SPACE: Anxiety Treatment or Galactic Travel?
When many people think of anxiety, one of the most familiar treatments that comes to mind is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT. CBT is effective, research based, and helps people understand and change the relationship between their thoughts and behaviors. When working with children, however, there are often other factors at play. When young children grapple with anxiety, parents very commonly become caught up in a cycle of accomodation. Parents do things for their anxious children that they would not do for a non anxious child. In other words, parents learn what triggers an anxious response from their child, and they work to avoid such situations. For example, if a child becomes anxious whenever dropped off at a playdate, leading to an outburst and tears, a parent might either stay for the duration of the playdate, or avoid arranging it altogether. Short term, this is an effective solution, but there are longer-term consequences of these accommodations.
When you believe that you are saving your child-and yourself-from the time and frustration of a meltdown in that moment, you are reinforcing that anxiety in the long run. So how can parents support their children without reinforcing their anxiety or OCD? Dr. Eli Lebowitz and his team at the Yale Child Study Center have developed a new type of therapy in order to help to treat childhood anxiety among several other related disorders. This approach is referred to as SPACE, which stands for “Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions.”
This form of therapy has two areas of focus: reducing accommodation and increasing support.
To reduce accommodation, for example instead of avoiding a playdate, parents would arrange for a playdate and drop their child off. Even though this will probably make the child anxious,parents communicate that playdates are not dangerous or unhealthy. Secondly, parents also learn to express support for their child in such moments. Parents are taught to acknowledge that something seems scary for the child, but they are indeed capable of doing whatever makes them feel uncomfortable.
SPACE is unique in that it addresses childhood anxiety from a different point of intervention: from the parents. For the most part, parents become entangled in their child’s anxiety which inadvertently can exacerbate or at the very least reinforce anxious thoughts and behaviors. The results are extremely promising, and one of the most fascinating aspects of this form of treatment is the fact that the child is not directly participating in therapy. This unique approach helps to manage the child’s symptoms and ultimately eliminate such fears and unwanted anxious behaviors.
This post was written by Angelique Simeone, Long Island Behavioral Psychology’s office intern