Pediatrician on changing views of childhood defiance — STAT News
Lawrence Diller, a pediatrician specializing in children’s behavioral development, writes in a column for STAT News that over the past 25 years, understanding of the behavior of children who do not comply with adults’ requests or instructions has changed significantly. In the headline, the author raises the question of what happened to oppositional defiant disorder, described in the subheadline as a once-common childhood psychiatric diagnosis.
The request about PDA
Diller gave an example of a phone conversation that took place about two years ago. A mother asked him to assess her son for PDA. The pediatrician, who had worked in the field for more than four decades, initially recalled another medical meaning of the abbreviation — patent ductus arteriosus, meaning the persistence of embryonic circulation around the heart.
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When Diller asked what PDA meant, the woman explained that she was referring to pathological demand avoidance. According to her, her son does not do anything she asks him to do.
The columnist
Diller practices behavioral and developmental pediatrics and family therapy. He is also a member of the clinical faculty at the University of California, San Francisco. The STAT News piece is in the format of an opinion column, so the observations presented in it reflect the columnist’s position.
