If your child has OCD, there’s a good chance you’ve done something like this:
You see your child is distressed, and they need you to check that the door is locked (just one more time), or to confirm that nobody is sick (just one more time), or to take a different route home because the usual one has become unbearable for reasons you don’t entirely understand. And so, because you can see they’re suffering, you do it.
What you’ve just done has a clinical name: accommodation. It’s one of the most important, and painful, things to understand about raising a child with OCD.
What is Accommodation?
Accommodation is any way that family members or other carers modify their own behavior in response to a child’s OCD. It includes participating in rituals, providing reassurance, adjusting family routines, avoiding triggers, and completing tasks on a child’s behalf to prevent distress.
It’s also, by a significant margin, the most common response parents have to a child with OCD. Studies suggest that the vast majority of families living with childhood OCD accommodate to some degree.
Before we continue, I want to be careful not to sound like I’m shaming anyone. Family members accommodate out of love. It’s not something to feel bad about having done, but it’s important to understand the impact of repeated accommodation.
The problem is that accommodation works only in the short term. Your child’s distress comes down, the moment passes, and everyone can breathe again. However, out of that fleeting moment of comfort, your child learns that the distress can be relieved this way, and you learn that this is how to help. The cycle quietly deepens.
Why it Makes Things Worse
OCD is maintained by avoidance. The anxiety that drives a compulsion feels unbearable in the moment, and the compulsion brings relief. That relief teaches the brain a lesson it doesn’t forget: the only way to survive this feeling is to do the thing.
When you accommodate, you become part of that cycle. The anxiety is (temporarily) relieved, and the OCD gets the message that its logic is correct; the threat was real, the ritual was necessary, and the relief required your participation.
Over time, accommodation tends to do two things. First, it expands the OCD into more triggers, more rituals, and more situations that require family involvement. Second, it reduces your child’s capacity to tolerate distress on their own, because they’ve learned that distress is something to be immediately resolved rather than something that can be survived.
That is exactly how OCD operates, and understanding it is the first step toward doing something to lessen its hold on your child.
The Guilt This Produces
I want to say something directly to the parent who is reading this and feeling a version of: I’ve been making it worse this whole time.
You haven’t been making it worse. I’ve said it already, but what you’ve been doing is what any loving parent would do with the information and instincts available to you. The impulse to relieve your child’s suffering is one of the most fundamental things about being a parent. The fact that OCD exploits that impulse is one of the cruellest things about the disorder.
What’s also true is that understanding accommodation changes what’s possible for your family. An informed parent has the opportunity to build a child’s strength, resilience, and self-belief.
What Reducing Accommodation Looks Like
This is where I want to be careful, because “just stop accommodating” is advice that sounds simple but is, in practice, very difficult.
Reducing accommodation without a plan tends to produce a spike in your child’s distress that is unbearable for everyone involved. It can feel like withholding comfort from someone who is suffering. Doing it without support, without understanding why you’re doing it, and without the tools to manage what comes up, often doesn’t hold.
The approach that works for most families is more gradual, collaborative, and done in the context of treatment. A therapist trained to work with OCD will typically collaborate with parents directly alongside the child. You’ll learn when and how to begin stepping back from accommodation, what to expect when you do, and how to respond to your child’s distress in ways that support their recovery rather than inadvertently reinforcing the OCD.
What This Asks of You
I won’t pretend this is easy. Watching your child experience distress that you could relieve is so challenging. The kind of sustained, informed, counter-instinctual love that a parent must display to help combat their child’s OCD is emotionally and mentally taxing. But, it’s also the kind of support that can truly change your child’s life, helping them build the tools to be comfortable and happy in their own skin.
If your family is navigating this and you’re not sure where to start, we’d be glad to help. Our team at Bellevue Family Counseling works with children with OCD and their families, and we understand that the parents in the room need support too. Reach out when you’re ready.