Welcome to Space Therapy: Supporting Anxious Children
Do you have an anxious child or teen? Ever wonder what to do when they can’t or won’t participate in therapy?
Welcome to SPACE Therapy: Supporting Anxious Childhood Emotions!
As parents, we understand that childhood can be a challenging and complex time for both children and their families. It is important to create a nurturing and supportive environment to help children navigate their emotions, especially when it comes to anxiety. That’s where SPACE Therapy comes in. SPACE was developed for children and adolescents with anxiety, OCD and similar problems by Dr. Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center.
What is SPACE Therapy?
SPACE Therapy, an acronym for Supporting Anxious Childhood Emotions, is a therapeutic approach specifically designed to assist parents in supporting their children dealing with anxiety or OCD. The goal of SPACE is to work on addressing the ways you, as a parent, respond to the anxiety or OCD. If you’re saying to yourself, “my child doesn’t have anxiety or OCD, how can this program help?” Here are a list of problems that have been successfully treated with SPACE:
- Separation Anxiety
- Social Anxiety
- Generalized Anxiety (excessive worry)
- Fears and phobias
- Panic Disorder
- Agoraphobia
- Selective mutism
- Obsessive-compulsive Disorder
Aspects of SPACE Therapy:
- Parents and other primary caregivers participate in SPACE sessions. Most of the time the child or adolescent does not need to attend any sessions.
- The therapist functions as a consultant, coach, and guide. Concepts are introduced in an empathic conversational manner.
- Parents are taught skills and tools to help their child overcome anxiety or OCD by focusing on changes that the parents can make to their own behaviors. This alleviates pressure that the child has to change or the parents need to make their child change.
- The two main changes that parents learn about in SPACE Therapy are how to respond in a more supportive way to their anxious child and how to reduce accommodations they have been making for their child’s anxiety and OCD.
- Parents meet weekly or bi-weekly, with a trained therapist. During each session, caregivers work one-on-one with a therapist. Topics covered during the various sessions include: understanding your child’s anxiety or OCD, cultivating a supportive role for caregivers, developing a supportive community, indirectly improving the child’s ability to self-regulate, taking unilateral steps as a care-giving team and minimizing escalations.
** Information and descriptions provided here were directly adapted from the SPACE Training Manual.