McFly star Harry Judd’s wife Izzy has opened up on the challenges of parenting a neurodiverse child who has the difficult condition Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)
Harry Judd’s wife Izzy has shared that one of their three children has been diagnosed with a condition that means you can’t tell them what to do. The 41-year-old, who is mum to daughter Lola Rose, nine, and sons Kit, eight, and four-year-old Lockie, opened up on the challenges she and McFly star Harry, 39, face as parents of a neurodiverse child who has Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA).
Widely understood to be a condition found within some autistic people, the PDA Society explains it as “where a person finds it hard to manage everyday tasks or demands, even those they want or need to do.” Speaking on former Love Island star Dr Alex George’s Stompcast podcast, Izzy didn’t reveal which one of her children it was but shared what life was like in their household.
She said: “From the moment a child wakes up in the morning, they are being told to eat their breakfast, get dressed, brush your teeth. And all these anxieties are forming in them – that people are putting pressure and demands on them.”
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The former Escala violinist, who was a finalist on Britain’s Got Talent and met husband Harry when her string quarter performed on McFy’s tour, continued: “They don’t respond to authority or hierarchy. They want autonomy, they want to be in control.”
Explaining how her and Harry handle things instead, she shared: “If you flip it and go, ‘I’ve left your clothes out,’ – I actually just don’t even say it anymore. And I don’t ask many questions at all because that’s placing a demand, and a demand is too anxiety-provoking.”
Sharing the diagnosis has forced her to “let go of comparisons” of other people’s opinions on their parenting style, Izzy said: “‘There are quite rigid societal expectations of how children are supposed to behave.
“Initially, I felt the judgement really heavily. You have to go through a kind of grief process that things aren’t going to be as you thought they would be.
“For a neurodivergent child, they’re physically unable to sit. It’s not because they don’t want to – they can’t. But then, as a parent, you’re going: ‘I need to teach my child to sit at the table and say please and thank you.’ What if they can’t look at somebody? What if that makes them feel really uncomfortable?”
She continued: “To the outsider looking in, they might see that as a sort of lazy parenting or a lack of discipline, or whatever it is they want to say.
“I kind of let go of being late a long time ago. The more pressure you feel – ‘You’ve got to go!’ – the more it’s going to slow everything down. Now I just shove them in the car, and if they’re cold, they’ll put on their coat. Once they feel the autonomy that they’re in control, amazing things happen.”
The mum-of-three said the stress of it had led to them doing things like skipping kids’ birthday parties because there are too many behavioural expectations tied to them.
She said: “Birthday parties are hugely challenging. If your child isn’t behaving ‘normally’, you spend the entire time conflicted about how to handle it. So a long time ago, I thought: why am I going to these parties? No one’s enjoying it.
“So we don’t don’t do birthday parties. Also, if we wrap a birthday present, we will say what’s in it. Not knowing what’s inside a present is a big thing – a big demand to open it and then be grateful and then say thank you.”
Calling on schools to do better for neurodiverse kids, Izzy added: “Our classrooms aren’t really inclusive. For a lot of our neurodivergent kids, everything in school is a struggle. It can just take a couple of teachers to really understand your child – that could be the difference between them being able to remain at school.”
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