As parents, it’s only natural to want to get your child the help they need as soon as possible. When your child is struggling with anxiety, avoidance, or big emotions, starting therapy can feel like the obvious next step. But what happens if your child isn’t ready to engage? What if they’re showing up to sessions but staying silent, refusing to participate in exposures, or simply shutting down?
Signs Your Child May Not Yet Be Ready for Therapy
Sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, a child or teen simply isn’t ready to engage in therapy in a meaningful way. Some common signs include:
- Sitting silently or giving only brief, surface-level answers during sessions.
- Refusing to participate in in-session activities, like practicing coping skills or brainstorming exposure steps.
- Consistently avoiding or forgetting between-session practice (homework).
- Expressing resentment or confusion about why they’re in therapy.
- Showing no interest in collaborating on treatment goals.
- Seeing therapy as something being “done to them” rather than something they are part of.
- Focusing entirely on externalizing blame (e.g., “If only my parents/teachers/friends changed, I’d be fine”) instead of building internal skills.
This doesn’t mean your child is “bad at therapy” or incapable of growth — it just means the timing and conditions may not be right yet. And that’s where Parent-Only Treatment comes in.
Outside-In Change: The Power of Parent-Only Treatment
In Parent-Only Treatment, we work directly with you, the parent, to create a home environment that gently and consistently encourages your child’s brave behavior. You’ll learn:
✅ How to respond to your child’s anxiety in ways that promote resilience, rather than reinforcing avoidance.
✅ How to reduce accommodations — those well-intended ways we often try to ease our child’s discomfort, like speaking for them, avoiding anxiety triggers, or adjusting family life to work around fears.
✅ How to model confidence and calm — even when you’re feeling anxious too.
✅ How to set compassionate boundaries and hold space for your child’s distress without rushing in to fix it.
✅ How to celebrate bravery, not just success, so your child learns that the goal isn’t to feel zero anxiety — it’s to build courage.
This Isn’t Giving Up — It’s Smart, Strategic Support
Sometimes parents worry that if we pause their child’s individual therapy, we’re giving up on treatment. In reality, Parent-Only Treatment is a proactive and powerful way to create the conditions your child needs to eventually succeed in therapy. By working from the outside-in, you become your child’s first and most important therapist, and you help build the foundation for them to step into their own brave work when they’re ready.
The Light On Anxiety Approach: Science + Heart
At Light On Anxiety, we believe in treating the whole family system, not just the individual child. Kids don’t exist in a vacuum — their struggles (and successes!) are shaped by the environment around them. When we empower parents with the right tools, we often see remarkable shifts in a child’s anxiety and functioning — even without the child attending sessions directly.
What If I Feel Like I’ve Already Tried Everything?
Parenting an anxious child is exhausting — especially if you feel like you’ve been walking on eggshells for months (or years). Parent-Only Treatment isn’t about blaming you for the anxiety, or expecting you to figure it all out on your own. It’s about giving you a clear plan, grounded in CBT and exposure therapy, with a supportive therapist coaching you every step of the way.
If Your Child Isn’t Ready — You Can Be
If your child isn’t ready for therapy right now, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck. By shifting the focus to Parent-Only Treatment, you can start creating change today — change that will ripple outward to help your child build confidence, courage, and resilience when they’re ready to take that next step.
