POCD: should I stay away from children until I know I am safe?
Avoiding your own children feels like the responsible thing. It is the compulsion keeping this going, and it spreads. Getting ordinary family life back is the goal, carefully and at your pace.
It seems like the responsible choice. If there is any doubt at all, the safe thing is to keep your distance. So you hand bath time to your partner. You stop offering to babysit. You find a reason not to go to the family party. You make sure you are never alone with a child, your own included, and you tell yourself this is what a careful person does until they know for certain.
The reasoning is exactly what OCD wants, and the avoidance is the thing keeping it alive.
What avoidance does
Every time you avoid a situation with a child, two things happen. The anxiety drops, because the feared moment has been prevented. And your brain records the event: that was dangerous, and avoiding it was necessary. The relief is the reward that keeps the avoidance going. The record is what makes the fear grow.
Repeated, the record becomes thick. Hundreds of avoided moments, each filed as a danger successfully managed. The brain concludes that the danger must be real, because look how much managing it has needed. And the list of things to avoid expands to match. It starts with being alone with children. It spreads to being near them, to the school gate, to television, to the word.
The certainty that is not coming
The plan is to stay away until you know for certain. But certainty about your own character is not available to anyone. Nobody has ever verified their own goodness; everyone else is simply not trying to. Every answer you have found so far has expired within the hour, and it will keep expiring, because the question is not answerable by the methods being used to answer it. Waiting for certainty means waiting forever, and the avoidance grows the whole time.
What people who pose a risk do not do
People who genuinely pose a risk to children do not organise their lives around never being alone with one. They are not the ones handing over bath time in terror. The avoidance you are describing is the behaviour of someone whose every instinct runs away from the feared thing, and it is one of the clearest features of this theme.
I know that noticing this brings relief for a moment and that the relief will not hold. That is fine. We are going to stop the avoidance rather than settle the question.
Getting it back, carefully
In CBT with exposure and response prevention, getting your ordinary contact with your own family back is usually one of the goals we work towards. We do it carefully, collaboratively, and never faster than you agree to. We build a ladder, from something you could do this week to the thing you want back, and each step is agreed in advance.
A step might be being in the room during bath time. Then doing part of it. Then doing it alone. Then the school gate, the family party, the friend's baby. At each step, the task is not to stop the thought, but to let it be there without the avoidance and without checking how you feel about it, and to find out what happens. What happens, every time, is that the anxiety rises, and then, given nothing to feed on, it falls. The feared thing does not occur. Your brain files a different lesson.
What exposure is not
Exposure work here never involves any risk to any child. That is not what exposure means, and anyone suggesting otherwise has misunderstood it. The work is giving up the safety behaviours, the handing over, the avoiding, the checking, and being a parent or an aunt or an uncle without a running commentary. Nothing else.
Safeguarding
Safeguarding responsibilities exist for every therapist. What triggers them is actual risk to a child, not a person in distress about thoughts they find repellent. Telling those apart is routine assessment work, and it is part of what you are coming for.
Where it ends
It is common for people to go from organising their whole life around avoiding children to barely thinking about it, without having proved anything: the question has stopped functioning as an emergency and the avoidance that fed it has been dismantled. If you have been keeping your distance to be safe, there is more on how I treat POCD, and getting your family back is where the work leads.