Parents, Families, and Couples

Parenting a child with an anxiety, mood, or related disorder can be confusing and frustrating. With anxiety disorders specifically, traditional parenting strategies such as reassuring a child when he or she is anxious can serve to reinforce and thereby strengthen the child’s anxiety. Parents often struggle with knowing how to respond to their child’s anxiety, such as when to “push” a child to do something that makes them anxious and when to allow a child to avoid the situation, or differentiating between “real” anxiety and defiant behavior.

Thankfully, a large body of scientific knowledge has identified evidence-based skills and techniques that parents can use to help their child overcome his or her anxiety disorder(s). Many of these techniques are counter-intuitive and involve the use of positive reinforcement to build specific coping skills and redirecting or ignoring specific anxiety-based behaviors.

Our clinicians may also meet with the entire family unit with families of school-aged children or adults who may be coping with difficult life circumstances or transitions. Family work may be offered in combination with other therapies including couples therapy with a focus on improving communication, connectedness and understanding amongst family members.

CABC offers several options for parents:

Parent Management Training (PMT)

A 6-week group that outlines these specific, concrete parenting skills. The group meets for 90-minutes once a week for six weeks. The group covers:

• The nature of fear acquisition, maintenance, and extinction
• How avoidance and fear are teammates
• The nature of the coping skills that are effective in dealing with high levels of anxiety and how to help children to confront their anxiety in a productive fashion
• The problematic role of reassurance and other safety behaviors and how to minimize them
• How to identify which behaviors to respond to and which to ignore
• How to develop a behavioral reinforcement system to assist the child

In addition, the parents in the group learn a great deal from each other, as each parent brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the group.

Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE)

SPACE is a parent-based treatment program for children and adolescents with a range of anxiety disorders, OCD, and other related conditions and aims to treat children and adolescents by working directly with their parents.  Although children do not typically attend SPACE sessions – they are still the patients!  Parents (and other caregivers) are able to help their anxious children tremendously simply by shifting their own behavior, responding more supportively to their anxious child, and reducing the accommodations they have been making to their child symptoms.

Developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center, when SPACE treatment is successful, children feel less anxious and function better following treatment. Clinical trials have shown SPACE to be very effective in young children as well as dependent young adults (18+) including those who are still living at home, have withdrawn from school, or are unemployed.