Support for Anxious Kids and Familes
SPACE-Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions
I am trained in SPACE treatment for anxious childhood emotions. SPACE is a parent-based treatment program for children and adolescents with anxiety, OCD, and related problems. I am honored to have personally trained with the creator of the program, Dr. Eli Lebowitz in 2020. I provide SPACE in individual and group therapy with parents.
The SPACE program requires ten (10) consecutive 60-90 minute sessions whether offered in a group or in individual sessions. We begin with the completion of a comprehensive intake then, we meet weekly. In each session, we will discuss concrete tools and strategies to reduce accommodations and increase parental support. Parental accommodation refers to parental behavior modifications that attempt to prevent or reduce child distress associated with participation in age-appropriate activities and/or exposure to feared or avoided situations that trigger anxious feelings. Treatment will focus on a parent's behavior change. This is what makes this therapy different, it does not depend on your child being willing to engage in therapy.
For families who value peer-to-peer support along with education and coaching, the group SPACE training runs 3 times per year and each cohort meets for ten (10) weekly 60-minute virtual classes to learn the same skills in a shared setting with other parents with similar concerns.
Who is SPACE for?
Some of the main anxiety problems treated with SPACE include:
Separation Anxiety
Social Anxiety
Generalized Anxiety
Fears and Phobias
Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia
Selective Mutism
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
What Happens in SPACE?
Parents (and other caregivers) participate in SPACE treatment sessions.
Parents who participate in SPACE will learn skills and tools to help their teen overcome anxiety, OCD or related problems.
The treatment focuses on changes that parents can make to their own behavior. This is great news because you don’t need to force anything on your teen your child. It is not uncommon for anxious kids and teens to refuse to attend therapy.
The two main changes that parents learn to make in SPACE treatment are to respond more supportively to their anxious children and to reduce the accommodations they have been making in an effort to reduce anxiety symptoms. This means, that by shifting how you respond to your child's anxiety or OCD symptoms, the behaviors your child exhibits will naturally change too!
What will I learn in SPACE?
Understanding Anxiety
You will learn about anxiety, what causes anxiety, and what patterns of thinking and behavior keep it stuck in place. You will also explore how your child's anxiety may have started to blur boundaries in your home. Identify ways your emotions and behavior get hijacked by your child's anxiety and why it is not your fault. Learn strategies to keep your cool.
How to Respond to Anxiety's Demands
You will gain a better understanding about how you respond to anxiety’s demands and why it matters. Learn how to increase support and how to validate your child’s and your own thoughts and feelings. Learn how to identify barriers to providing support and ways that you have been accommodating anxiety in an effort to reduce or eliminate child anxiety, just to have it back fire.
Make a Plan and Implement Plan
Choose a goal to work on such as child sleeping in own bed, taking the bus to school, closing the door when you, the parent uses the bathroom. Create and implement plan a on how you are going to respond differently, learn how to cope with child's reactions and troubleshoot setbacks, leading to increased confidence. I will walk you through the process, step by step.
Resources to Learn More
The Unified Protocol for Children and Adolescents
The Unified Protocol is a 15 session emotion focused treatment for children ages 7 and older with emotional disorder related concerns. It can be offered in both individual and in groups and parents learn right along side their child as concurrent caregiver support and education is provided.
The Unified Protocol
The Unified Protocol for Children and Adolescents is a 15 session treatment for emotional disorders. What makes this treatment different is that it is transdiagnostic treatment to treat emotional disorders. An emotional disorder is the experience of very frequent and strong emotions, along with a high level of distress about feeling these unwanted emotions, accompanied by efforts to quickly get rid of, reduce, suppress and/or avoid these emotions at all costs. This treatment is appropriate for adults and children who experience intense emotions that are perceived as negative and difficult to manage or cope with-sadness, anxiety, worry, anger, irritability, frustration, or guilt.
Many therapists tend to introduce coping skills for particular problems such as anxiety, depression, specific fears etc. Therapists will often target a specific anxiety diagnosis such as Social Anxiety Disorder or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the goal is to reduce anxiety in social situations or reduce the frequency of intrusive, unwanted thoughts and behaviors. These approaches are helpful and they do work but where they tend to fall short is that the skills taught are not always helpful to clients is multiple problem areas. Clients also have difficulty understanding how skills learned can be applied in to many different emotions. This treatment has been shown to be effective in reducing the frequency and intensity of strong emotions in children and teens. Skills taught to clients and parents are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Mindfulness, Problem Solving, Acceptance and Exposure skills.