Young people’s development is shaped by interactions between genetic traits and environmental factors. This means that a child’s interpersonal relationships, home environment, friendships, and other experiences have a big impact on how they think, feel, and act as they grow older. Parents – possibly the biggest single influence on a young person’s life – play a key role in this process.
It’s unsurprising, then, that unaddressed parental mental health problems can impact children’s well-being. Parental mental health challenges have been associated with disrupted schooling, interpersonal difficulties, and challenging home environments. Children often struggle to understand and navigate their parents’ mental health symptoms, impacting their emotional well-being.
While the impact of mental health disorders like anxiety and depression among parents has been well-researched, parental OCD has received little attention – even though it’s a common and serious mental health condition. In this blog, we look at the experiences of children of parents with OCD and the kind of support available for parents living with the disorder.
What Is OCD?
OCD stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder, a serious and disruptive mental health disorder that impacts a person’s psychological and social well-being. People with OCD experience patterns of thinking and behaviour known as obsessions and compulsions.
- “Obsessions” are distressing, intrusive thoughts, emotions, worries, urges or images that keep coming to your mind, even when you try to stop them
- “Compulsions” are behaviours or rituals that you use to find relief from obsessions. However, this relief is only temporary, and these obsessions soon return
Obsessions and compulsions can involve different themes. These might include:
- Experiencing intrusive thoughts about causing harm to others and engaging in rituals to ensure this harm doesn’t happen
- Experiencing intrusive thoughts about cleanliness and contamination
- Experiencing fears that bad things will happen if objects and actions are unsymmetrical or incomplete
How Does OCD Impact Families?
Families function as systems, meaning that the well-being and actions of every family member impact all the rest, and the family system as a whole. When one family member lives with OCD, it affects other family members, relationships, structures and dynamics.
Relatives of people with OCD often become involved in their rituals and compulsions, seeking to avoid conflict in relationships or help alleviate their distress. But this involvement ultimately intensifies the emotional impact on family members and can help sustain OCD. Relatives may also experience stigma that, sadly, still surrounds the disorder.
How Can Parental OCD Affect Young People’s Lives?
Parental OCD can impact children’s lives in different ways. Young people’s perspectives on mental health are often overlooked or underresearched, although they offer some of the most valuable insights into child, adolescent, and family mental health. A 2012 study explored children’s experiences of living with parents with OCD.
Control and Boundaries
Sometimes, obsessions and compulsions can push parents to overstep young people’s boundaries. For example, parents may enter their child’s room to reorganise or arrange their things or to clean parts of their space. Or they may ask a child to arrange their room in a certain way.
Young people sometimes accommodate these rituals by completing their requests or pretending to have done so. In other cases, they put clear boundaries and refuse to engage. However, while placing boundaries and avoiding accommodation is important, it can also be difficult and tiring for adolescents.
Offering Support
Many young people try to support their parents in some way. But children often feel confused, unsure or lost about how to offer support.
Attempts to offer support can also result in role-reversal and parentification, processes that can be deeply damaging for young people’s development. Children can end up taking on extra responsibilities at home when their parents are struggling with symptoms, intensifying parent-child role-reversal.
Experiencing Stigma
Because of social stigma surrounding OCD, many young people hesitate to discuss their parents’ OCD with others. They may feel embarrassed or worry about what other people will think about them and their family. Sometimes, parents also ask their children not to speak about it.
Speaking about parental OCD may be easier when parents are receiving additional support and learning how to manage and navigate their symptoms. In these cases, some young people speak about feelings of pride and a sense that their parents’ experiences could help others.
Seeking Support and Understanding
For young people whose parents have OCD, finding the right support for themselves is important. This might involve professional support, but also help from specific friends or figures who have some understanding of OCD and their experience. Many young people speak about the importance of psychoeducation and understanding why their parents think and act in certain ways.
Is OCD Intergenerationally Transmitted?
There is conflicting evidence about whether OCD traits are intergenerationally transmitted: whether children can internalise and mirror their parents’ obsessions and compulsions and develop OCD themselves. A 2018 study concluded that obsessive beliefs among parents were not themselves a specific risk factor for child OCD: instead, more general parenting traits, such as anxiety, stress, or control, made young people more vulnerable to developing the disorder.
Seeking Help for Parental OCD
Parents often hesitate or feel ashamed to seek help for OCD, despite its impact on their daily lives. They may worry about being considered bad parents or judged by others. Unfortunately, this stigma prevents many parents and families from receiving the support they require.
Like all mental health disorders, it’s very difficult for someone to recover from OCD on their own. Parents with OCD usually require additional care to manage and recover from OCD symptoms. But with the right support, most people with OCD are able to live fulfilling lives that are not disrupted by obsessions or compulsions.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with Exposure and Response Therapy
Exposure and response therapy is a type of cognitive-behavioural therapy designed for people with OCD. It is one of the most common and effective OCD treatments.
Exposure and response therapy supports you to confront and tolerate obsessions while resisting urges to engage in compulsions. It can take place in one-to-one or group sessions. In ERP sessions, a therapist might:
- Explore different ways to think about and respond to obsessions. This might focus on accepting and tolerating the thought or worry, rather than trying to fight or resolve it.
- Support you to delay or avoid engaging in compulsions and trust that the feeling will pass
ERP therapy can feel very challenging, especially at first. But therapists should work with you at your own pace, taking small steps at first as you develop confidence and self-belief in your ability to avoid compulsions.
Anti-Depressants
OCD symptoms seem to be connected to serotonin levels in the brain, although experts still aren’t sure about the exact mechanisms in play. Anti-depressants, particularly SSRIs, that regulate serotonin levels can help reduce obsessions and compulsions.
Different people respond to medications in different ways, and pharmaceutical treatment isn’t right for everyone. A psychiatrist can help you consider and manage medications and find the treatment path that works for you.
Family Therapy
Family therapy is often a core element of treatment for parents living with OCD. OCD can disrupt family dynamics, alter boundaries, and restructure family systems, causing difficulties in relationships and impacting each member’s well-being. In particular, families often move into accommodating patterns of behaviour that not only are distressing, but can also help sustain the disorder.
Family therapy can help parents place appropriate boundaries to prevent young people from becoming involved in their parents’ mental health problems or taking on adult roles. Therapists can help children cope with difficulties at home and support other family members to facilitate their loved one’s recovery. They can also identify processes of family accommodation and support families to develop healthier and more helpful responses to OCD.
The Wave Clinic: Specialist Recovery Programs for Young People and Families
The Wave Clinic offers transformative recovery programs for young people and families living with OCD and other mental health challenges. We take a whole-person approach to mental health recovery, emphasising the role of past experiences and interpersonal relationships in shaping how we think, feel, and act.
We offer residential and outpatient support from our treatment spaces in Kuala Lumpur and Dubai, combining exceptional clinical care with enriching experiences, education, and community involvement. We centre the families in our treatment programs, through collaborative decision making, communities of parents and days or weeks of family therapy.
If you’d like to find out more or begin an admissions process, please get in touch today. We’re here to help.
