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.
SPACE was developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center and has been tested and found to be efficacious in randomized controlled clinical trials.
I am trained in SPACE treatment for anxious childhood emotions. I'm honored to have personally trained with the creator of the program, Dr. Eli Lebowitz in 2021. 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 or bi-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 stimuli. 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.