There is a conversation happening in the PDA community right now about the word "boundaries," and it is one of the most important conversations the field is having. Diane Gould, the founder of PDA North America, recently wrote about how the word gets used to justify emotional withdrawal from children who need closeness. She is right. And there is a piece that completes the picture, because some families are hearing "lower demands" the same way and arriving at a place that is just as harmful in the opposite direction.
Most of what gets called "boundaries" in parenting and clinical work is not really about the child's needs. A parent who will not let their child put their head on their lap and calls it a boundary is withholding connection and giving it a clinical name. A therapist who will not return a call and calls it a boundary is protecting their evening and calling it a frame. Diane's point is sharp: the word has become a way to make distance sound healthy, and for a child with Pervasive Drive for Autonomy (PDA, formerly called Pathological Demand Avoidance), distance is the opposite of what they need. Felt safety is the foundation, and felt safety requires presence, not policy.
She is also right that much of what professionals tell parents to enforce as "boundaries" is really compliance enforcement dressed up in therapeutic language. "Hold your boundaries or your child will walk all over you" is a threat-based frame applied to a child whose nervous system is already in threat. It escalates exactly the dynamic it claims to fix.
We agree with all of this. The RELATE framework is built on the same foundation: relationship first, felt safety as the condition for everything else, and the recognition that most demands placed on PDA children are unnecessary and can be dropped without consequence. The work of lowering demands is real work, and it is not permissiveness.
Here is what we are seeing in our clinical work, and it is the part that worries us. Some families, having heard the message to lower demands and drop the word "boundaries," have arrived at a place where every limit dissolves the moment their child pushes back. Not because they believe in it philosophically, but because their child's escalation is so distressing that giving in is the fastest way to stop their own pain. They call this accommodating the PDA. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not.
A real scenario, composited from several families in our practice: a parent tells their teenager it is time to leave the park. The teenager refuses. A grandparent, wanting to help, says "just let him stay, it's not worth the fight." The parent gives in. The teenager stays another hour, cheerful, playing, completely fine the moment the limit was removed. On the drive home, the sibling asks why they always have to leave when the family says so but their brother does not.
Everyone in that family described this as PDA accommodation. But the immediate recovery, the fact that the escalation targeted the adult most likely to relent (the grandparent pressured the parent, not the other way), and the specific conditions under which the pushback happened all pointed somewhere else. The escalation was working instrumentally. The child had learned that pushing hard enough moves the limit, and that learning was being reinforced every time the limit moved.
Lowering demands does not mean removing all limits. It means reducing the unnecessary pressure so the child has capacity for the limits that actually matter. Those are different operations, and confusing them produces a child who learns that escalation is the answer to every no.
This is the piece we think completes Diane's insight. She is right that most "boundary" talk is really withdrawal disguised as structure. And: some behavior that looks like PDA is actually reinforced escalation, and accommodating it as PDA makes it worse. Both of these things are true at the same time, often in the same child, sometimes in the same afternoon.
A child whose nervous system reads a demand as a threat and cannot comply is experiencing PDA. The response is to lower the demand, offer autonomy, reduce threat. That is accommodation, and it is the right thing to do.
A child who has learned that escalating hard enough makes the limit go away is using a strategy that works. The response is to hold the limit, calmly, without escalating, and let the child build evidence that this particular strategy no longer changes the outcome. That is not a "boundary." It is a decision not to reinforce a pattern that will ultimately harm the child more than the discomfort of hearing no.
The hard part, the clinically meaningful part, is that these can look identical from the outside. A child screaming in a store because a spending limit triggered a genuine threat response and a child screaming in a store because screaming has historically removed spending limits look exactly the same at full volume. The caregiver standing in that aisle needs to know which one they are looking at, because the intervention goes in opposite directions.
Watch what happens after the child gets what they wanted. If they are still dysregulated, still struggling, slow to recover, sometimes ashamed, that was probably the threat response. The pressure stopped but the nervous system is still flooded. They did not want to fight. Their system forced it.
If they are fine, quickly back to baseline, maybe even cheerful, that was probably instrumental. The blowup worked. It achieved its goal. The distress was real in the moment but it resolved the instant the environment changed. That is the signature of reinforced behavior, not a nervous system in threat.
This is not a perfect diagnostic, and in many children the two overlap. But it gives caregivers a starting point, something to observe rather than react to, which is itself a shift from the pattern.
Diane is right that the word carries too much baggage and too little clarity. We do not use it in our framework. What we teach instead is a sort: which demands are load-bearing, and which are habit?
Load-bearing demands are the ones where removing them causes real harm. Safety, health, basic respect for the people in the house. A spending limit is load-bearing. A seatbelt is load-bearing. Not hitting is load-bearing. These are worth holding, not because of authority, but because a child who learns that every limit dissolves under pressure becomes increasingly unsafe, increasingly isolated, and, paradoxically, increasingly anxious, because a world with no predictable structure is itself a threat to a nervous system that needs to know what is coming.
Habit demands are the things families do because "that is how we do it." Matching socks. Saying please on command. Making the bed. Eating at the table. These are the first to drop, because they cost the child capacity and buy the family nothing essential. Dropping habit demands is what creates the room for the load-bearing ones to be tolerable.
This sort does not require the word "boundaries." It requires the family to be honest about what actually matters and what they are enforcing out of habit, expectation, or fear of what the neighbors think. That honesty is harder than any boundary, and it is more useful.
When a parent gives in to every escalation, the most common reason is not a belief about PDA accommodation. It is that the child's distress activates the parent's own nervous system, and caving is the fastest way to stop their own pain. That is a human response, not a parenting failure. Naming it plainly, "I am giving in because I cannot tolerate his distress right now, not because the limit was wrong," is the beginning of something more honest than any conversation about boundaries has ever been.
And it is the beginning of the real work: building the parent's capacity to sit with discomfort while a load-bearing limit holds, so the child can build evidence that this particular storm has a shore. That work is relational, not punitive. It happens inside felt safety, not instead of it. The limit and the relationship are not in competition. The limit, held by a regulated adult who is not going anywhere, is itself evidence of safety.
We think Diane Gould is right that most talk of boundaries in the PDA world does more harm than good, and we are grateful she said it publicly. We also think the conversation needs the next sentence: some limits are load-bearing, and accommodation that removes all of them is not accommodation. It is a different kind of harm, slower and harder to see, where a child learns that the world rearranges itself around their distress and is then terrified by every setting where it does not.
The skill is not "have boundaries" or "don't have boundaries." The skill is sorting: what to hold, what to drop, and how to tell whether this particular moment is a nervous system in threat or a strategy that has been working. That sorting is hard. It requires knowing the child, reading the moment, and being honest about your own activation. It cannot be reduced to a rule, and anyone who tells you it can is selling something simpler than the truth.
For the framework this rests on, see What Is PDA? and the RELATE framework. For a deeper look at how demands work in PDA, see low-demand parenting.