For parents

Family accommodation tracker for parents of anxious children

A week's record of the things the household does to keep a child's anxiety or OCD at bay, so that we can see the whole pattern and choose what to change first.

Download the PDF (127 KB) See the sheet on this page

A4, free, no sign-up. The PDF is tagged for screen readers.

What counts as accommodation

Accommodation means anything a parent, brother, sister or grandparent does, or stops doing, because a child is anxious. Some of it is obvious, like answering the same question about the weather six times before school, and some is so built into the week that nobody notices it, such as never mentioning the dentist until the morning of the appointment. Each change spares the child distress in the moment, and together they leave the anxiety deciding more and more of family life.

Who it is for

The sheet is for parents of children of any age, including teenagers, and it is most useful early in parent-based work for anxiety or OCD. If there are two parents, both can fill it in. If you are unsure whether something counts, put it on the list and we will sort it out together.

Two rows as an example

Example rows
What we did	How often	What it prevented
Told her again that nobody would be ill at dinner	Most evenings, three or four times	Crying and refusing to come to the table
Stayed in his room until he fell asleep	Every night, about forty minutes	Him coming downstairs repeatedly and calling out

A common mistake

A common mistake is stopping several accommodations at once, for example on a bad evening. Sudden changes usually bring a sharp rise in distress and leave the child feeling that the rules changed without warning, which is why the sheet asks for changes to be announced in advance. Try not to read the sheet as a judgement of yourself, because accommodation comes from trying to help.

The sheet comes from SPACE, a treatment delivered to parents only, in which the child does not attend. In one trial of 124 children aged 7 to 14, 12 parent-only sessions were found to be no less effective than 12 sessions of CBT with the child, though that tells us less about very young children or older teenagers. The FASA, a standard questionnaire measure of accommodation, is listed with its official source on the resources page.

For parents

Family accommodation tracker

What the anxiety is currently asking the household to do

Accommodation is the term for the things families do to keep a child from becoming distressed: answering the same question again, checking for them, taking over a job they find hard, changing the route, letting them sleep in your bed, doing the talking for them.

It is what any loving parent does, and it is not a parenting failure. Research links higher accommodation with more severe childhood anxiety (Iniesta-Sepúlveda and colleagues, 2021), which does not by itself show that accommodation causes anxiety. It is one of the first things treatment looks at. Filling this in is not an admission of anything. It shows what the anxiety is currently asking the household to do.

This week

This week, with 12 blank rows to fill in
What we did	How often	What it prevented

Reading it back

The one that takes the most out of the household

The one that would be easiest to change first

What I think would happen if we changed it

Changes to accommodation work best when they are announced in advance and made calmly, not sprung in the moment. Bring this sheet to the session and we will plan the order together.

If your child becomes aggressive, talks about hurting themselves, or you are worried about anyone’s safety, keep everyone safe first and get professional help before going further. In an emergency call 999.

Using and sharing this sheet

Free to print and use for personal or clinical use, including by other clinicians with their own clients, provided it is unchanged and the footer is left on. Not for sale. You do not need to ask, sign up or give an email address, and the download is not tracked. If you want to adapt the wording for your own service, write your own version rather than editing this one, so that the footer never ends up on something I did not write.

A worksheet, not treatment, advice about your situation or a diagnosis. It is best used alongside a qualified clinician. If using it makes things worse, stop and speak to your GP or clinician. In an emergency call 999. Written by Anxiety CBT Ltd and free to print for personal or clinical use.

Sources

Lebowitz, E. R., Marin, C., Martino, A., Shimshoni, Y., & Silverman, W. K. (2020). Parent-based treatment as efficacious as cognitive-behavioral therapy for childhood anxiety: a randomized noninferiority study of Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 59(3), 362-372. doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2019.02.014 (opens in a new tab)
Iniesta-Sepúlveda, M., Rodríguez-Jiménez, T., Lebowitz, E. R., Goodman, W. K., & Storch, E. A. (2021). The relationship of family accommodation with pediatric anxiety severity: Meta-analytic findings and child, family and methodological moderators. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 52, 1-14. doi.org/10.1007/s10578-020-00987-6 (opens in a new tab)

Written by Dr Daniel O’Rourke, PhD, ABPP, CPsychol, HCPC-registered Clinical Psychologist Last reviewed: September 2026

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