More thoughts on PDA and the intersection of privilege.
It's not "low demand" parenting for us. It's just.... parenting.
For a family who experiences marginalization... there are extra considerations around "low demand" parenting that would be discussed if we centered the conversation differently (I am using low demand in quotes because I said in a previous comment, for us this was just..... parenting.).
I remember my very first time I was like "wait.. is this not how all kids are? all parents?", and the way me and A- were treated accordingly. Especially me, as a BIPOC parent.
It was the summer, and A- must have just turned 2. We either didn't know he was autistic or were still figuring out what that meant for him. And he loved jumping in puddles. Gross NYC puddles. Oh and I was too weak to pick him up and carry him.
So, multiple times that summer he would jump in puddles and multiple times I'd have people come over to my face and yell at me, about how disgusting it was that I was letting him play in puddles. It didn't occur to me that with most other kids you could say "get out of the puddle" and they would understand you, and get out (or argue back, or get mad at you, or cry, or you'd set a timer, or a bribe, or whatever, but there was some way to get kids out of puddles) (this was just as lockdown was ending so we hadn't had much experience seeing other parents with similar age kids).
I remember saying "YOU get him out of the puddle" (like... duh that isn't possible) and the person yelling back at me "YOU ARE THE PARENT! YOU ARE THE PARENT!", implying I just had to control this uncontrollable situation.
There is a race component here, and I won't describe all of it. Suffice it to say that our family is hyper visible. And me and A-, as non-white people, invite way more direct comments than white people do. For example, we often noticed that when Daniel (white guy) was with A-, people maaay make comments but muttered under their breath, unlike me where they'd just come up to me and say whatever the hell is on their mind.
It was also a moment where I started looking around at other parents with kids, or daycare providers with kids, and realized that most kids just comply, for some weird reason. Or they at least understand. They'd hold those weird bright orange ropes and walk in lines. They'd leave the playground - albeit crying and screaming, but often holding a parent's hand and walking while crying and screaming. Or a parent would be talking to a kid offering them promises of ice cream to convince them to leave, or a timer that they'd listen to. So I guess this is when I realized we did "low demand" parenting (although I still hadn't heard the term) because we had to. AND that this opened the door to serious judgement.
But it's more than just judgement - there are real potential consequences to marginalized families - to other families far more than ours.
Earlier this year there was a small medical thing that we thought A- would have to do by law if state policy or something (not giving details to protect privacy). But it was SO CLEAR that this would be impossible for A- to do. Like - medical trauma impossible. So, like with everything, our desire is to not make A- do this thing.
But we are already a family who adopted - which puts us under more scrutiny as it should - and with a non-speaking autistic kid where we've chosen to go against ALL the advice of the system. Which will put us under more scrutiny too, at some point I'm sure.
So - we had to sit down and really think through the consequence of CPS being involved in our family. Because that, we felt, was our choice - we force A- to do this thing which would cause serious trauma, or we prepare for CPS. I did try to call the government agency to figure out if CPS would even be called as a consequence and got very obscure responses.
Luckily, we have this amazing couples therapist who has both personal and professional experience with the foster care system and CPS and so we spent an entire therapy session having her talk through with us what the consequences would be and how to make sure we have all our ducks in a row, including that she said she would happily write a report on how we are making the best parenting choices for our kid, we wrote out a "journal" with all the dates and times and the proactive actions we took, and we had a plan to have our OT write a report too if needed. It seems like everything has blown over (but who knows! Maybe we'll still get a call in 2 years from now!). That is the kind of thing we have to do in order to center A-'s needs.
And other families, with less privilege than ours, time and resources to understand and mitigate risks (and possibly our own family the older A- gets and the taller and more "threatening" people see him as) definitely have starker consequences for simply parenting in a way that centers their kids need for autonomy.