The Accommodation Trap: When Helping Fuels Anxiety
A practical, compassionate guide to one of the most powerful ways adults shape child anxiety
For today’s extended playbook, I’ll be writing in my child anxiety specialist hat:
(Please note: AI titled this creepy image that kinda but doesn’t really look like me as “Bright Smile in Nature’s Embrace”)
I want to pull back the curtain on one of the most powerful forces shaping the development and treatment of child anxiety. My colleagues and I address this variable in every single anxiety focused treatment plan we write. A quick Google search shows that hundreds of research articles exist on this topic. Yet, maddeningly, the average parent or educator has never heard of it.
Psychology has a well-established branding problem. Half of our terms are clunky, misleading, or feel vaguely—or overtly—accusatory (“refrigerator mother” anyone?). But this is a particularly unfortunate miss—because the concept is not actually complicated, and once families understand it, it can have a rapid, meaningful impact.
Okay, sufficiently hyped?!
I’m talking about accommodation.
Like most psychological terms, accommodation does not exactly roll off the tongue, but you might be familiar with its more judgmental sounding cousin—“enabling.” I don’t love the term “enabling” because of all the baggage that comes with it so for the purposes of this playbook we’re going to stick with the official term—accommodation.
What is Accommodation?
At its core, accommodation occurs:
When we change our behavior to help someone avoid anxiety or distress.
Before we go further, I want us all to be clear on what this is not. The instinct to accommodate is not a character flaw. It’s not weakness or bad parenting. It’s just evolution. We are hardwired to protect our kids. The human species has survived across the millennia because of this innate parental instinct to step in when we sense danger or distress in our offspring.
If your child runs anxious or is just more vulnerable in certain situations like social gathering, academics, or new environments, the urge to step in and protect makes even more sense. We are incredibly attuned to our children. After a few tough birthday parties, we start to anticipate their distress and get really good at spotting the early signs. With the best intentions (I want them to be able to participate! I know that if they can just get in the door, they’ll be fine!), we start stepping in earlier and earlier to manage their distress.
Layer on top of this the cultural pressures we all feel. We’re parenting in a social environment that tells us more parenting is better parenting, that the experience of distress might actually be dangerous for our kids to feel, and that a “good” parent optimizes their child’s emotional experience at all times.
Suddenly, stepping in isn’t just instinct—it feels like the responsible thing to do.
In my clinical practice, accommodation comes up with every single anxious young person I treat. Some common examples include:
Staying at a sports practice “just in case” they need you
Promising to pick a child up early when they’re anxious about getting through the school day
Avoiding places you know would make your child feel anxious
Lying in bed with your child until they fall asleep (and then allowing them into YOUR bed at 3 am). (Quick note: if co-sleeping is something you enjoy, more power to you! This example is for the parents who would love to have their evenings and their own bed back, but feel like they can’t because their child would be too anxious).
While these specific examples often track with common anxiety disorders like separation anxiety, social anxiety, and panic disorder, there are many more subtle ways accommodation can show up in our parenting. I help parents reduce accommodation every day for my job, yet as I wrote the following list, I felt uncomfortable recognizing so many of these behaviors in my own parenting:
Answering for your child when an adult asks them a question
Emailing teachers to pre-explain or excuse behavior when your child could self-advocate, even if it would be awkward or imperfect
Over-explaining situations in an attempt to eliminate all stress and uncertainty, in other words trying to logic your child out of anxiety
Constantly monitoring your child’s mood and adjusting the environment to keep their spirits high
Answering the same question over and over. For example, “Are you sure it will be okay?” → yes → on repeat
Avoiding your own emotions so you don’t escalate theirs, in other words “walking on eggshells”
Engaging in a multi-step bedtime ritual that you never intended to start, but just kind of evolved out of a period of tough bedtimes
Which of these resonate with you? What other parenting behaviors in your life might have started with the most loving, attuned, and thoughtful intentions, but have taken on a life of their own?
The Accommodation Cycle (And Why It Backfires)
Here’s the part that’s both counterintuitive and incredibly important:
Accommodation works in the short term—and makes anxiety worse in the long term.
When you accommodate:
Your child feels immediate relief
You feel immediate relief
The situation “goes better”
But over time, something else happens:
Anxiety grows
Confidence shrinks
Avoidance and over reliance on parents becomes the default
In other words, the more we accommodate, the bigger anxiety gets. The bigger anxiety gets, the more parents feel like they have to accommodate. Before they know it, parents find themselves working harder and harder just to maintain a fragile equilibrium.
Crazy parental tap dancing is hard enough, but something important also gets lost in the accommodation cycle—the opportunity to learn:
Maybe it would have been okay
Maybe I/my kid can handle this
Maybe the worst doesn’t happen
Or maybe it does… and we figure it out
It can be easy to skim through these points and think, “My kid will learn those things eventually. Right now, I’m more focused on getting them through the school day. If I do that with a little accommodation, so be it.” And that is such a reasonable, understandable take. Yet, one of the reasons I wanted to write this piece is because the best time to start giving your kid practice with anxiety and distress is right now. (Actually, it’s probably yesterday, but we’ll take what we can get).
I’ve worked with many families over the years who, with the best of intentions, pushed off the day of reckoning with accommodation. And I’m here to tell you—it doesn’t get easier as your kid gets older. In fact, it tends to get much harder. The stakes only get higher as our kids grow up. Many parents of high schoolers or college students have told me that they wished they’d started this work when their kids were younger, because in hindsight they recognize that the stakes were not actually all that high then (even though it didn’t feel that way at the time) and that they had a lot more influence over their younger child than over their teen or young adult.
Quick Reality Check: We All Do This
For anyone who might be reading this and thinking OMG, I am ruining my children and must stop all accommodation immediately, let’s slow down for a minute. Accommodation is not black and white. We all do it sometimes.
Sometimes we help our kids just because we love them and it feels good to do something for them. Sometimes we know they had a tough day, and we want to throw them a bone. Sometimes we just need them to make it through Thanksgiving dinner.
The question is not: Do I ever accommodate?
The question is: Where are my/my child’s slippery slopes?
Accommodation becomes a problem when it’s preventing your kid’s growth, growing in its own right, and/or when families feel dependent on it. If you’re on the fence about if your behaviors around your kid’s distress are tipping into problem territory, ask yourself the following questions:
Am I helping my child handle this—or helping them avoid it?
Handling = builds tolerance, flexibility, confidence
Avoiding = reduces distress now, grows anxiety later
If the answer is “I’m mostly helping them not have to deal with this” → that’s most likely accommodation.
Is what I’m doing to help with their anxiety increasing over time?
Look for the creep:
“This used to be optional…”
“Now it feels necessary…”
“Now we can’t not do it…”
If your effort is growing just to maintain baseline functioning, you’re likely in the accommodation cycle.
What happens if I don’t do this?
Do things fall apart immediately?
Does your child feel unable to proceed without you?
Do you feel like you can’t risk not stepping in?
If the system depends on you doing the thing, that’s a sign you’ve shifted from support towards accommodation.
And the one question to rule them all:
Am I reducing my child’s anxiety in the moment—or building their ability to handle anxiety over time?
Most parents I know in my personal and professional lives who answer these questions conclude that they are doing at least some accommodating in their parenting. Me too! Your challenge now is to think flexibly about how big of a problem this is for you, your kid, and your family. Play the tape forward—if you are still intervening at this level in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years—what would that look like? Think it through and decide if this is:
An address this now problem
A keep an eye on it and reassess in a few weeks problem
A check back in 6 months problem
Armed with your timeline, let us proceed to….
What Can We Do About This?
