Well-meaning parents may be worsening their children’s OCD

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Parents of children with obsessive-compulsive disorder are often faced with a tough choice: not indulge the behavior, or soothe the anxiety. While many parents often opt for the latter, they may do so at a price. A recent study shows that accommodating OCD behavior may trigger more serious symptoms, but therapy may help in reversing that.

In the study, which appears in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 49 children aged 6 to 18 with OCD took part in 14 sessions of family-based cognitive-behavioral therapy with their parents. In those sessions, emphasis was placed on helping parents reduce ‘family accommodation,’ or trying to relieve the anxiety by offering comfort, giving the child objects, or even doing tasks like homework. The therapy also included exposure-response prevention, a method of treatment based on the idea that by facing their fears and realizing they’re baseless, people will eventually stop their behaviors as they find better ways to cope.

Before the sessions, tests were given to measure the children’s level of OCD and note how often parents indulged their behavior. Researchers (from the University of Florida) noticed that the more serious the symptoms, the more the parents accommodated them.

But after therapy, families did not try to soothe their children’s anxiety as much or facilitate their behavior. Parents who changed the most also saw the most progress in improving their children’s OCD symptoms.

Despite the results, researchers caution that the study had its limitations, including the lack of a control group, the fact that most study participants were white and middle or upper-middle class, and that parents reported their own levels of family accommodation. They recommend that future studies delve into what factors could influence families accommodating their kids’ behavior, such as subtypes of OCD, comorbidities, or family patterns.

-Jeannine Stein