Parental Accommodation and Pediatric Anxiety: Moderating Effect of Emotion Regulation

Anxiety disorders are among the most common and distressing psychiatric conditions among youth. Child anxiety symptoms are impacted by a variety of factors, including parenting practices. Parental accommodation (i.e., a parent modifying their routine or facilitating avoidance to alleviate their child's anxiety) is one of the most well-established parenting practices thought to maintain anxiety in youth. Scant research, however, has explored how child emotion regulation impacts this relationship. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate whether parent-reported child emotion regulation moderated the relationship between parental accommodation and child anxiety symptom severity. Participants included parents of youth with mixed diagnostic status (i.e., some with psychiatric disorders, some healthy controls; N = 63, ages 7-17). Emotion regulation moderated the relationship between parental accommodation and child anxiety, such that among children whose parents reported higher levels of emotion regulation, accommodation more strongly predicted child anxiety. These results differed from our expectations and suggests that future research evaluating how emotion regulation impacts the accommodation-anxiety link is warranted.