How Avoidance Grows Our child’s Anxiety or OCD Most parents don’t see avoidance as an integral part of their child’s anxiety or OCD. They often don’t realize that avoidance is one of the fastest ways to grow anxiety. It is also one of the most common types of compulsions in OCD. In this week’s Youtube video for kids and teens, I discuss how avoidance grows […]
How to Help Our Kids when Anxiety and OCD Lead to Depression Having anxiety or OCD can be depressing. It can make your child feel hopeless, overwhelmed and discouraged. It can rob them of the things they used to enjoy one fear and one compulsion at a time. Clinical Depression can be a comorbid condition with anxiety or OCD, but in this Youtube video I […]
How Self-Esteem Plays a Role in Kids with Anxiety or OCD Anxiety and OCD will often take a swing at our child’s self-esteem. It can do that with the anxious or intrusive thoughts it bombards them with. It can do that by paralyzing them with fear, as they watch their peers not struggle. It can also be present alongside anxiety or OCD. It can help […]
How to Help Our Kids Create Daily Structure to Help OCD & Anxiety More and more these days our kids are finding themselves at home. They are often at home doing school work and are socializing more online. The hustle and bustle that used to be many of their lives has taken a hit. As we enter summer in the next few months, schedules altogether […]
Helping Kids with Anxiety or OCD Cope with Grief or Trauma It’s hard enough to have anxiety or OCD, but what happens when your child is hit with grief or trauma? It can feel like a muddy, chaotic mess. Unfortunately life happens and so do tragedies. Our kids are not immune to life happening to them, I wish they were. Anxiety and OCD are opportunistic. […]
How Online Support Can Be A Game Changer for Parents Raising Kids with OCD or Anxiety There are common stories among parents raising kids with OCD or anxiety. Stories of struggling to find a well trained anxiety or OCD child therapist. Stories of feeling isolated and alone. Stories of friends, family or the school not fully getting the depths of their child’s struggles. These are […]
Why Mental Health Professionals are Missing Signs of OCD When you get assessed by a mental health professional you assume that they would be well versed in all possible diagnoses. You assume they will identify, diagnose and treat any possible mental health struggle. Unfortunately that assumption is not only wrong, but dangerous. OCD seems to be the step-child of mental health education and training. Which […]
How to Motivate Our Kids to Work on Anxiety or OCD One of the biggest challenges parents face when raising a child with anxiety or OCD is…motivation. How do we motivate our kids to face their fears? How do we motivate our kids to sit in discomfort? How do we motivate them to even talk about their struggles. That can feel like an uphill battle. […]
How to Tell When It’s Difficult Behavior or When It’s Anxiety or OCD Your child is refusing to clean their room, go to bed or go to school. They are digging their heels in and it doesn’t look like they are going to budge. What are you supposed to do? Well if your child has anxiety or OCD, you might want to take an extra […]
How to Help Kids with Perfectionism There is no room for mistakes. There is no room for growth. Everything must be perfect the first time or your child will crumble. Perfectionism has the power to paralyze our kids and make them give up before they even begin. Often our kids think imperfection is synonymous with failure. Ironically it is actually perfectionism that holds our kids […]
How to Help Kids with Contamination OCD Contamination OCD can make kids feel contaminated by anything, not just germs. It can be a thought, a feeling or a person that makes something contaminated. I have seen kids who were consumed with contamination around bodily fluids, dust, “bad” people, and cleaning supplies to just name a few! OCD can be creative on what it makes kids […]
Therapist Corner with Dr. Allison Solomon and Michelle Massi, LMFT Welcome to another episode of the Therapist Corner with two of my favorite therapists, Dr. Allison Solomon and Michelle Massi, LMFT. In this episode we answer questions submitted from AT Parenting Community members. We discuss a variety of issues including: Anxiety/OCD therapy with multiple diagnoses Improving OCD skills among mental health professionals Accommodating OCD Confidentiality […]
How to Not Accommodate Your Child’s Anxiety or OCD with Eli Lebowitz Anxiety and OCD is a family affair. The anxiety and OCD will hook you in, talk to you and get you to grow it. Learning how to identify how you are accommodating your child’s anxiety or OCD is key to their long-term success. I’m honored to have Dr. Eli Lebowitz on as […]
Helping Kids Understand Why Distraction Doesn’t Help Anxiety or OCD When I ask kids what’s the main way they cope with anxiety or OCD, I almost always hear distraction. “I try to get my mind off of it,” they usually say. Unfortunately that is like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole to stop the bleeding. Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away, it […]
How to Help Your Child with Anxiety or OCD Advocate for Themselves As much as we want to protect our child from anything and everything, it is important that we teach them how to advocate for themselves. This is especially true when our kids have anxiety or OCD. They need to know how to articulate how they feel and what they need. This is true […]
