Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions

SPACE stands for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions and is a 12-session parent-based intervention for children and adolescents with anxiety, OCD, and related problems.

SPACE was developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz and found to be efficacious in randomized controlled clinical trials.

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Some of the main anxiety related problems treated with SPACE: 

Separation anxiety

Social anxiety

Generalized anxiety

Fears and phobias

Panic disorder and Agoraphobia

Selective mutism

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Picky Eating (ARFID)

Parents who participate in SPACE will learn skills and tools to help their child overcome anxiety, OCD or related problems.

The treatment focuses on changes that parents can make to their own behavior, they do not need to make their child change. 

The two main changes that parents learn to make in SPACE treatment are to respond more supportively to their anxious child and to reduce the accommodations they have been making to the child symptoms. 

It is important to stress that the primary target of this treatment is your child’s anxiety and ability to manage it. Our focus on your behavior as a parent does not mean that you are to blame for your child’s anxiety. You are not the problem here, however, you can be an important part of the solution. The reason for that is the interpersonal nature of anxiety. Anxiety disorders tend to make it harder for children to function as independent individuals because they rely on their parents to help them cope with anxiety, rather than learning to cope on their own. The systematic nature of anxiety underlines the potential of parent work as a means of addressing the problem.