Exam season may trigger OCD symptoms like reassurance-seeking, checking, and perfectionism. You can support your child during the busiest time of the school year by resisting reassurance, avoiding accommodations that reinforce OCD, and encouraging treatment like exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy.
Exam season can be a stressful time for most students. For kids with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the overwhelming stress can trigger anxiety and behaviors that aim to relieve distress. Your child may face difficulties with intrusive thoughts, perfectionism, or excessive checking that may make it hard to focus during exams. They may also reread notes, doubt whether they answered the question correctly, or seek constant reassurance about their performance.
As a parent, it’s natural to want to help your child, but even well-intentioned responses can actually worsen their OCD symptoms. Instead, you can use strategies that support their well-being while encouraging resilience from OCD.
In this article, you’ll learn five ways to help your child manage OCD and anxiety during exams.
1. Don’t give them reassurance
Your child may seek reassurance, a common OCD compulsion or safety behavior, to get 100% certainty about their exams. They may ask you questions like, “Do you think I’m going to pass?” or “What if I fail these tests and flunk out of school?” In response, you might give reassurance to make them feel better, but you’re only reinforcing their obsessive thoughts and anxieties, which keeps OCD up and running.
Tracie Ibrahim, LMFT, CST, NOCD’s Chief Compliance Officer, recommends using non-engagement responses (NERs) instead of giving reassurance. You can practice non-engagement by saying things to your child that are supportive but not accommodating,” she says.
Here are some examples of non-engagement responses you can say to your child when they’re seeking reassurance:
- “Anything’s possible.”
- “I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.”
- “We may never know the answer to that.”
You and your child can learn more strategies to handle intrusive thoughts by working with an OCD specialist who provides exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, which is a treatment we’ll cover in a later section.
Find the right OCD therapist for you
All our therapists are licensed and trained in exposure and response prevention therapy (ERP), the gold standard treatment for OCD.
2. Don’t provide accommodations for their OCD
According to Ibrahim, a common thing parents do that reinforces their child’s OCD is providing accommodations. When you see your child struggling in school because of their OCD, you naturally want to find ways to ease their distress. You might consider requesting a private testing room or extra time for your child to complete their exams. However, these seemingly harmless actions could actually worsen their symptoms.
“When we allow accommodations for anxiety and OCD, what we’re saying is that we’re going to allow these conditions to be there without confronting them directly,” says Ibrahim.
She adds that OCD and anxiety are in your child’s brain, so wherever they are, those conditions are going to be with them. If they don’t learn how to sit with the discomfort from intrusive thoughts, it’ll be difficult for them to function in their day-to-day life beyond just taking exams.
3. Tell your child’s school about their OCD
Even if you stop giving reassurance or accommodations to your child during exam season, their school may still provide them. Teachers, nurses, and counselors may unknowingly feed into their OCD to relieve distress.
Once you have a solid understanding of how OCD manifests, notify your child’s school so they’re not reinforcing the condition during exam season and beyond. “Educate teachers and school staff on what accommodations are and why they make OCD and anxiety worse so they aren’t providing them at school,” says Ibrahim.
4. Encourage them to practice mindfulness
OCD and anxiety can make your child ruminate or overthink about the past and the future for up to several hours a day. Their rumination and anxiety may increase with the added stress of taking standardized tests and final exams.
You can encourage your child to stay in the present by teaching them present-moment focus or mindfulness. Mindfulness is the practice of being fully present and aware of your surroundings. One mindfulness practice you can share with your child is the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique, which involves naming things you can see, hear, feel, and taste to ground yourself. This exercise can help bring your child back to the moment when they feel anxious and distressed.
5. Seek specialized therapy
If you haven’t already gotten therapy for your child’s OCD and anxiety, it’s highly recommended that you seek ERP therapy. ERP is a specialized form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) specially designed to treat OCD. During ERP, your child will learn how to respond to obsessions—whether they’re intrusive thoughts, images, feelings, urges, or sensations—without engaging in compulsive behaviors like rumination or reassurance-seeking. With the help of an ERP therapist, they’ll learn healthier ways to reduce distress and put more focus on what matters to them.
“Working with an ERP specialist is my number one tip to learn non-engagement strategies for dealing with anxiety disorders and OCD in the classroom and any environment,” says Ibrahim. ERP therapy can also be beneficial for parents, as you can learn how to not accommodate your child or provide reassurance that can worsen their OCD.
You can support your child without enabling their OCD
Supporting your child through exam season isn’t about eliminating anxiety. It’s about teaching them how to handle it in ways that don’t fuel OCD. By resisting reassurance, not providing accommodations, and considering professional mental help, you can help them build resilience to tolerate the discomfort from obsessions on their own. Regardless of the test results, what’s important is that they learn to manage OCD in their day-to-day lives.
Key takeaways
- Stress during exams can amplify OCD symptoms, making it more difficult for your child to focus.
- Resisting reassurance, avoiding OCD-related accommodations, educating staff, and seeking treatment can help your child build resilience.
- Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy is the most effective way to help your child manage OCD during exams and beyond.
