable thing to say, but it's not reasonable to say "I won't let you hurt me or your siblings"?
82 The orchestra conductor metaphor she deploys stinks. Orchestra members don't choose what songs they play.
90 Not monitoring or controlling your children's screen content is like letting your toddler crawl around on the floor of a machine shop. It's only a matter of time before they "explore" something that will harm them. You can decide that they are allowed to have their screens as many hours a day as they want them, but absolutely what they do on those screens should be monitored and controlled. And all of this discussion of "as much screen time as they want" ignores powerful forces that are working to keep eyeballs attached to content endlessly. I have unintentionally wasted many evenings on digital content rabbit holes when I didn't really "choose" to spend those hours scrolling. I know my behavior was manipulated into that endless consumption cycle. True, shame would be a bad motivator to stop (all the psych research says so), but the endless scroll is not "helping heal" my exhaustion. It's praying on my exhaustion as vulnerability, to keep me searching for another dopamine hit.
99 If the kids throws a tablet and it breaks, and there doesn't have to be a meaningful life lesson. That's a lot of privilege. If my kid throws a tablet and it breaks, we can't afford a new one, so there's a natural consequence even if there doesn't need to be a lesson.
121 Low-demand partnering also looks like it requires a lot of privilege. 2 cars. Pay for the unlimited mobile wi-fi so the kids never have to stop their games. Hired staff to do the stuff you can't. Stay at home parent. You're not asking your spouse to do anything differently! You're just paying for the privilege of doing things the low-demand way you want to.
Ok, that's a lot of details. On a "big picture" level, my problem with Diekman's approach is that her children will never, ever be able to be independent adults. Yes, we should parent towards the liberation values we hold, and we should do what we can to shift the world to be more just and inclusive. However, at the same time, we also have to teach our kids to survive in the real world as it actually exists during this lifetime. We live in a capitalist society, and so adults have to have money. They can hold jobs, where their bosses will demand something. Or they can be entrepreneurs, where their clients will demand something. Or maybe they will be too disabled to do either of those things, in which case they'll have a caseworker who will demand something. There are demands in the real world, and so we can't prepare our kids for adulthood by just never, ever, ever making any demands of them.
There's also the detail that Diekman's oldest child, at the time of publishing this book, is only in early elementary school, and she's only been doing the low-demand approach she espouses in the book for about about a year. I suppose a lot of people are looking for an accessible book that tells them how to successfully and lovingly parent their PDA child. But I feel skeptical about extrapolating "this specific choice worked one year when my PDA child was 8" to "this specific choice is the right one for every single circumstance with a PDA child."
16 My kids are doing their best, all the time. I am doing my best, all the time. Hard disagree. Sometimes I am overwhelmed or overstimulated and I act in ways my better self doesn't want. Those times, I am doing my best, despite falling short of my own expectations. Sometimes I know I'm being unreasonable, bitchy, unnecessarily mean, deliberately rude, or intentionally lazy. I make a choice to engage in behaviors that are not "my best." I am not doing my best, on purpose, because I have decided to do something else instead. It is absurd to think anyone is always one thing or the other. Nobody does their best all the time. That's nonsense.
17 radical acceptance. Yes, this is in line with Biblical theology. We don't have to "do our best" to be loved an accepted exactly as we are. We are beloved the way we are created. Radical acceptance of our children is a reflection of Our Father's radical love for them.
21 connection and trust are the core of good parenting. I also agree with this. We teach our children how to be in the world, and how to be the best version of themselves. To do that well, we have to deeply understand who our children are, and they have to believe that we are looking out for their real best interests.
32 healthy, firm boundaries. She keeps saying boundaries and then describing rules. "In control" of what? Of whom? Boundaries are around ourselves and our own behaviors. It's good to have firm boundaries, or else you end up being a punching bag, even if only unintentionally. A "firm rule" is telling another person what they can or cannot do, a "firm boundary" is telling another person what YOU will or will not do. Autonomy for everyone means you ALSO get autonomy, which includes boundaries like, "If you are screaming, I need to go in a different room" and "I will not pay for a Wi-Fi hotspot."
64 Meeting your own needs. Your child doesn't have to do anything differently. This is spectacular advice. To the extent possible, absolutely, figure out how to get your needs met in ways you can control. And you can't control other people.
68 House rules I do a lot of explicitly stating "house rules" so I agree with the concept of making your expectations explicit. A lot of my house rules aren't actually rules, but 4 of her "rules" aren't rules, either. And she's not internally consistent in this section. Her complaint about "we keep each other safe" being a demand makes me roll my eyes. "I won't let you hit another person" is a boundary, and a reasonable one at that. And yes, it contains the expectation that everyone deserves to be physically safe. But that's, again, a very reasonable expectation. And please, "Ask for help if you need it" is a demand, too. So why does she think that's a reasonable thing to say, but it's not reasonable to say "I won't let you hurt me or your siblings"?
82 The orchestra conductor metaphor she deploys stinks. Orchestra members don't choose what songs they play.
90 Not monitoring or controlling your children's screen content is like letting your toddler crawl around on the floor of a machine shop. It's only a matter of time before they "explore" something that will harm them. You can decide that they are allowed to have their screens as many hours a day as they want them, but absolutely what they do on those screens should be monitored and controlled. And all of this discussion of "as much screen time as they want" ignores powerful forces that are working to keep eyeballs attached to content endlessly. I have unintentionally wasted many evenings on digital content rabbit holes when I didn't really "choose" to spend those hours scrolling. I know my behavior was manipulated into that endless consumption cycle. True, shame would be a bad motivator to stop (all the psych research says so), but the endless scroll is not "helping heal" my exhaustion. It's praying on my exhaustion as vulnerability, to keep me searching for another dopamine hit.
