Child & adolescent social anxiety and family accommodation : exploring the role of coping

Abstract

Research demonstrates that family accommodation is positively correlated with the severity of childhood anxiety. This finding is particularly interesting in the case of social anxiety, due to the role of the caregiver in the psychogenesis of the disorder. The prevalence of effective coping strategies is important in the mitigation of stress during childhood. Therefore, due to the need for effective parent modeling to acquire these strategies, it is hypothesized that higher levels of family accommodation reduce opportunities to acquire coping, which then results in more severe social anxiety. The proposed study seeks to use multiple regression to evaluate childhood coping skills as a mediator variable between family accommodation and the severity of social anxiety.