How to Help Your Child Cope with OCD: 11 Parenting Tips

Perhaps you are a parent wondering if your child has OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) or maybe you have recently received this diagnosis.

If so you may be wondering what you, as a parent, can do to help support your child.

There may be some parenting strategies that you are doing that are right on target.

However, keep in mind all the regular parenting stuff you know may not apply to highly anxious kids and you may be accidentally doing the wrong thing.

Don’t fret there are plenty of opportunities to turn things around and help your child understand with and better cope with OCD.

One thing that is really important to keep in mind is that OCD, as well as the other anxiety disorders, is very treatable.

First off, you can start to educate yourself about all the tricky ways anxiety manifests in the family.

As you, your child, and your family become more and more familiar with how anxiety has impacted you, you can start to make  a game plan for how to turn things around.

It is not usual for parents as well as siblings to become entangled in OCD rituals or avoidance behaviors. This is the tricky way OCD affects everyone.

Some specific examples of OCD worries and behaviors are:

Worries about germs, dirt, and contamination and excessive washing and avoidance of feared contaminants.

Fear of  “bad” or “gross” images or words and compulsively telling on themselves or seeking reassurance.

Fear of harming themselves or others and refusal to be alone or insisting potentially dangerous objects are removed. Keep in mind this is different than a desire or want to harm self or others. It is the FEAR of doing harm.

Fear or excessive worry that objects are out of place and arranging them so they are “just right.”

Fear or excessive worry of locks being left undone or leaving objects behind and checking multiple times.

I have also seen separation anxiety and fears manifest with obsessions and compulsions. Some examples of this include: fear that parents will leave and not come back and that harm will come to them. The compulsions include excessive reassurance seeking and demands to know where parents are, when they will be back, and exactly what they are doing

11 Helpful Parenting Tips:

1. Don’t try to rationalize with your child. It is important to know and accept that by its very nature, OCD is irrational.
2. Be compassionate to your child. They are truly doing the best they can and shaming them or making them feel bad to try to get them to resist the OCD worries and behaviors will likely backfire.
3. Play detective with your child and find all the ways OCD is tricking and controlling the family.
4. Make a plan to work with your child to resist the rituals and avoidance behaviors. Explain that this will weaken the OCD and you will no longer engage in the OCD behaviors to help, not punish, your child.
5. Don’t give into rituals, rescue, or give into avoidance. Your child needs opportunities and experience to overcome difficult emotions. If you rescue them, they may believe they are incapable and the problem will worsen.
6. Don’t be afraid of medication. If your child’s symptoms are severe and they do not seem capable of resisting their compulsive actions, medications have been found to be safe and very effective and can make exposure therapy more successful.
7. Make sure your child is involved in cognitive behavioral therapy WITH exposure response prevention with a trained psychologist or therapist. This is the most effective treatment for OCD and is backed by a lot of research.
8. Make sure you and your child do your exposure therapy homework. This will help speed up progress.
9. Label the symptoms by using language you and your family feel comfortable with. For example, you can simply call it “OCD”,  “anxiety”, or “worry pests”. This helps externalize the symptoms and begins to transform the OCD into something that can be faced and overcome.
10. Use sayings like “Face your fears” and “Resist the urges” and think of your role as coaching your child.
11. Reward your child for being brave and changing their behaviors.

OCD can be an extremely uncomfortable and debilitating condition and if not treated can lead to major depression, hopelessness, and other difficulties in maintaining relationships and functioning at home and at school.

Don’t be afraid to reach out for help. It’s the first step in being brave and facing your fears.

If you or your child are experiencing OCD and you would like to learn more about cognitive behavioral exposure therapy, please set up a free 10 minute phone consultation please use my online scheduler below or call 303-747-4014.