This is a common marketing lie. This actually isn't trying to protect his parents. This is greatly inconveniencing his parents in order to protect themselves in a cheaper fashion.
Preventing theft is hard. Preventing theft while not punishing users is extremely hard. And so lots of banks and services take the easy route: forcing complicated passwords, OTP's, holds, "sitekeys", security questions, et cetera.
True protection would be: "Behind the scenes we are going to do everything we can stop thieves. And, in the very rare cases where they succeed and access your account, we'll cover it 100%. And, we're not going to make you stab yourself in the eye every time you want to create an account, or send, receive or withdraw funds."
Then it's up to Dwolla to build in strong defensive and offensive measures to combat online thieves, without making 99.9% of its users suffer for the 00.1% of people that are looking to steal.
tldr; these "security measures" absolutely suck and I can't wait for the service that comes along and says "we did the hard security work so you don't have to".
P.S. Dwolla looks awesome. I signed up. Am very impressed. I realize EVERYONE has these PitA security measures and I'm sure the Dwolla guys hate them just as much as me and have plans to eliminate them eventually. I just had to respond to the marketing bs.