Easier Isn’t The Same as Better

Some messy thoughts on pathological demand avoidance and the limits of any framework.

I’ve been musing on the difference between:

“This made my life easier.”

and

“This made my life better.”

I’ve dealt with severe depression for most of my life. When I’m deep in a depressive state, I want to take the path of least resistance: staying in bed all day with the curtains drawn, not showering, not eating, everybody leaving me the hell alone.

That’s easier.

Pushing myself to complete any activities of daily living feels utterly unbearable. Impossible.

It would also be easier for my partner to just . . . let me do that. It would be way less effort than coaxing a profoundly depressed PDA (pathological demand avoidance) person outside for five minutes, which (let’s be honest) is an annoying, thankless chore.

But should he just let me rot without objection because it’s easier for both of us?

Is that better?

Is it kinder, more loving?

Easier isn’t the same as better, and it’s definitely not the same as cared for.

The Kindness of Enablers

In my very favorite TED Talk, Andrew Solomon’s Depression, the secret we share (it has 13.5 million views and I’m pretty sure half of them are mine), Solomon says:

You don’t think, in depression, that you’ve put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away . . . and that now you’re seeing truly. It’s easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there’s something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it’s difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth.

PDA does this to me too. When I avoid a task, I don’t feel like I'm overriding my better judgment. In that moment, avoidance is the good judgment.

But I don’t think anybody wants to be non-functional. When I think of myself, I don't idealize a version of me that’s unable to get out of bed or brush my teeth for the third day in a row.

From the outside, I think it’s genuinely difficult to untangle the difference between accommodating someone and enabling them. And I think most of us want to err on the side of kindness, right?

I just don’t know that accommodating everything is inherently kinder than accommodating nothing at all.

For example, my partner grew up with compulsive hoarders. Yes, like the TV show—we cleaned out his childhood bedroom with a snow shovel. As far as I know, his parents got very little push-back from his extended family about the conditions of their home.

That was easier in that it avoided conflict, but it wasn’t kinder to my partner, who has PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from growing up in that environment. I don’t think it was kinder to his parents, either. I just don’t believe people would choose to live in unsanitary, chaotic conditions if the alternative didn’t feel insurmountable.

‘Their house, their choice,’ is easier, but I don’t think it’s better.

On the flip side, I know many of the things that my own mother did were intended to help me expand my window of tolerance—the range of stress a person can handle while still staying calm enough to think clearly and function—but I experienced them as traumatic. She was (by her own account) autistic and undiagnosed, struggling with attachment issues, and hoping that she could help me have an easier time navigating the world than she did.

The intentions were good, but I often felt like my emotions were hand-waved—I was too much, too dramatic, too extreme—and that I was pushed into anxiety-inducing situations without agency. I’d guess that her fear of enabling me kept her from accommodating me at times when I really needed it.

A good clinical parallel for this kind of ‘accommodating vs. enabling’ tension might be family accommodation in OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) treatment, where family members make significant behavioral changes to help the OCD person avoid distress.

And for OCD, more accommodation predicts worse symptoms and worse outcomes over time, even though in the moment it looks like kindness.

I’m not saying PDA is OCD—we don’t really know what PDA is—but OCD can certainly look similar to PDA, with a 2024 commentary by researchers at Yale's Child Study Center noting:

Even children and adolescents may use force to impose accommodations on their relatives, and react in challenging ways when not accommodated. These reactions range from refusal to function, to increased anxiety and distress, to anger and verbal or physical aggression.

So I think that’s where the debate on PDA comes into play.

Is pathological demand avoidance more like paralysis—an involuntary response of an atypical nervous system?

Or is it more like a compulsion—an anxiety loop maintained by the very accommodations meant to relieve it?

Or some mixture of the two—an involuntary response that then gets reinforced over time by the relief of avoidance?

Maybe the actual clinical and parenting skill is telling, moment to moment, which mechanism you’re looking at, for this kid, on this day, with this specific ask.

A Tale of Two Easies

‘Easier’ only answers one question: how do I avoid friction?

‘Better’ isn’t just less friction. In this context it means something closer to: healthier. More functional. More joyful. More connected to other people. Better able to pursue the kind of life you’d like to have.

Relief from friction isn't worthless, but I don’t think it’s always restorative.

Watching TV alone in a dark room for twelve hours is easy, but from experience, I don’t come out of it feeling better. I’m disengaged, probably mindlessly scrolling on Reddit or Tumblr, half-focused on things I’m half-interested in.

Playing D&D with my partner for twelve hours is also easy, and I come out of that feeling great. I’m engaged, co-creating a story, and connecting with someone important to me. This kind of easy often improves my capacity.

Both are easy, but only one is better.

Maybe easy isn’t a single thing. Maybe it’s something like:

• Escape-Easy: Effortless because you’re successfully avoiding friction, but often leaves you feeling a little worse after than before.

• Flow-Easy: Effortless because you are deeply engaged with something that feeds you. You aren’t running from anything, you’re absorbed.

Under that framework, the useful question isn’t “is this easy?”

It’s “is the sense of ease coming from avoidance or alignment?”

Answering that question can be a struggle. Solomon's quote about the ‘gray veil’ applies here, too. If a dysfunctional state of mind—depression, anxiety, PDA shutdowns—can convince me I'm the only one seeing things clearly, what makes me think I can accurately sort my own ‘easy’ into ‘escape’ or ‘flow’ while I'm still inside it?

In the moment, watching TV alone for twelve hours doesn't feel like escape—it feels like the rational response to an intolerable situation. I don't get a video-game-style label floating over my head, clarifying which kind of easy I'm choosing. I often only find out in hindsight, though age and experience have taught me to recognize patterns that are usually capacity-limiting.

