Join us for our live, virtual NHPA CE Workshop and earn 3 APA CEs!
From Protecting to Empowering: Using ACT to Reduce Family Accommodation in Pediatric Anxiety and OCD
This interactive, 3-hour virtual training will focus on identifying and reducing parental accommodation in the context of pediatric anxiety and OCD. It will equip clinicians with practical, evidence-based strategies to help families reduce these problematic patterns and provide more autonomy-supportive and resilience-building responses to their child’s anxiety and OCD symptoms.
The training will open with an evidence-based overview of parent accommodation: what it is, why it develops, and how accommodation of children’s avoidance and compulsions inadvertently sustains and strengthens anxiety and OCD symptoms over time. Introductory content will also include an exploration of the bi-directional relationship between parent and child responses to emotional distress, including how parents’ relationship to their own discomfort, values conflicts, and psychological flexibility influence the capacity to tolerate their child’s anxiety and forego accommodation.
The training will then delve into applied examples, inviting clinicians to distinguish between helpful parent behaviors and those that inadvertently fuel anxiety. Next, drawing from the clinical literature on parenting interventions for youth with significant behavioral health struggles, clinicians will learn and practice approaches to support parents in reducing accommodation and engaging in more effective, autonomy-supportive, and values-consistent strategies. Clinicians will be guided in applying the core processes of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – a mindfulness- and acceptance-based therapeutic modality – to the clinical challenge of helping parents manage their own distress and reflexive reactions so they can respond more intentionally and flexibly to their child’s anxious distress and resist the pull to accommodate. The training will emphasize skills practice and clinical application, providing case examples, experiential exercises, and role plays focused on identifying accommodation patterns and leading parents through the process of helpfully reducing and replacingthem. Participants will leave with concrete tools for integrating these strategies into both individualparent work and group-based treatment.