Ethan Knox

10th annual Lisman Lecture explores childhood anxiety

By Ethan Knox ’20 on OCTOBER 14, 2025 @BingUNews

Parent involvement is a widely used — though not well-understood — approach to treating child and adolescent anxiety disorders. This is an important topic of study to better understand; close to 30% of children, at some point in life, will have a clinically significant anxiety disorder, often beginning at just age 11. 

For Wendy Silverman ’77, the study of parental involvement has become a lifelong career, and one she has pioneered.

“It’s the work of parents that I’m most passionate about, and from a clinical perspective, really resonates,” she said during this year’s 10th annual Stephen A. Lisman Lecture in clinical psychology. “Parents are not the cause [of anxiety], but they can be one part of the solution. If you take away anything from today, it’s this.”

Silverman’s presentation was entitled “Parent involvement in childhood anxiety disorders treatment: Lessons learned and clinical and research paths forward.” Free and open to the public, her talk was held on Friday, Oct. 10, in the Anderson Center Chamber Hall on campus. 

“This series has been a wonderful gift to Harpur College. It allows us to bring in leading scholars from around the world in the field of clinical psychology,” said Celia Klin, dean of Harpur College of Arts and Sciences. “In addition, this series allows us to pause each year and to celebrate my colleague and dear friend, Steve Lisman, an emeritus distinguished professor who has had incredibly strong impact on the department and on the College.”

For Silverman, the connection is personal; as a Binghamton student, she worked in Lisman’s lab on campus as an undergraduate, where, she said, she learned to loved psychology. It served as the foundation for her future work, with one of her most significant contributions to the field resulting in the most widely used anxiety disorders interview schedule for children and parents. Notably, her work explores the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat child avoidant anxiety. 

Silverman, now the director of the Anxiety and Mood Disorders Program at the Child Study Center and an Alfred A. Messer Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale University School of Medicine, delved into the difficulty of treating childhood anxiety, as well as the foundations of involving parents in therapy. She highlighted how certain parent behaviors, such as reinforcement of avoidance behavior and psychological control, contribute to child anxiety maintenance. 

Silverman also discussed using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) with and without parental involvement, which she said showed strong results but held no added benefit from parent participation, although more studies are required. 

“Efforts to ‘fill up the glass’ to enhance CBT with parents have been unsuccessful. One reason is, in my opinion, that people have tried to train so many things in a single study and they try to teach the parents too much in too little time,” Silverman said. “With our studies in 2009 and 2019, the sample sizes were large enough. We can say, it’s great, everybody got better. But you see, we wanted to find enhancement. We didn’t find that. …It’s hard to change parent behavior. It’s hard because we love our children. We want to protect them. But it’s not helpful in the long run with child anxiety.”

The presentation concluded with evidence-based strategies to optimize parent involvement to enhance child anxiety outcomes, as well as future research and clinical directions to take. One potential, she said, lies in digital interventions to enhance the effectiveness of parent training programs, although making these interventions accessible and user-friendly for parents is essential. 

“EBA equals EBT — that means evidence-based assessments equal evidence-based treatments. It’s not possible, in my opinion, to ever get anywhere near an evidence-based treatment if we’re not doing ample assessments,” she added. “The durability and the long-term follow-up of these studies, they vary, and that’s an area that we need to do improvements.”