Description
Presenter:Renee Pepin, PhD
Overview.
Anxiety disorders remain among the most prevalent mental health concerns in youth worldwide. Although cognitive-behavioral interventions incorporating exposure therapy are considered first-line treatments for pediatric anxiety, a substantial proportion of children continue to experience persistent impairment even after receiving evidence-based care.
One increasingly recognized factor influencing treatment response is how caregivers respond to a child’s anxiety. Caregiver behaviors intended to reduce immediate distress—such as modifying routines, providing reassurance, facilitating avoidance, or participating in rituals—can unintentionally reinforce anxiety over time. At the same time, these parental accommodation behaviors often arise from understandable parental fears, beliefs about protection, cultural values, and caregivers’ own distress tolerance and anxiety histories.
This session will examine caregiver accommodation not only as a child-treatment variable, but also as a clinical target in its own right. We will discuss how to conceptualize accommodation within pediatric treatment and how to address it when working with anxious adults whose parenting patterns may be maintaining child anxiety. Emphasis will be placed on maintaining a collaborative, non-blaming stance while helping caregivers move from short-term distress reduction to long-term resilience-building.
Objectives.
- Describe common forms of caregiver accommodation and explain how these responses may maintain anxiety symptoms in youth.
- Formulate caregiver accommodation within a broader framework that includes caregiver anxiety, distress intolerance, belief systems, and sociocultural influences.
- Apply strategies for addressing accommodation collaboratively in pediatric treatment.
- Identify intervention approaches when working directly with anxious parents whose own anxiety contributes to accommodation patterns at home.
About the Presenter.
Dr. Meredith Elkins is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in the research and cognitive-behavioral treatment of anxiety disorders in children, adolescents, and parents. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Boston University. She completed her clinical internship at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Clinical Child Psychology at Columbia University Medical Center.
Dr. Elkins is Co-Program Director of the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program (MAMP) at McLean Hospital, an intensive outpatient program for youth ages 6–19 with anxiety and OCD, and serves as an Instructor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She also maintains a private practice focused on addressing perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, grief, and parenting stress.
She is the author of Parenting Anxiety: Breaking the Cycle of Worry and Raising Resilient Kids, which offers an evidence-based framework for understanding the reciprocal nature of parent and child anxiety and offers parents practical strategies to foster resilience. Her work has been featured in The Guadian, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Parents Magazine, and the Harvard Gazette.
Cost
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$10.00 for Non-Members
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