Parenting Kids with Ocd: A Guide to Understanding and Supporting Your Child with OCD

by Bonnie Zucker

Parenting Kids With OCD provides parents with a comprehensive understanding of obsessive-compulsive disorder, its symptoms, types, and presentation in children and teens. The treatment of OCD is explained, and guidelines on how to both find appropriate help and best support one's child are provided. Family accommodation is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to childhood OCD; yet, higher accommodating is associated with a worsening of the child's symptoms and greater levels of familial stress. Parents who have awareness of how they can positively or negatively impact their child's OCD can benefit their child's outcome. Case examples are included to illustrate the child's experience with OCD and what effective treatment looks like. OCD worsens when there is increased stress for the child; therefore, stress management is an essential component for improvement. Parents will learn how to manage stress in themselves and encourage effective stress management for their children.

Genres: Parenting, Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2017

Reviews

[fpk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the best book I've read on OCD. Bonnie Zucker does an excellent job at describing the nature of OCD, its various manifestations, treatments and prognoses. Zucker is a licensed psychologist with many years of experience working with children and teens who suffer from OCD. Her primary mode of intervention is CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and much of the book focuses on that- creative ways to counter the obsessive thoughts and compulsions that overwhelm the sufferer. The main method is exposure/response prevention, where the person is exposed to an anxiety provoking scenario but then does not respond to it in the usual obsessive way- so as to experience the stimulus and bear the anxiety until she realizes it is tolerable and the cycle is thus broken. While Zucker touches a bit on medications, she doesn't spend too much time on this, which I found to be a bit of a drawback. CBT can be a very effective intervention, but often, in my experience and from what I've read on the subject, it is not enough in itself to combat the symptoms and accompanying depression and anxiety.
Many of Zucker's interventions I'd heard of, but I'd never heard them described so clearly before. She talks about making ladders of behavior, where the patient/client lists behaviors that are difficult to do in ascending order, starting from the bottom, where the easiest behavior is on the bottom, the most difficult behavior is at the top of the ladder. And then the individual works her way up the ladder, little by little until she becomes habituated to the new behavior. My favorite intervention was the loop recordings. Zucker has her children patients record themselves speaking aloud their obsessive thoughts. And then they are supposed to listen to these recordings over and over again, a certain number of times per day or week, until their thoughts become so boring that they quickly lose their power to elicit compulsive behaviors. I thought that was a riot! And it made a lot of sense! Zucker provides a lot of helpful tips to parents; in particular she posits that accommodation to the obsessive rituals actually perpetuates the cycle, so she suggests that parents not do this. Even though it seems kind to go along with Jimmy's need to disinfect all the door handles, doing so actually reinforces Jimmy's OCD. Zucker includes a lot of case studies in this book, 10 in all. I was intrigued by them, but I don't think she needed to include so many, three or four would have sufficed to illustrate her points. Zucker also included a wonderful list of resources in the back, which is a huge plus when wanting to provide info in a book like this. Parents often are at a loss as to where to turn; having these links, books and even apps listed is very helpful. One question I'd like to pose to Zucker is whether her assertion that OCD is resolvable is truly supported by current research. Zucker , more than once, makes claims such as, "Now we know that OCD can be cured, and many children who receive effective treatment will never have OCD again." And then again she states, "In most cases, the child is able to discontinue the medication without any return of symptoms or side effects." ... Hmmmm I am not so sure of these assertions. For one, Zucker works with children. And teens. She is not basing outcomes on adults. Children are not all grown up yet; the results haven't come in yet. These individuals have perhaps improved with her treatment and discontinued therapy, but how can she so positively state that they are cured? Really? What about down the road? When stress hits them in college? Or when they enter the work force? I'm not a behavioral scientist, but from what I've read and witnessed, it does seem that OCD ebbs and flows. Testimonials from OCD sufferers seem to more often suggest temporary remissions. I say this hesitantly though, as I am not up on the current research and certainly my limited anecdotal evidence isn't statistically significant. I do hope Zucker is correct in her assertions: that OCD is overcome-able and can be put to rest in people. I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it to anyone in the field as well as to OCD sufferers and their parents.