Masking and the coke bottle effect

One of the most common things I hear when speaking with parents about their PDA children, is “school don’t see anything”, or they “don’t display behaviours in school”. This can lead to misconceptions about the source and the cause of the issues that parents are experiencing with parenting often being blamed. What is often happening is that a child is masking.

Masking is a term that means hiding the extent of the difficulties that are experienced and/or holding things together in a bid to fit in and appear “normal” (whatever that is!). Masking often happens in school, but can happen in other settings such as at friends houses, social events, with a non-resident parent. The mental and emotional energy it takes to mask often results in an unleashing of pent up emotions when back in their safe place, most often at home. This is known as the coke bottle effect.

Schools might hear parents speaking of challenging behaviour or emotional outbursts at home, anxiety over coming into school, difficulty getting the child into school, and may see a child that is clinging onto the parent crying or refusing to come into school. Quite often the child is taken into school by staff with the parent being told “they are fine once you have gone”.

I think it is really important for all involved to understand what is really going on here and that these young people are not “fine”, they are simply masking.

A failure to recognise this and support the underlying difficulties can leave families feeling alone and unsupported, and can make anxiety and school attendance worse with some young people not able to attend at all.

So let’s take a look at the Coke Bottle Effect in relation to a child with PDA.

Pathological Demand Avoidance or PDA is described as an anxiety driven need to avoid everyday demands and expectations. School is place of huge demand such as the daily timetable of lessons, writing, reading, listening, sitting still, time restrictions, to name a few. For those without a thorough understanding of PDA these examples may seem trivial and therefore something dismissed, but for a child with PDA it is far from trivial. For a child who masks in school every demand will shake the metaphorical coke bottle. Add into this other challenges a lot of autistic people experience such as difficulties with transitions, difficulties with change (e.g. different teacher or change to normal routine), social communication difficulties, sensory issues and you can add more and more shakes to that coke bottle. By the end of the school day the coke bottle is well shaken and well fizzed up and when the child is back in their safe space or even as soon as they leave the school environment the lid comes off and everything that was inside fizzes out sometimes quite explosively.

If this was recognised in the early stages, taken seriously, and appropriate understanding, support and adaptations put in place to reduce the number of times the coke bottle is shaken then I believe that in a lot of cases the level of school anxiety and attendance difficulties would be reduced.

If you recognise any of the challenges described here and you would like some support and further understanding over how to support a young person with PDA in school, then please do get in touch via the contact form HERE