Fine at School, Falling Apart at Home: What Ivy's Story Taught Me About Emotion Coaching and PDA
I want to share a story with you about a young girl, I'll call her Ivy. I was supporting her parents through parent-coaching, and working collaboratively with her school, and I've changed important details to ensure confidentiality. But the shape of this story will likely be familiar to many of you. I've seen it so many times since.
At school, Ivy was mostly fine. That's the word everyone used, fine. Happy, even. She joined in, she did the work, she sometimes mentioned that things felt hard, and the adults around her would offer a kind word and she'd carry on. Nothing that raised a flag.
At home, the evenings told a different story. Meltdowns that swallowed whole nights. Mornings thick with resistance, shoes refused, tummy aches, refusal to brush teeth, tears getting into the car. Her parents were exhausted and increasingly concerned, because every time they raised it with school, they heard the same thing: we're just not seeing it here.
And the school staff were working hard. They cared about Ivy. They'd put things in place, they were checking in with her regularly. They were exasperated in the way that only people who are genuinely trying can be exasperated: hearing about devastating evenings while looking at a mostly happy child, and wondering what on earth they were missing.
Then one evening, mid-meltdown, Ivy said something to her parents that helped me to identify what might be 'missing' for her at school.
She said she had been telling the adults at school when things were hard. But they 'didn't listen', or they just said, 'you'll be ok.'
I sat with this, I got curious about why
I've thought about "you'll be ok" a lot since then.
It's meant as comfort. I've said it myself more times than I could count, to children, to parents, probably to myself. And the adults saying it to Ivy weren't dismissing her. In their minds, they were reassuring her.
But here's what I think Ivy heard: this conversation is over. Stop telling me. Be ok now.
For a child who masks, who works enormously hard, all day, to look fine, those small bids for help cost a great deal to make. "This is hard" might be the visible two percent of something bigger underneath. When the response is a quick reassurance, however warm, a young person might think: I showed you the edge of it, and you didn't want to see the rest.
Whilst everyone was encouraging her to speak up, she was, but her experience was that it 'didn't work'. What a confusing experience for an Autistic child. I reflected upon Ivy's experience, where not only was she experiencing frustration in attempting to speak up and not being heard, but she had also come to perceive that she had very little agency to change what was happening around her. She felt that regardless of what she said or showed, things would stay the same.
For many of us, that sense of powerlessness would be its own source of significant stress. For a child with a PDA profile, where autonomy and agency are foundational needs for safety and the capacity to function, this can be so disabling.
The school saw a happy child. The parents saw the cost of that happiness, every evening.
Nobody was doing it wrong
What struck me, working with everyone around Ivy, was that the adults at school were doing what most of us were taught. Notice the feeling, acknowledge it briefly, encourage the child, move things along. For example, "You've done this before, you'll be ok." Sometimes they were adjusting things, based on Ivy saying something felt hard, they were so willing to adapt in support of her. Yet the adjustment alone wasn't landing for Ivy as being seen and heard. You can probably see just how confusing this seemed for everyone, and why the teachers were feeling at a loss - because they were working SO hard to be supportive and accommodating.
What was missing, I think, wasn't willingness or effort. It was a moment before the adjustment. The feeling needed to be received before anything was done about it. The adjustment said: I want to help you. What Ivy also needed to hear, first, was: I can see this is hard; and be offered an opportunity to process her own feelings and thoughts before things moved on.
What we tried instead
What I shared with Ivy's team was a simple process to support communication. One that I hoped would help Ivy feel heard, and help the adults around her gather the information and insights they'd been reaching for. A bridge, in a sense, that could feel meaningful on both sides.
When Ivy said something was hard, the first response became a gentle reflection rather than a reassurance. "Something about this feels hard." Not a question. Not a fix. Just received.
We moved away from confident labels toward tentative guesses. "I wonder if this feels like a lot right now" leaves room for Ivy to correct us, or say nothing at all. She gets to stay the expert on her own inside world. (Children correct me often, by the way. I've come to see that as the approach working, not failing.)
What shifted
Not everything, and not quickly. I'd love to tell you the meltdowns vanished, but that would be too neat of a story arc! The upset after school remained present, for a little while.
But within a few weeks, something subtle changed. Ivy started telling her teacher things were hard a little earlier, and a little more often. This, counterintuitively, was good news. The distress was coming out in daylight, in small instalments, instead of being carried home in one enormous, unbearable load. Her teacher said:
"I thought she needed me to fix it. She just needed me to hear her."
How often do we as adults want to 'fix' things? I know it's a persistent drive for me, one that I often need to consciously tamp down.
What I've taken from Ivy's story
I've come to believe that the difference isn't really about technique. It's about what we think the moment is for, when a child shows us something feels tricky.
Emotion coaching offers a process, and I think it's a genuinely useful one. But the technique matters far less than the intent behind it. The willingness to slow down, to be curious, to listen before doing anything else.
If a child's "this is hard" is a problem to be smoothed over, we reach for reassurance, and a masking child learns to stop saying it. If it's a bid for connection from a nervous system at capacity, we reach for validation first. From this place, the child learns that big feelings don't threaten their belonging; and that they don't have to perform 'ok' to stay close to us.
It's important to note that validating isn't agreeing with everything, not unsafe behaviour, not every thought. It's acknowledging that what the child is feeling is true for them, in this moment. That they make sense.
I'm grateful, as always, to the adults and children who let me into these moments. It's from stories like Ivy's that everything I make and share is built. Real homes and real classrooms, integrated with neuroscience, research, neurodiversity affirming principles, somatic therapy and Social Work theory.
If you'd like to try this in your own setting
In this scenario I used the PDA Informed Emotion Coaching guide for teachers and education support staff — it's 2 pages of information about the flow of the conversation, validation and curiosity phrases word-for-word, and two full example scripts of what this can sound like in real moments.
