Therapy for Child and Teen OCD in San Marino

When Kids and Teens Struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

It can feel like your entire family’s life revolves around their obsessive thoughts and exhausting rituals. Parents often describe feeling stuck in a cycle of reassurance, endless questions, or hours-long routines that take over the day. It’s overwhelming, for your child and for your family.

At times this condition can feel hopeless, but there is good news: OCD is treatable. With the right treatment, kids and teens can learn how to step out of OCD’s grip and reclaim their time, energy, and confidence.

What Child and Teen OCD Looks Like

Though OCD can look very different from one child to another, signs can often look like:

• Repeated questions and constant need for reassurance

• Compulsions like checking, tapping, washing, or counting

• Mental rituals (reviewing, erasing “bad” thoughts, repeating phrases silently)

• Long delays around routines like getting ready for school or going to bed

• Intense distress if rituals are interrupted

How Therapy Can Help

OCD isn’t something kids can “just stop.” But therapy can help them build the skills to respond differently when obsessions or compulsions show up. In therapy, we focus on:

• Learning how OCD works in the brain, so kids understand they aren’t “broken”

• Building confidence through ACT-informed exposure work (helping kids practice facing fears in manageable, supportive steps that guide them toward meaningful relationships and activities)

• Developing coping strategies for moments of high anxiety or urges

• Supporting parents with tools to step out of the reassurance cycle and create space for change

Little by little, kids and teens discover they can handle OCD’s demands—and parents see their child reclaim more freedom in their daily life.

My Approach

I integrate evidence-based therapies like CBT and ACT with neuroscience-informed methods that help reset the anxious brain. For parents, I draw on SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions), a treatment I trained in directly with Dr. Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center, including advanced training for ARFID and “Failure to Launch.”

My graduate research explored the role of parental support in treating child anxiety, and that foundation continues to shape my approach: empowering both kids and parents to shift out of OCD’s cycle together. If you believe that your child will not, or cannot, participate in therapy themselves, please click here to learn more about how I work with parents to utilize SPACE principles to help reduce their child’s symptoms of anxiety and OCD.

If you believe that I would be a good fit to work with your child, or you’d like to know more, please click the button below to schedule a free 30-minute consultation call.