When a child refuses to follow a rule, asks “why” about something everyone else accepts, or seems to fixate on one small detail instead of the larger point, adults often interpret this behaviour as resistance, stubbornness, or manipulation. In school and home environments that rely heavily on shared assumptions, implied meaning, and unstated social logic, children who ask for clarity or disassemble expectations are often treated as obstructive. But for PDA children—who tend to rely on local rather than global processing styles—those questions are not challenges to your authority, but attempts to build safety, coherence, and truth from the ground up.
The truth: Local processing reflects a different way of seeing the world
PDA children often process the world through the lens of details, parts, and moment-by-moment logic rather than sweeping categories, generalised rules, or unspoken norms. They are often local processors, which means they prefer to perceive the elements of a situation before they perceive the whole. When a rule changes from one setting to another, they do not default to abstraction or generalisation—they treat each context as unique and worthy of examination. When someone makes a demand, they do not assume legitimacy—they test its meaning, its logic, and its emotional safety. This is not defiance. This is perception.
Autistic perception, as described in the Enhanced Perceptual Functioning model, defaults to local orientation—not because of deficit, but because of depth. A child may spot a microexpression, hear a shift in tone, or question a rule’s internal consistency—long before they grasp what others believe to be the “big picture.” When adults expect global processing—rules over reasoning, summary over nuance—children who process locally are left disoriented, misjudged, or worse, punished for how their minds naturally work.
One metaphor that has helped me grasp the difference between local and global processing is the way I experience hiking. When I go out on a trail, I don’t just remember the general route or the sweeping view from the ridge; I carry with me a kind of 4K memory of every moss-covered rock, every gnarled root, every flicker of light through cedar branches—a vivid, spatially detailed replay of the landscape that unfolds as if my mind recorded it frame by frame. For children with this same open perceptual aperture, the world arrives all at once, in fine grain and full resolution. They are not missing the big picture; they are still parsing the thousand pictures already in front of them. To ask them to leap from this exquisite field of detail to a summary interpretation—especially in the context of a demand, a rule, or an assumed social logic—is not just a cognitive shift, but a rupture in their process. It pulls them out of sync with how they are naturally processing the moment, and that rupture can feel distressing, confusing, even unsafe.
The practice: meet the child at the level of their perception
Speak slowly, with intention, letting each phrase land gently rather than tumbling one after the next; reduce verbal complexity by breaking ideas into parts, removing layers of implication, and describing what is rather than gesturing at what should be. When a child engages with your words—through pause, silence, dissection, or revision—recognise that what appears to be resistance may in fact be an earnest attempt to orient within a world that shifts constantly beneath their feet, a world that often asks for synthesis before offering safety.
Offer every framework as an opening, not an ultimatum—an idea that lives for now, in this context, with these conditions, rather than a fixed doctrine to be accepted without scrutiny; speak as though your meaning is one possible way of understanding, not the only path through the forest. Instead of appealing to abstraction or authority, ground your expectations in lived experience and make visible the purpose beneath the structure—what this rule holds, what it protects, what trade-offs it carries, what discomforts it might conceal.
Children who process locally deserve a world that welcomes disassembly. When expectations are shared not as pronouncements but as hypotheses—small truths, held lightly, adapted as needed—they become breathable. Meaning begins to stretch, to soften, to feel inhabitable. And in that softening, something new emerges: a relational safety that grows from shared attention. A space where perception is plural and difference is not a glitch in the system, but a way of seeing more.
Repetition is not redundancy—it is rhythm, echo, reassurance, but takes cues, so you do sound boring. Speak as if you are building a bridge between inner and outer worlds.
Release the fiction of “common sense,” a concept shaped by culture, habit, and convenience more than by universality. Reality is experienced in bodies, and those bodies carry different thresholds, different registers, different truths. The double empathy problem reminds us that misattunement is reciprocal—so when something feels obvious, it is worth remembering that obviousness is a local truth, born of your own path. And someone else’s path may carry a different rhythm, a different centre of gravity, a different way of making sense.
Why it works
When we honour local processing, we affirm the child’s way of being in the world. We show them that their perception is valid, not broken. We teach them that they do not need to override their instincts to survive our expectations. And we begin to create a relational dynamic in which trust grows not through compliance, but through mutual understanding.
Children who experience this kind of attunement begin to feel safe asking questions, safe thinking differently, and safe being their full selves—even when their lens on the world differs profoundly from ours.
If you’re the parent
Don’t rush to summarise. Let your child stay in the details. If they fixate on a specific rule, a small item, or a memory from two years ago, follow their lead. That detail might hold the emotional key to the entire situation. Honour it.
If you’re the teacher
Avoid phrases like “You should know this” or “That’s just the rule.” Instead, say, “Let’s walk through it together” or “Here’s why that rule exists?” Give space for disassembly. Recognise that insight often begins with deconstruction.
Final reflection
PDA children live in a world that insists on shared meaning without offering shared safety. When we respect their local processing style, when we respond to the detail they notice instead of demanding they see the whole we assume—they begin to feel less like strangers and more like trusted interpreters of a complex world.