99 If the kids throws a tablet and it breaks, and there doesn't have to be a meaningful life lesson. That's a lot of privilege. If my kid throws a tablet and it breaks, we can't afford a new one, so there's a natural consequence even if there doesn't need to be a lesson.
121 Low-demand partnering also looks like it requires a lot of privilege. 2 cars. Pay for the unlimited mobile wi-fi so the kids never have to stop their games. Hired staff to do the stuff you can't. Stay at home parent. You're not asking your spouse to do anything differently! You're just paying for the privilege of doing things the low-demand way you want to.
Ok, that's a lot of details. On a "big picture" level, my problem with Diekman's approach is that her children will never, ever be able to be independent adults. Yes, we should parent towards the liberation values we hold, and we should do what we can to shift the world to be more just and inclusive. However, at the same time, we also have to teach our kids to survive in the real world as it actually exists during this lifetime. We live in a capitalist society, and so adults have to have money. They can hold jobs, where their bosses will demand something. Or they can be entrepreneurs, where their clients will demand something. Or maybe they will be too disabled to do either of those things, in which case they'll have a caseworker who will demand something. There are demands in the real world, and so we can't prepare our kids for adulthood by just never, ever, ever making any demands of them.
There's also the detail that Diekman's oldest child, at the time of publishing this book, is only in early elementary school, and she's only been doing the low-demand approach she espouses in the book for about about a year. I suppose a lot of people are looking for an accessible book that tells them how to successfully and lovingly parent their PDA child. But I feel skeptical about extrapolating "this specific choice worked one year when my PDA child was 8" to "this specific choice is the right one for every single circumstance with a PDA child."
November 19, 2024
The intro to this was welcoming and made me invested in reading the entire book. Definitely shifts some ways of looking at things and encourages some introspective thinking on my "whys". Definitely leaves me with more questions than answers but everyone's parenting journey is different so that is to be expected.
February 13, 2025
Amanda Diekman has such compassion and love for her children. That is thoroughly evident in this book. There were many helpful concepts & ideas. Although many are nuanced specifically for their family situation & life. It’s a great starter for getting yourself thinking and doing some of the work, but there’s also some parts that just didn’t sit quite right. Chapter 9 was nearly impossible to get through, as unlimited screen time is harmful to children and adults. That’s not opinion, that is fact. To stand against the many experts in this so vehemently was problematic for me. I do not have a problem with someone choosing that for their own family, but to repeatedly recommend others drop all limits on what type of games can be played and/or how often children are consuming screen-based media is an issue. Also to say something like, “if the child breaks the tablet it’s not an issue as it can be replaced” (paraphrase) speaks to a privilege not everyone has.
That being said, I still think this book is worth a listen/read to see the amount of demands a person faces in their daily life and how we as caregivers and nurturers can help our PDA kids & all the ways we can drop demands. It’s a great opportunity to look at what’s important to you and why it’s important. A great starting point for seeing what perfectionistic or unnecessary societal ideals we can drop. Just be sure to take things with a healthy dose of salt.
That being said, I still think this book is worth a listen/read to see the amount of demands a person faces in their daily life and how we as caregivers and nurturers can help our PDA kids & all the ways we can drop demands. It’s a great opportunity to look at what’s important to you and why it’s important. A great starting point for seeing what perfectionistic or unnecessary societal ideals we can drop. Just be sure to take things with a healthy dose of salt.
June 19, 2023
I wish every parent and parent to be could read this book! This low demand approach for families is just what is needed in today’s society which leaves so many families exhausted and burned out with no idea what to do next. This low demand approach has infused joy and peace into our home for my kids and my partner and I. I wish hospitals could hand it out to new families to read. Amanda’s book provides practical examples and ways to incorporate the low demand approach into your day to day life which I found super helpful! I will be gifting this to all my Mama friends and new mama friends for years to come.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 8, 2024
This was an excellent book! If parents of Autistic children only read one parenting book, I think I'd recommend this one. I'm also an Autistic parent and had come to many of the same conclusions, but had never seen the process of dropping demands laid out as clearly as Amanda Diekman does in this book.
Highly recommend!
Highly recommend!
May 27, 2024
Every neurodivergent family should read this book (maybe even NT ones). This is a must read for parents of kids with PDA or any kind of extreme demand avoidance.
June 7, 2025
2* and I feel that's generous.
Whilst the general concept of low demand is worth considering this book is on a level that doesn't sit right with me. This all just screamed lazy parenting to me.
Whilst the general concept of low demand is worth considering this book is on a level that doesn't sit right with me. This all just screamed lazy parenting to me.
June 23, 2025
A helpful different angle to look at why we do things as parents. Ultimately what makes a good parent is meeting a child's needs regardless of how that looks to outsiders.
August 31, 2025
Really good account and guide from one family’s perspective & experience. Loved that she shared about her own mental state during parenting. I found this helpful & to the point. Worth the read!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews