By Dr. Courtney Walraven, Ed.D., LCSW-S
As a mom, I know it is hard to witness your child feeling anxious and overwhelmed. Evidence-based inventions for helping children with anxious emotions and OCD include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and medications (Ruocco, et al., 2018; Khan, 2019). These may work but also are dependent on the desire of the child to participate in the therapy, and even the desire of parents to utilize any psychiatric medications on their child. Age can be another factor that may create a barrier to the levels of participation in CBT. Luckily, there is now another intervention that is equally effective as CBT for anxiety and OCD in children. This intervention is called Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE).
SPACE is an intervention in which the parents participate to learn strategies to address their child’s anxious emotions. The child is not asked to change their behavior or participate in counseling directly. Rather, parents learn how to replace accommodations with supportive responses. These skills increase the confidence of both children and parents, and SPACE has excellent clinical outcomes (Lebowitz et al., 2020). SPACE has been shown efficacious in the treatment of childhood anxiety, OCD, ARFID, and failure to launch adults. You can learn more about SPACE here. If this sounds like a counseling approach you would like to try, please reach out!
References:
Khan, A. M. (2019). The effectiveness of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) for treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in adolescents and children: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 254, 154-155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2018.10.348
Lebowitz, E. R., Marin, C., Martino, A., Shimshoni, Y., & Silverman, W. K. (2020). Parent-based treatment as efficacious as cognitive-behavioral therapy for childhood anxiety: A randomized noninferiority study of supportive parenting for anxious childhood emotions. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 59(3), 362-372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2019.02.014
Ruocco, S., Freeman, N. C., & McLean, L. A. (2018). Learning to cope: A CBT evaluation exploring self-reported changes in coping with anxiety among school children aged 5–7 years. The Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 35(2), 67-87. https://doi.org/10.1017/edp.2018.8
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