Friday, January 29, 2027 | 9:30 AM - 12:45 PM
Zoom | 3 CEs
Program Description:
This interactive, 3-hour training will focus on identifying and reducing parental accommodation in the context of pediatric anxiety and OCD. It will equip clinicians with practical, evidence-based strategies to help families reduce these problematic patterns and provide more autonomy-supportive and resilience-building responses to their child’s anxiety and OCD symptoms.
The training will open with an evidence-based overview of parent accommodation: what it is, why it develops, and how accommodation of children's avoidance and compulsions inadvertently sustains and strengthens anxiety and OCD symptoms over time. Introductory content will also include an exploration of the bi-directional relationship between parent and child responses to emotional distress, including how parents' relationship to their own discomfort, values conflicts, and psychological flexibility influence the capacity to tolerate their child's anxiety and forego accommodation.
The training will then delve into applied examples, inviting clinicians to distinguish between helpful parent behaviors and those that inadvertently fuel anxiety. Next, drawing from the clinical literature on parenting interventions for youth with significant behavioral health struggles, clinicians will learn and practice approaches to support parents in reducing accommodation and engaging in more effective, autonomy-supportive, and values-consistent strategies. Clinicians will be guided in applying the core processes of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – a mindfulness- and acceptance-based therapeutic modality – to the clinical challenge of helping parents manage their own distress and reflexive reactions so they can respond more intentionally and flexibly to their child's anxious distress and resist the pull to accommodate. The training will emphasize skills practice and clinical application, providing case examples, experiential exercises, and role plays focused on identifying accommodation patterns and leading parents through the process of helpfully reducing and replacing them. Participants will leave with concrete tools for integrating these strategies into both individual parent work and group-based treatment.
Level of Instruction:
Intermediate
Learning Objectives:
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Identify the behavioral, emotional, and contextual factors that contribute to parental accommodation in pediatric anxiety disorders and OCD, and explain how accommodation maintains child anxiety and OCD symptoms.
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Differentiate between accommodation, autonomy-supportive parenting, and other common parent responses by evaluating clinical case examples through an evidence-based framework.
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Apply Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) processes to help parents increase psychological flexibility, tolerate their child's distress, and reduce accommodation in a values-consistent manner.
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Develop an evidence-informed intervention plan that incorporates practical strategies for assessing parental accommodation, coaching parents to reduce accommodating behaviors, and replacing them with resilience-building responses across individual and group treatment settings.
About the Presenters:
Dr. Alyssa Faro s a licensed psychologist in private practice at True North Health, PLLC in addition to serving on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and as a clinical supervisor and researcher at McLean Hospital. She has extensive experience treating OCD and related disorders across the lifespan with Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and other evidence-based treatments such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), ACT, and Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE). She previously served as the Director of Clinical Services at McLean Hospital’s OCDI Jr. where she oversaw clinical training and programming, admissions, and supervision. Dr. Faro has presented and written on treating OCD and has been featured in the press as an expert. She is the co-founder of Anchored Approach, PLLC, which provides clinical consultation, training, and educational programming on evidence-based assessment and psychosocial treatment for anxiety disorders and OCD. In addition to her clinical and training work, Dr. Faro is actively engaged in advocacy through her service on the Board of Directors of OCD New Hampshire, contributing to efforts that expand access to evidence-based care and community education.
Dr. Ashley Hart is a licensed clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, MA, where she serves as a staff psychologist and the Training Director in Student Counseling Services. Dr. Hart specializes in and trains others in evidence-based psychotherapy approaches for anxiety, OCD, and related disorders in youth and adults, especially exposure therapy interventions. She has co-authored a number of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and newsletter publications. She regularly attends and presents at conferences of the professional organizations of which she is a long-standing member, including the International OCD Foundation, Anxiety and Depression Association of America and the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. Dr. Hart maintains a private practice (Willow Tree Psychology, PLLC) that serves individuals and families in the greater Worcester, MA community. She is the co-founder of Anchored Approach, PLLC, which provides clinical consultation, training, and educational programming on evidence-based assessment and psychosocial treatment approaches for anxiety disorders and OCD.
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NHPA prices workshops by CE credit hour:
$25.00 per CE for members; $35.00 per CE for non-members
Paying with a check:
Checks must be received within one week of the event. If payment has not been received, registrant will still have option to pay online with a credit card up until the day before the program. If an invoice remains open on the day of the event, the registrant will not be allowed to attend.
Cancellation policy:
Refunds, minus a 10% cancellation fee, will be issued for all cancellations received two weeks prior to the start of the course. No refunds or vouchers will be made thereafter. No-shows are not refunded.
Attendance policy:
Full attendance is required to obtain CEs per NHPA policy. No partial credit will be given. Those who attend the workshop and complete the evaluation form will receive 1 continuing education credit. Please note that APA CE rules require that we only give credit to those who attend the entire workshop. Those arriving after the scheduled start time or leaving before the workshop is completed will not receive CE credits.
Registrations are Transferable:
Registrants can transfer an event confirmation to another individual. The NHPA office must be notified of the transfer at least 24 hours prior to the event.
This program is sponsored by the New Hampshire Psychological Association. NHPA is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. NHPA maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
