SPACE Treatment for Parents
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.
SPACE aims to treat children and adolescents with anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Although children do not have to attend SPACE sessions - they are the patients! In most cases the child or adolescent does not need to attend the treatment sessions. 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
Selective mutism
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
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.