What Advice Would You Give to Parents of Children With OCD?
Last week I wrote about a resource for parents of children with autism – a book that provides parenting advice from adults who also have autism. It seemed to me that this is such an important concept that we can often overlook when our children receive a diagnosis or experience difficulties that are not personally familiar to us; we only ask experts for advice. We look to doctors and therapists and find resources from organizations specializing in this particular topic. But we don’t have to ask for advice from those who have actually gone through it.
Resources, professional advice and support are all great. But sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know – if we don’t ask. This may be why user Kinja JLL commented on my post on autism with a similar question – with the exception of obsessive-compulsive disorder:
Could you do this for OCD? I would love to hear from adults living with OCD what they have to say to children growing up with it.
There are many resources for parents of children who have been diagnosed with OCD or are showing signs of a disorder, including this Parenting Guide to OCD from the Institute of the Child’s Mind. Specifically, this guide provides a detailed explanation of the different types of obsessions and compulsions your child may experience, as well as this basic description:
Children with OCD struggle with either obsessions, compulsions, or both. Obsessions are unwanted and obsessive thoughts, images, or impulses. Obsessions make children feel upset and anxious. Compulsions are actions or rituals that children are forced to perform to relieve anxiety.
To understand how OCD works, consider a mosquito bite. When a mosquito bites you, it itches, so you scratch to feel better. When you scratch the bite, you feel great, but as soon as you stop scratching, the itching gets worse. Here’s how OCD plays out. When a child with OCD feels anxious, they do something to temporarily fix it, but this ritual only makes the situation worse over time.
But if you haven’t struggled with OCD yourself, and if the experts you work with also don’t have the disorder, you may be missing important insights or advice from those who have it.
So let’s help the JLL and provide the missing item; If you have obsessive-compulsive disorder, what did you do well as a child? What was useless or even harmful? Let us know in the comments what advice you would give to a parent raising a child with OCD.