Journaling your own behavior can provide historical data that allows a person to look at their own record and say, "my brain is telling me that going outside will make me feel worse, but my data from the last three weeks says that's factually incorrect." But honestly, I’m ADHD, and I’ve never been very good at this sort of consistent habit, even as an adult.

And if you’re trying to make a judgment call from the outside, how can you possibly tell?

The Least Dangerous Assumption

In the 1980s, education researcher Anne Donnellan proposed the criterion of the least dangerous assumption: when you don't know someone's actual capacity, assume whatever does the least harm if you're wrong. Generally, presuming competence is considered less harmful than presuming incompetence.

I think a lot of the PDA community has embraced the idea that presuming competence leads to forcing compliance—you can do it, so you must do it. That makes presuming incompetence look like the kinder, better option. It sets up a fake choice between:

• Extreme low-to-no-demand parenting, which presumes incompetence due to a fixed, inadequate capacity. In practice this often plays out as zero-expectations, sometimes even dropping basic boundaries around safety and human decency.

or

• Rigid, compliance-based parenting, which presumes competence as a mandate, ignoring capacity completely and forcing obedience through ‘consequences.’

And competence as a mandate and presuming incompetence are really just mirrors of each other:

• “You’ll do this, because I’ve decided you can.” The other person’s response is being measured against the standard rather than informing it.

• “I won’t offer this, because I’ve decided you can’t handle it.” A mandate of incapacity—every bit as fixed and unresponsive as the reverse.

They both strip the person in question of the same thing: autonomy. The right to decide, for themselves, what they're capable of and where their life goes. If PDA really is a reaction to a loss of autonomy, both options don’t just miss the point. They recreate the very thing that set PDA off in the first place.

So maybe instead of asking ourselves how much accommodation is appropriate, we should be asking if the specific accommodation in question presumes competence without mandating it. Does this accommodation offer agency, opportunity, and support?

There’s definitely ‘low-demand’ writing that already proposes a framework more like this: reduce demands to focus on connection and relationship building, then collaborate to gradually widen the window of tolerance. But I consistently see that advice degrade quite a bit in PDA communities. ‘Low-demand’ becomes ‘no-demand, forever.’

Okay, but what even is a demand?

Most parents I talk to are already aware that authoritative parenting—high demand, high warmth—is generally associated with the most positive outcomes, but I think it’s worth exploring what a demand even is.

Because the term authoritative parenting was coined in the 1960s within a hierarchical cultural framework, it’s easy to conflate demands with commands.

• A command relies on hierarchy. A command is an order issued by a person who holds authority due to their rank.

• A demand relies on relationships. A demand is a requirement dictated by the situation, a shared agreement, or the baseline needs of the relationship.

In family studies, demands aren’t commands, and demandingness is something more like whether or not standards exist and are enforced. When you strip away the mid-century bias, the core mechanics of demandingness don’t require a top-down power structure.

I think this mix-up is the source of a lot of confusion around the term ‘low-demand parenting.’ Some PDA advocates define ‘low-demand parenting’ as a directive to stop issuing commands—and I think that’s generally a positive step that can lead to a more collaborative, connected future.

But I also see parents afraid to make ‘demands’ about things like not tormenting other children. They’ve been convinced their PDA child is so incredibly fragile that they’ll be permanently scarred by any boundary, anything other than easy.

People Aren’t Protocols

So if ‘low-demand’ parenting is an ongoing source of confusion . . . then what?

I’m consistently drawn to frameworks based on mutual respect, consent-based decision making, and collaborative problem-solving, like Dr. Ross Greene’s Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) or sociocracy frameworks.

Both CPS and sociocracy are high-demand but non-hierarchical systems. The goal is to teach parents how to preserve healthy boundaries without issuing top-down commands, and give children real agency to solve problems that affect them.

But let’s be honest: systems are orderly. Families are not.

What happens when a child is completely dysregulated, or when a teenager is too depressed to participate in a collaborative meeting? What happens when any human being simply runs out of capacity?

This is where we have to accept that frameworks aren’t designed to automate family life or replace human intuition. Sometimes what’s better isn’t easy. Sometimes escape-easy is all anyone has the capacity for, even if it might make tomorrow a little worse.

Care is an act of discernment. We desperately want certainty that frees us from the burden of judgment—and if the outcome is bad, at least we can tell ourselves we followed the proper protocol.

But people aren’t protocols.

A child’s capacity (or a partner's, or our own) fluctuates with sleep, illness, trauma, hormones, grief, hunger, confidence, and a thousand other invisible variables. Discernment sees that nuance and refuses fixed conclusions. It doesn’t say, ‘they can, therefore they must,’ nor does it say, ‘they can’t, therefore they never will.’

It says, ‘I’m not sure, let’s find out together.’

Discernment takes a radical kind of humility. It means accepting from the outset that you will sometimes get it wrong. Sometimes you’ll push your child towards a challenge they genuinely aren’t ready for, and sometimes you’ll protect them from one they’re well equipped to handle.

Some days, the hardest part isn't knowing which call to make. It's that you don't have the energy left to make one. Untangling whether or not someone else’s behavior is avoidant or restorative and whether or not it can (or should) be gently pushed against is real cognitive and emotional labor. Some days you’re too exhausted to try.

I don’t think that’s a failure of love. I think that’s a person who doesn’t have an infinite capacity, the same as the rest of us.

Discernment requires us to look past the immediate friction and towards the horizon.

Who does this person want to be?

What kind of life do they deserve to live?