Introduction

Anxiety is a common challenge that can significantly impact a child’s social, emotional, and academic development. In an effort to reduce their child’s distress, parents often engage in accommodation behaviours. This article explains what accommodation behaviours are, why they occur, and how they can influence anxiety over time.

Accommodation Behaviours

Accommodation behaviours are actions parents take to reduce their child’s distress or prevent exposure to feared situations. Common examples include:

• Facilitating avoidance: Parents may avoid situations that trigger the child’s anxiety (e.g., social events, school, specific location).
• Providing reassurance: Parents may offer repeated reassurance (e.g., saying “you’ll be fine”, “there is nothing to worry about”).
• Taking over the child’s duties: Parents may take over tasks their child finds anxiety-provoking (e.g., ordering at a restaurant, introducing themselves to unfamiliar adults).
• Modifying family routines: Parents may modify their family’s plans to avoid triggering their child’s anxiety (e.g., forgoing overseas travel due to child’s fear of flying, cancelling date night due to child’s fear of being alone).  

Why Parents Engage in Accommodation Behaviours

The drive for parents to accommodate their child’s anxiety can be explained by referring to the attachment system.

The Attachment System

When humans are born, they are unable to protect themselves from danger. To increase our chances of survival, we are biologically wired to form attachments to our caregivers who can keep us safe. This attachment means that when children sense danger, their distress alerts caregivers to step in and protect them.

The Attachment System and Anxiety

As children develop, they become increasingly able to rely on their own skills to say safe. Anxiety disrupts this process by making everyday situations feel overwhelming. When this occurs, children may doubt their ability to cope and rely more heavily on parents to feel safe. In response, loving and committed parent may offer protection through accommodation behaviours.

Risks of Accommodation Behaviour

Although well intentioned, accommodation behaviours can create a protection trap that maintains or worsens anxiety. This occurs through three mechanisms:

1. Negative reinforcement: When parent reduce or prevent exposure to feared situations, the child’s distress reduces immediately. This relief reinforces both the child’s avoidance and the parent’s urge to accommodate – making these behaviours more likely to repeat.
2. Lost learning opportunity: Children build confidence by facing challenging situations and discovering that fears are often tolerable, temporary, or unlikely to occur. When accommodation prevents these experiences, the child misses opportunities to learn they can cope – allowing anxiety to remain strong.
3. Parental belief: Children often look to their parents to understand whether a situation is safe. When parents step in quickly, the child may interpret this as evidence that the situation truly is dangerous or that they cannot cope alone. Over time, this can increase dependence and reinforce anxiety.

Supporting Brave Behaviours

In order to support children to overcome anxiety, it is important parents change their behaviour. They must move away from supporting avoidance behaviours, and instead, move towards supporting brave behaviours. Brave behaviours refers to those where children face feared situations, despite their anxiety symptoms. This process involves two steps:

This process typically includes two steps:

1. Strengthening coping strategies: This gives children tools to use when anxiety arises.
2. Supporting graduated exposure to feared situations: This allows children to learn through experience that they can manage them.

It is important both steps are done sequentially, and with great care. Therefore, these topics will be discussed in a later blog.

Conclusion

Parental accommodation is a natural and well-intentioned response to a child’s distress. However, when overused, it can hinder the development of coping skills and independence. By gradually reducing accommodation and encouraging brave behaviours, parents help their child learn to manage anxiety and face challenges with confidence.