Every parent of an anxious child knows the instinct. Your kid is scared, so you soften the moment — you answer the same worried question one more time, you call ahead to the birthday party to map out exactly what’s going to happen, or you quietly steer the family away from the thing that might set them off. It comes from love, and it works, at least for a few minutes. But according to Dr. Emily Bailey, a licensed psychologist specializing in childhood anxiety and OCD, that instinct — known clinically as accommodation — can accidentally teach a child’s anxiety the opposite of what we intend.
What Accommodation Actually Looks Like
Accommodation rarely looks like giving in. It looks like being a good, attentive parent. It’s answering for your child at a restaurant, emailing a teacher on their behalf, giving them a detailed heads-up before every outing, or adjusting the whole family’s schedule around what makes them anxious. None of these things are inherently a problem — the question isn’t what you’re doing, it’s why. If you’d be doing the same thing regardless of your child’s anxiety, that’s just parenting. If you’re doing it specifically to prevent or eliminate their anxious feelings, that’s accommodation. Over time, this pattern can turn a parent into what Dr. Bailey calls their child’s anxiety’s “personal assistant” — anxiety hands out a job, the parent completes it, and the relief is real but temporary. Anxiety simply comes back with another request.
Why Pulling Back Builds Resilience
It feels counterintuitive to remove support from a child who’s already struggling. But resilience isn’t something a child either has or doesn’t — it’s built through experience, specifically the experience of facing something hard and discovering they can handle it. Dr. Bailey compares it to the immune system: a body that never encounters anything stays fragile, while manageable exposure to challenge is what makes it stronger. The same is true emotionally. Every time a parent steps in to remove discomfort, the child loses a chance to learn that they’re capable. Every time a child faces something uncomfortable and gets through it, their brain updates its internal prediction from “I can’t handle this” to “maybe I can.” That shift, repeated enough times, is what resilience actually looks like in practice.
Telling Accommodation Apart From Support
Because accommodation so often looks like good parenting, most parents genuinely don’t realize when they’re doing it. A useful gut check is to ask: if my child’s anxiety weren’t in the picture right now, would I still be doing this exact thing? Would I do it consistently for their siblings too? And is what I’m doing helping my child get through something difficult, or helping them avoid it altogether? None of these questions are about judgment — they’re about noticing patterns. A single instance of comfort or reassurance isn’t the issue. The issue is when a family’s daily life becomes increasingly organized around preventing anxiety rather than living around it.
When a Parent's Own Anxiety Gets in the Way
Here’s the part that often goes unspoken: when a child is anxious, it’s common for a parent’s own alarm system to go off right alongside theirs. Accommodation can feel like the fastest way to quiet both alarms at once. But if a parent’s anxiety isn’t addressed directly, a child can end up set up to struggle later, once real exposure-based treatment begins. Many parents unconsciously use their child’s emotional state as a kind of report card — if the child is upset, it must mean something went wrong. In reality, some distress is an unavoidable, even necessary, part of a child learning to cope. A parent’s job isn’t to prevent every uncomfortable feeling; it’s to help a child move through them.
This pattern often has roots that go back further than the current moment. Many parents grew up in households where a caregiver’s distress felt genuinely unsafe, and that nervous-system pattern can resurface the instant their own child gets upset — even in a situation, like a soccer practice or a sleepover, that carries no real danger at all. Recognizing that inherited pattern is often the first step toward interrupting it.
How to Start Reducing Accommodation
The good news is that this isn’t an all-or-nothing shift. The most sustainable approach starts small: identifying every accommodation currently in place, ranking them by how difficult they’d be to stop, and beginning with the lowest-stakes one — something a parent can follow through on consistently. Consistency matters more than speed here, because a child quickly learns which parent, or which day, might bend. It also helps enormously for a parent to know their “why” — the specific reason they’re willing to do something that feels, in the moment, like the opposite of parenting. That might be wanting a child to have a bigger, fuller life, or wanting to break a generational pattern of anxiety in the family. Having a clear plan, a support system, and self-compassion for how hard this work actually is makes all the difference.
Resources
If this feels familiar — if you recognize yourself in the personal-assistant description, or you’re noticing your own anxiety rising alongside your child’s — you don’t have to figure it out alone. Dr. Emily Bailey’s work, along with approaches like SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions), offers a structured, compassionate path forward for both kids and the parents raising them. If you’re local to the Denver area and looking for a therapeutic team to support your family through this exact kind of work, Integrated Behavioral Health’s doors are always open.
- Dr. Emily Bailey / Atlanta OCD and Anxiety Treatment, LLC
- Learn more about SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions)
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