Comforting your child and answering the same question for the tenth time aren’t the same thing, and telling them apart is where this gets useful. You don’t have to change anything tonight to start noticing the difference.
If your child asks every night whether the door is locked, whether you’re sure the dog is fine, whether tomorrow is really a half day, you already know the pattern. You answer. They settle. Twenty minutes later they ask again, and the question has grown a little.
Why does answering help for a minute and then stop working?
Because the relief is real and it’s short. The answer takes the worry down for a few minutes, and then the worry comes back and asks for a bigger dose.
Clinicians have a name for the pattern of answering: parental accommodation. It covers everything a family changes to make an anxious feeling stop — checking, reassuring, ordering for a child who is scared to order, driving a longer way, keeping a sibling quiet, calling the teacher on their behalf.
Dr. Emily Bailey, licensed psychologist and owner of Atlanta OCD and Anxiety Treatment, works with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She joined me on the podcast and put the honest version of it in one sentence. “accommodation is actually such a loving behavior. And it accidentally teaches anxiety the wrong thing.”
Am I supposed to just stop comforting my child?
No. That’s the fear that keeps most parents stuck, and it’s worth taking off the table right now.
Dr. Bailey describes wanting parents “to be incredibly responsive and supportive of their child and less responsive of the anxiety.” Your child still gets the hug, the listening, the confidence that you’re on their side. The worry is what stops getting served.
She was also blunt about the guilt that shows up when parents first hear the word accommodation. “of course you have done these things. You are a parent. You care about your child.”
How do I tell comfort from doing anxiety's job?
Ask three questions before you do the thing. They take about ten seconds.
First: “If anxiety weren’t here, what would I be doing?” A bedtime story you’d read anyway is a bedtime story. A fourth lock check you’d never have done is something else.
Second: “do I do this consistently for other people in my family?” If one child gets a service the others don’t, the anxiety is usually the reason.
Third: is what I’m doing “helping my child cope with something difficult, or is it helping them escape it?”
Her own framing is that “a behavior itself isn’t accommodating or not accommodating. It’s what’s behind it”: what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what would happen if you stopped.
What can I actually do this week?
The first week is for counting. Write down every accommodation for seven days and mark the one you’d be most afraid to give up. That single list tells you how much of the day is being run by a feeling, and it’s where a therapist would start too.
Then pick one small thing, and expect it to be uncomfortable rather than dramatic. The American Academy of Pediatrics gives parents the same shape of advice for a fearful child: “Gradually facing fears. Consider gradually exposing your child to feared objects or activities.” And on what to praise while you do it: “Praise and reward brave behavior: the goal is to cope, not avoid.”
Set yourself up for the hard night before it arrives. One idea from the episode is worth borrowing: “Have your friend record a voice memo and just listen to it.” A rough bedtime goes differently when someone who loves you has already said the thing you’ll need to hear at 9:15.
One caution, stated plainly. Reducing accommodation is a treatment, and it works best with a plan and a clinician who knows your child. Nothing in this post is a protocol to run alone, and no single step here should be started on the strength of a blog post.
Is there a treatment that works on the parent's side of this?
Yes, and it’s worth asking about by name. SPACE stands for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. It’s a parent-based program: the parents attend the sessions, and in most cases the child or adolescent does not need to.
It was developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center. Yale describes SPACE as a parent-based treatment program that “has been tested and found to be an effective evidence-based treatment in multiple clinical trials.” The program’s own description of the work is the plain one: parents learn to “respond more supportively to their anxious child and to reduce the accommodations they have been making to the child symptoms.”
What if the questions are actually OCD?
Sometimes they are. The International OCD Foundation lists “Constant questioning of self-judgment; excessive need for reassurance” among the signals for parents to recognize in a child with OCD. When that’s what is driving the questions, the work is a specific therapy rather than a better answer.
That therapy is exposure and response prevention, usually shortened to ERP. The National Institute of Mental Health describes it as time spent “in a safe environment that gradually exposes them to situations that trigger their obsession” while the usual compulsion, like handwashing or checking, does not happen. In a house where the compulsion is asking the same question again, that question is what ERP works on, with a clinician and a plan.
You’re not on the outside of that work. As NIMH puts it, “Children with OCD may need additional help from family members and health care providers to recognize and manage their OCD symptoms.” Your involvement is part of how the treatment works.
Nothing here can tell you what your child has. Only an evaluation can do that.
When is it time to call someone?
When it isn’t going away, and when it’s costing your child things they want.
The first call is an ordinary one. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts it simply: “If you are concerned about anxiety or depression in your child, the first step is to talk with a health care provider such as your child’s primary care provider, or a mental health specialist, about getting an evaluation.” The American Academy of Pediatrics says the same thing about persistence: “If your child’s anxiety doesn’t go away or gets worse, get back in touch with the doctor.”
You can hear the whole conversation this post came out of in the episode write-up, Anxiety’s Personal Assistant.
You don’t have to arrive with the answer worked out. Tell us what the evenings look like and what you’ve already tried, and we’ll talk it through with you.
At Integrated Behavioral Health we work with children, teens and families on anxiety and OCD at our Denver and Greenwood Village offices, in person and by telehealth. Our clinicians use exposure and response prevention (ERP) and SPACE among the approaches we offer, and there is no waitlist.
This post is educational and is not a substitute for an evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment from a licensed professional. If you or your child is in crisis or thinking about self-harm, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7.