12-week treatment services for parents of children with big worries, anxiety, and OCD in grades JK-12
SPACE stands for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions and is a parent-based treatment program for children and adolescents with anxiety, OCD, and related problems. Developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz at Yale University, SPACE has been rigorously tested and found to be highly effective in randomized control clinical trials. Researchers have found that supporting caregivers of anxious children using SPACE is just as effective as one-on-one treatment of the children themselves.
What is SPACE treatment?
Who is SPACE for?
SPACE aims to treat children and adolescents with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive symptoms (whether diagnosed or not) by working directly with their parents. Although children do not attend SPACE sessions, they are crucial part of the treatment participants as well! When SPACE treatment is successful, children feel less anxious and function better following treatment.
Some of the main anxiety problems treated with SPACE include:
- Separation anxiety
- Social anxiety
- Generalized anxiety
- Fears and phobias
- Panic disorder and agoraphobia
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
- School Refusal
SPACE may not be the best fit for children and youth dealing with ongoing suicidal ideation or significant attachment issues. These situations require more intensive and consistent treatment, where a mental health professional can follow the family more closely on a one-to-one basis.
What happens in SPACE sessions?
Parents or other caregivers who participate in SPACE learn skills and tools to help their children overcome anxiety, OCD, or related problems. The treatment focuses on the changes that parents can make to their own behavior; they do not need to make their child change (and they don’t need to battle with their child anymore!).
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 for their child’s anxiety or OCD symptoms.
