Low Demand Parenting

In this episode, I’m talking with author and therapist Katie May about something so many parents are facing—and so few feel equipped to handle: what to do when your teen is engaging in self-destructive or self-harming behaviors. Because everything in us wants to stop it. Fix it. Control it. And yet, the strategies we’ve been taught—punishment, consequences, taking things away—often make things worse. Katie helps us understand what’s actually going on underneath these behaviors, why teens turn to them in the first place, and what they really need from us in those moments. We talk about how to stay connected even when you’re scared, how to create safety without control, and how to show up in a way that supports real healing—not just behavior change. If you’re parenting a teen who is struggling, this conversation will give you a different lens—and a place to start.

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ABOUT KATIE

Katie K. May is a licensed therapist, author, speaker, and group practice owner. She founded Creative Healing, a multi-location teen support center in the Philadelphia area, and wrote the #1 Amazon best-seller You’re On Fire, It’s Fine. With lived experience as a teen who turned to self-harm, Katie is one of only 11 Linehan Board Certified DBT Clinicians in Pennsylvania, the gold standard treatment for self-harm and suicidal behaviors. She equips parents and clinicians with practical, trauma-informed tools to decode behavior as survival and create lasting change.  

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/creativehealingphilly 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creative_healing 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiekmay 

Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiekmay 

Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@teensupportcenter 

In this episode, I’m answering a listener question I hear all the time: What does low demand actually look like?

I walk through the foundations of low demand parenting by breaking it down into a clear, practical process—using real-life examples to show how we identify what’s too hard, drop demands that aren’t doable, and increase accommodations in ways that actually bring relief. I explain how low demand isn’t about “giving up” or being permissive, but about attuning to capacity—our kids’ and our own—and responding with intention instead of force.

I also introduce the six-step low demand process, unpack how demands work like a layer cake (surface demand → expectation → adult need), and share how learning to truly listen to our kids’ communication changes everything.

If you’ve ever felt confused, overwhelmed, or unsure whether you’re “doing low demand right,” this episode is meant to give you clarity, structure, and reassurance that there is a path through this.

What if the hardest part of low demand parenting isn’t your child’s needs — but what their needs bring up in you?

In this solo episode, we will explore the deep inner work beneath low demand parenting: how many of us were taught to suppress our needs, feel ashamed of them, or believe they hurt other people…and how those old messages get activated when we’re raising kids with big needs of their own.

This episode unpacks why so many parents feel burned out, resentful, or stuck in a painful “it’s me or it’s my kids” mindset, and offers a different framework: your needs and your child’s needs are not in competition. They are deeply interconnected.

I share mindset shifts, lived examples, and practical steps for rebuilding a compassionate relationship with your own needs — without abandoning your child, without self-sacrifice, and without shame.

This episode is especially for all my beloved fellow parents who feel exhausted, overwhelmed, or quietly resentful. I hope that this episode helps you imagine a world where both you and your kids can be needy, sensitive, and deeply connected, all at once.

Additional Resources:

Follow us on social for updates on the podcast, blog, and more! 

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you! 

In this episode, I sit down with my friend and neighbor Jeff Parrott to talk about parenting a PDA, pressure-sensitive child while letting go of the “typical” parenting manual. Jeff shares their family’s pivot from high academic expectations to unschooling, how discovering PDA reframed everything, and why consent became the key non-negotiable in their parenting. He walks me through his family’s practical, proactive demand-drops (like rethinking laundry and mealtimes), handling criticism as a father, and the affirmation that anchors him: “connection over correction.” If you’ve ever wondered how to live out your low demand beliefs when your identity is tied to achievement, this conversation is a powerful roadmap.

Jeff Parrott is a proud father and husband in a neurodiverse family and is committed to learning from his lived experience practicing Low Demand. With a focus on personal growth, he is committed to the appreciation, understanding, and support of neurodiversity, sensory sensitivities, Pervasive Drive for Autonomy (PDA), and Low Demand. Jeff has B.E. degrees in engineering (Biomedical and Electrical) and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (Women’s Health and Reproductive Endocrinology) and has much experience in academic and pharmaceutical development laboratories. A persistent problem solver, he strives to find everyday solutions that work for his beautiful, developing, gifted family. In this space, he identifies with the username @JeffAugmen. “Augmen” is a Latin for “growth.

Mentions in this episode:

Additional Resources:

Follow us on social for updates on the podcast, blog, and more! 

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you!

In this episode, I sit down with writer and disabled parent Jessica Slice about what it looks like to practice low demand parenting… and also not. Jessica shares how parenting her autistic daughter showed her that “endless freedom” actually made her child more anxious — and that loving, predictable structure was the real low demand move for their family. We talk about how disability culture dismantles shame, why some kids panic in the face of too many choices, how to build rules that are genuinely child-centered, and why no one on the internet gets to tell you whether you’re “doing low demand right.” This conversation is a permission slip for families who need containers, timers, and posted rules on the wall, not because you’re trying to control your kid, but because that’s what actually lowers demands in your unique family culture.

