When School Rewards Create More Stress Than Support

This week I want to talk about something that has come up again and again in conversations with parents of PDA children – and has shown up loudly in the past few days with families I know. It’s the topic of rewards. Points. Stickers. Charts. Climbing ladders. All the traditional behaviour systems schools rely on.

And why, for PDA children, they don’t just not work… they can actually cause harm.

Over the past week, two different PDA children, in a specialist setting with staff who genuinely understand autism and PDA, reacted in completely opposite ways to the same reward-based expectation. Even with huge adaptations, flexibility and understanding around the system, it still became a source of extreme anxiety.

One child immediately rejected it. The pressure to earn every point turned the whole thing into a demand – so they opted out entirely. “If I can’t get them all, I don’t want any.” Their behaviour dipped, but underneath that was pure anxiety.

The other child went the opposite direction. It turned into an obsessive drive to earn every point, right now, pushing themselves far, far outside their window of tolerance. Their usual understanding of their own needs, their fluctuating capacity, and their regulation disappeared under the urgency of the reward.

Two different responses. Same root cause. Anxiety triggered by the pressure of needing to earn something.

And it made me think about rewards more broadly – especially in the context of PDA.

Because rewards are everywhere in school systems. They’re the backbone of behaviour policies. They’re baked in. And yet, for so many of our children, they don’t support progress or confidence – they create chronic stress, overwhelm, and internal pressure.

Dr Ross Greene talks about this in his collaborative approach. The idea that rewards assume a child can but won’t. When actually, with our children, it’s almost always that they want to… but can’t. There’s a barrier in the way. A lagging skill. A sensory overload. A demand they can’t meet. A nervous system that spirals the moment something feels pressured.

Rewards don’t fix that. Rewards don’t build skills. They don’t reduce anxiety. They don’t help a child understand themselves better.

And they absolutely don’t help a PDA child stay regulated.

What they do instead is trigger demand avoidance, or hyper-fixation, or distress. They push children into black-and-white thinking. And they pull them further away from the feeling of safety they need in order to learn, connect or try something new.

And then there’s the part we don’t talk about enough – what it does to us as parents.

Because watching your child experience anxiety at this level – knowing exactly what has triggered it – is incredibly hard. You spend your whole life trying to reduce their overwhelm, trying to anticipate what might dysregulate them, trying to protect their nervous system as best you can.

When something like this hits, it hits the whole family.

A dysregulated child doesn’t exist in a bubble. Their distress becomes the atmosphere everyone is living in. You’re trying to help them regulate, manage behaviours, create safety, hold space for their emotions… while also supporting siblings, navigating school conversations, and keeping yourself from spiralling.

Your own nervous system takes the strain. You absorb it in your body. Your sleep is impacted. Your ability to think straight goes. Your bandwidth shrinks to almost nothing. And yet, you keep going because you have no choice.

This is why understanding why rewards don’t work with PDA is so important. Not just for our children’s emotional wellbeing, but for ours. Because every spike in their anxiety has a ripple effect on us – and it’s relentless.

There is another way. A kinder way. The collaborative, respectful approach Dr Ross Greene teaches – starting from the belief that kids do well if they can. Not bribing them into compliance, but working with them to identify what’s hard, what’s getting in the way, and how we can support them to meet expectations without pressure, shame or panic.

Curiosity instead of control.
Skill-building instead of sticker charts.
Safety instead of stress.

And honestly – that’s where things start to shift.

Before I finish, I want to share something positive from this week. The brilliant Alice Marshment from SEND Advocacy joined us for a live session in the membership area for participants of my Reclaim Your Balance course, and it was absolutely fantastic. Clear, compassionate and packed with genuinely useful guidance.

Alice also shares her knowledge freely in her guide:
EHC Plan Appeals: What Every Parent Needs to Know (Free Guide)

Gain clarity on your child’s rights and cut through the confusion around EHCP appeals with guidance from a lawyer and SEND parent.

You can download it here.

I’ll leave it there for this week. As always, I hope you’re being gentle with yourself. This life can feel a lot, and the emotional labour we carry is real – you’re doing your best in really complex circumstances.

You’re not alone in any of it.