By: Jaclyn Rink, MSCP

Does your child continuously struggle with anxiety, regardless of how much reassurance you offer them or changes you make for them? Although it is a natural parental instinct to protect children from anxiety, this gut reaction can sometimes be harmful to chronically anxious kiddos. At a biological level, childhood anxiety feeds off what we call “accommodations,” which are anything that a parent does to prevent anxiety in their child.

Accommodation examples:

• Getting their backpack for them from upstairs because they are afraid to go alone
• Making them a different dinner than the rest of the family
• Allowing them to stay home from school because they are feeling nauseous, again.
• Reassuring them you will be on time to pick them up each school day
• Sending an email to their teachers about a missed assignment because they are embarrassed
• Making sure there is hand sanitizer in every room of the home
• Allowing them to take a stuffed animal/support blanket to school

Accommodations can be active or passive, meaning we either do/participate in lessening our child’s anxiety, or we passively modify our own behaviors to reduce anxiety. Examples:

• Active: answer repeated questions, perform safety checks, and sleep next to your child
• Passive: return early from work, drive special routes, avoid assigning chores

Sometimes it can be challenging to figure out if the behavior is an accommodation, because these changes become so ingrained in day-to-day functioning that they almost feel “routine” and “normal.” Over time, both parents and children see that these accommodations are helpful to their functioning, so the cycle keeps repeating in an attempt to help the child move past their anxiety.

Ask yourself:

-If my child didn’t struggle with anxiety, would I be doing this for them/acting this way?

-Would I do this for any of my other children?

– What happens if I don’t do it?

-Do I do this to avoid an emotional meltdown?

-Is this something my child needs from me/asks of me often?

If you answer yes to any of these, it is likely that the behavior is an accommodation.

Why can this be harmful for anxious children? Children have two ways of regulating their emotions: themselves and their parents. When they are chronically anxious, they become dependent on a parent. If parents continue to accommodate the majority of their child’s anxieties, a child’s own self-regulation capabilities are at risk for becoming underdeveloped. Independence will be a challenging virtue to teach if your child is dependent on you to feel emotionally safe and stable. Think about it this way, if your child was born with weak muscle tone, the solution would not be to always carry them around. What if your child could only eat when you fed them? We don’t want to be forever standing alongside the pool with a life preserver; we want to teach our kids how to swim.

How the accommodation cycle works: When a parent consistently accommodates a behavior, they are accidentally affirming the child’s biological fear. Their thought process becomes: “Well, my parents always come with me when I go to the basement. I must be right about my fear” or “My parents sleep with me every night, so that must mean I need them in order to sleep well.” Reducing accommodations helps to instill confidence in the child that they can handle the anxiety provoking situation without your help, ultimately lessening the fear in the long run, the more often they are exposed to it.

At MFS, we offer SPACE treatment (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Experiences), which is a parent-led intervention for helping children who are struggling with anxiety. This empirically supported treatment method helps to reduce the amount of accommodations that may be occurring in the household that are unintentionally reinforcing/escalating the child’s anxiety. Parents will work with a trained SPACE provider for approximately 8 weeks, with the goal of achieving anxiety reduction in the home, via eliminations of specific accommodations and increased emotional support. SPACE therapy has been empirically supported to treat childhood anxiety, specific phobias and OCD.