SPACE - Treatment for Childhood Anxiety 

What is SPACE therapy?

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 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! When SPACE treatment is successful, children feel less anxious and function better following treatment. 

Some of the main anxiety-related problems treated with SPACE: 

• Separation anxiety

• Social anxiety

• Generalized anxiety

• Fears and phobias

• Panic disorder and Agoraphobia

• Selective mutism

• Obsessive-compulsive disorder

• Picky Eating (ARFID)

Who participates in treatment?

Parents (and other caregivers) participate in SPACE treatment sessions. In most cases the child or adolescent does not need to attend the treatment sessions.

What happens in SPACE treatment?

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's symptoms.