When your child has OCD
Free guidance on support at different ages, family routines, cooperation and your own needs as a parent.
Course for parents
Support and boundaries that take your child’s age and independence into account.
In development · For parents
Supporting your child through OCD
An online course for parents whose child has OCD, whether that child is young, a teenager or an adult. Understand how OCD works, why its demands can feel so pressing and what your child faces when working to change its patterns. Use that understanding to work together and adapt your support, while caring for yourself and your relationship with your child.
Recognise how OCD can shape the support you give
Understanding your child’s OCD is central to the course. You learn how doubt, unwanted thoughts or a sense of incompleteness can create a pressing need to check, repeat or seek reassurance. The teaching explains why visible rituals and mental strategies can feel necessary even when a fear or rule seems illogical.
That understanding extends to the work your child is doing: what the different methods aim to change and why practising a new response can be difficult. It helps you listen to your child’s experience and discuss support at a level that fits their age and development.
You also explore how caring responses, such as taking over part of the morning routine or changing family plans, can become part of the pattern. The aim is to agree help that fits your child’s actual needs and makes it easier to work together. Being drawn into this pattern does not mean you caused your child’s OCD.
Working with OCD as a parent
You will explore how to:
- Understand what drives OCD and what the different ways of working with it aim to change.
- Talk with your child about what they experience, using a shared language that helps you work together.
- Support your child’s own work with OCD, including their course work where relevant.
- Agree on support with your child and the other adults involved, adapting it to your child’s age, abilities and changing needs.
- Recognise how worry, guilt or exhaustion affects your own responses and identify the support you need.
- Make room for family activities and time together when OCD is not the focus.
For children and teenagers, this includes considering how family agreements fit with school and treatment.
Parenting at different stages
A young child’s dependence, a teenager’s growing independence and an adult child’s autonomy call for different forms of support. The course explores your responsibilities as a parent and how to involve your child in decisions, taking their development and needs into account. An adult child makes their own decisions about life and treatment.
The course also addresses the worry and exhaustion you may experience as a parent, and your own need for support. It explores disagreements between parents and the needs of siblings, alongside ways to preserve family activities and time with your child that is not centred on OCD.