In this episode we talk about:

My Guest:
Jessica Slice is the Toronto author of four books about disability and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Guardian, The Globe & Mail, LitHub, Alice Wong’s bestselling Disability Visibility, Slate, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and more. She’s also been featured in Vogue, The New Yorker, PBS, NPR, The Cut, the BBC, and more. She lives with her husband, two kids, and two dogs. 

Additional Resources:

Follow us on social for updates on the podcast, blog, and more! 

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you! 

In this solo episode, I get to dive into one of the most radical, healing, and countercultural practices in Low Demand Parenting: listening deeply to our kids. As the third step in the six-step Low Demand Method, listening is the heart of it all—the bridge between understanding and letting go. Together we will explore how to listen when our kids won’t answer a single question, when what they say triggers us, and when their truth doesn’t match what we wanted to hear. I share real-life stories, practical tools (like “bark if you love cereal!”), and deep reflections on the power of curiosity, differentiation, and radical humility. This episode will help you release the pressure to “get it right,” and instead, open your ears—and your heart—to what your child is really communicating.

Additional Resources:

Follow us on social for updates on the podcast, blog, and more! 

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you!

What happens when parenting meets the deep work of liberation? In this episode, I talk with Jaya Ramesh and Priya Saaral, authors of Parenting at the Intersections, about raising neurodivergent children of color, unlearning oppressive systems, and redefining what it means to love our kids exactly as they are.

Together, they explore how intersectionality shapes parenting, why “expert culture” often misses the mark, and how resistance, both ours and our children’s, is a form of love. This is a tender, eye-opening conversation about healing generational wounds, honoring ancestral wisdom, and raising children who belong without apology.

Priya Saaral, LICSW, RPT-S is a proud mama, play therapist and parenting coach specializing in the emotional wellbeing of neurodivergent children and parents by helping them reconnect to their playful spirit amidst personal and structural adversity. She is a late-identified neurodivergent person with caste privilege and a first generation immigrant settler from India and Singapore, settled on Duwamish land (Seattle).

Jaya Ramesh, LMHC is psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in supporting BIPOC and neurodivergent individuals and couples in having more authentic relationships. She also runs a DEI consultancy supporting communities and organizations in creating more anti-racist spaces. She identifies as a caste-privileged Indian-American who is neurodivergent. She is married, raising two kids and an adorable dog and lives on the unceded lands of Duwamish (colonially known as Seattle).

Follow us on social for updates on the podcast, blog, and more! 

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you! 

In this raw, tender conversation, Chris and Jasmine open up about navigating a “big blended family crisis,” discovering PDA, and rebuilding connection in a stepfamily with three kids. They share the pressure cooker of custody battles, school expectations, aggression at home, and the moment low-demand and CPS (Ross Greene) reframed everything around autonomy and safety. We talk deconditioning from “good parent” scripts, stepmom complexity, marriage repair, and how Chris’s autistic burnout changed the pace of their whole family. It’s honest, nuanced, and deeply human.

 📌 Content note: brief mention of a child’s disclosure of self-harm early in the story.

Ten years married, Chris and Jasmine are an interracial couple raising three PDA kids aged 14,6 and 4 in Goolwa Beach, South Australia. They navigated an intense blended family crisis with intense child behaviors, catalysing their conscious parenting journey before discovering PDA. Chris is an entrepreneur and a coach who helps people reprogram their reality. Jasmine is the author of Behind That Shiny Resume. She supports stepmoms navigating complex family dynamics as well as neurodiverse couples.

Follow us on social for updates on the podcast, blog, and more! 

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you! 

In this solo episode, I reframe “low-demand” beyond crisis triage and into a proactive, sustainable practice. I explain why dropping demands only in the moment can leave parents burned out—and how to move toward durable drops that create real ease and joy for everyone. Using a concrete “can’t get out of bed for school” example, I show you how to become a demand detective, uncover the deeper beliefs and personal history driving our pressure, and design accommodations that actually work. We also tackle internally driven demands (especially with teens), dismantling the cultural “shoulds,” and why believing yourself is the first liberating step to building a life that fits your child—and you.

Follow us on social for updates on the podcast, blog, and more! 

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you!

Parent coach, clinical psychologist, neuropsychologist, and single mom Dr. Gila shares hard-won, compassionate guidance for solo parents of high-needs kids: naming the grief and stressors unique to single parenting, why stress is “the great magnifier,” and how radical permission + perspective help us stay out of shame and make workable choices. We get concrete about the “tiger in the room” (what to do when the meltdown is happening right now), expanding what counts as support (yes, screens sometimes), asking for help when choice A isn’t available, and building micro-practices—audio journaling, body-based resets, and community—to keep one adult resourced when there’s no one to tag in.

Additional Resources:

Follow us on social for updates on the podcast, blog, and more! 

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you!