Alexis’s 8 year old son didn’t like to be out of sight from his mother for even for five minutes. “I would always be like, okay, I'm going right upstairs, I'm just switching the load of laundry – I'll be right back! He knew where I was every minute of the day.” Then, with the help of a therapist, Alexis and her husband wrote their son a letter, explaining to him that they would no longer allow him to accompany them to the bathroom. It didn’t go great. “He was visibly upset and crying and he shredded it immediately." But things did start to change as Alexis and her husband continued to implement a therapy program designed to help parents change how they respond to their children’s distress. Anna also talks to the founder of that program, Dr. Eli Lebowitz, director of the Program for Anxiety Disorders at the Yale Child Study Center, and author of Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: A Scientifically Proven Program for Parents. In therapy, parents are asked to think about the accommodations they do for their children, and to slowly eliminate them. “If you're a kid and what you're growing up learning about yourself through your parents is, I can't handle anxiety, well, you're gonna have a lot of anxiety in your life.”

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