Addressing Parental Accommodation When Treating Anxiety in Children

Changes that parents and other family members make to their own behaviors to help a child avoid or alleviate anxiety are known as accommodations. Parental accommodation is a key aspect of child anxiety, and has a major impact on course, severity of symptoms and impairment, family distress, and treatment outcomes. As such the careful, gradual removal of accommodation by parents and loved ones is an important target of anxiety treatment for children. Addressing Parental Accommodation When Treating Anxiety in Children provides invaluable guidance to clinicians who wish to address accommodation within the context of a broader treatment strategy for anxious children, or as a stand-alone treatment. Clinicians will learn from this concise and easily accessible primer how to help parents identify and monitor accommodation, how to create treatment plans for reducing accommodation, and how to help parents communicate these plans to their children and implement them effectively. They will also learn how to help families cope with disruptive child responses to reduced accommodation, how to work with parents who struggle to cooperate, and what to do about a child's threats of self-harm. The book includes transcripts and rich clinical illustrations, as well as guidance on how to discuss accommodation with both parents and children-including a wealth of easily understood metaphors to aid in approaching the topic with empathy and without judgment. Addressing Parental Accommodation When Treating Anxiety in Children is an essential resource that will be of use to psychologists, counsellors, and clinical social workers who treat anxious children.