SPACE, or Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions, (https://www.spacetreatment.net/), is a a novel evidence-based treatment developed by Yale Child Study Center for helping children and adolescents with anxiety disorders. If you are a parent with an anxious child or teen, you have likely experienced how your child’s anxiety can impact the whole family. Children and teens often elicit support from parents to help them cope with anxious feelings. As parents, you naturally want to alleviate your child’s distress and make them feel better. The behaviors parents engage in to make kids feel better are called parental accommodations. For example, parents may change schedules, answer questions, or avoid specific activities to help reduce a child’s anxiety. While accommodations alleviate children’s anxiety in the short-term, children don’t learn how to tolerate anxiety on their own. In SPACE, we treat childhood anxiety by working directly with parents. We coach parents on how to respond supportively to their child’s anxiety while taking gradual steps towards reducing accommodations.
In addition to individual SPACE work with a therapist, Gordon Therapy Group offers a six-week group for parents of children with anxiety and OCD. This group teaches parents how to respond to their children’s anxiety in a manner that increases children’s independence and ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions. The group will focus on teaching and practicing new skills, while also allowing parents with similar situations to connect and learn from each other.
Topics that will be covered:
- Learn how to respond supportively to your child’s anxiety.
- Learn how to reduce family accommodations (ways parents respond to anxiety to reduce children’s distress).
- Learn how to better respond when your child becomes dysregulated.
Group meets virtually at 12:00 pm on either Tuesdays or Thursdays for 6 weeks.
Cost: $125/group, $725total.
Contact us to sign up.