Anxiety Treatment for Children (SPACE): Child Anxiety Treatment in Ventura and Online in California
Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions
SPACE is a parent-based treatment program developed at the Yale Child Center by Eli Lebowitz. It is regarded as a compassionate, evidence-based therapy for children’s mental health that supports recovery from anxiety disorders and OCD. Studies demonstrate SPACE results in equal positive outcomes to cognitive-behavioral therapy for children. SPACE is a sensitive solution to anxiety disorders and OCD recovery for children who are unwilling or unable to participate in therapy and for parents who desire to be equipped with effective tools to help their child overcome fearful avoidance and ritualized behavior.
What does SPACE help with?
Anxiety Disorders
Fears and Phobias
Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms
"Failure to Launch” or Highly Dependent Adult Children
Anxiety Treatment for Children (SPACE) Anxiety, OCD, and Failure to Launch
What is SPACE Treatment?
Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) is an evidence-based IOCDF recommended treatment for pediatric OCD. SPACE treatment promotes parental empowerment and is shown to be as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for child and teen anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behavior.
How does SPACE treat child and teen anxiety?
SPACE works by utilizing therapist coaching of parents to strategically and lovingly adjust their approach. With expert guidance, parents are supported in reducing accommodations that in the long-term unintentionally maintain and increase their child’s anxiety and obsessive-compulsive symptoms.
What if my child refuses therapy?
SPACE does not require children or teens to participate in therapy. Children and teens are helped through SPACE via a family model of specific parental behavioral change. As appropriate, the therapist can work directly with children and adolescents but this is not required for SPACE treatment to be effective. SPACE is parent-based therapy with a coaching approach.
Is SPACE a good fit for gentle parenting?
SPACE is a non-coercive, family-centered model that respects child development, child autonomy, and parental values. SPACE is grounded in a supportive and confident parental stance. It’s a great fit for loving parents who desire to remain validating and understanding while encouraging resilience, agency, and optimal development in their children.
How do I get started with SPACE for my anxious child?
Contact to learn more and get started with evidence-based and compassionate child and adolescent anxiety and OCD treatment. Learn to lovingly help your child launch despite their vulnerability to anxiety with SPACE therapy in Ventura and throughout California.
Anxiety and OCD Therapy for Kids & Teens in Ventura
Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) is a transformative family-centered program designed to help parents effectively support their anxious children. The program focuses on understanding your child's anxiety or OCD and learning helpful parental strategies to foster resilience and psychosocial development.
What are the key principles of SPACE?
Parent-Based Treatment: Parents work directly with the therapist to make changes in their own behavior that seek to influence the anxious child’s improved functioning and overall wellbeing.
Reduce Accommodations: While it’s the most natural thing in the world to protect your child from their fears, some types of accommodations can unintentionally reinforce the anxiety and OCD symptoms. In SPACE parents are taught to lovingly increase support while gradually changing their patterns of relating to their child’s anxiety.
Increase Support: Parents are coached to increase a very specific type of support that helps children and teens feel validated while parents convey a message of acceptance and confidence.
Learn Anxiety Triggers: Become aware of the situations or events that trigger your child's anxiety. This awareness allows you to collaborate with the therapist on treatment planning to target your child’s unique concerns.
Teach Courage: Children look to their parents for guidance on how to respond to a variety of situations. Demonstrating calmness, courage, and healthy coping strategies can help children learn new skills in navigating how to approach their own challenges.
Strategically Plan for Change: With the help of a SPACE therapist, you will have a well crafted plan to implement gradual change. You will be helped to inform your child of the upcoming changes and you will assisted in planning your response to your child’s reaction to the change.
Enhance Healthy Coping Skills: Encourage your child to develop emotional and physiological self-regulation and problem-solving strategies to use when faced with anxiety-inducing situations, worries or fears.
By implementing these principles, parents can create a nurturing environment where anxious children feel safe to confront their fears, ultimately fostering the development of independence and resilience. The SPACE program empowers families by providing tools that promote emotional growth and healthier coping mechanisms for managing anxiety, phobias, and OCD.
“accommodation is helpful when it teaches your child the valuable lesson that she is able to cope with feeling anxious. Accommodation is unhelpful when it reinforces your child’s belief that she cannot cope with anxiety and must avoid situations that are likely to trigger it.”
— Eli Lebowitz
SPACE FTL Help for Failure to Launch
SPACE FTL Parent-Based Treatment for Highly Dependent Adults
What is Failure to Launch?
Failure to launch (FTL) or highly dependent adult children, refers to the difficulty some people face when transitioning into adulthood. They may struggle to leave home, start a career, meaningfully participate in a training or educational program, or manage their own basic responsibilities. Parents of FTL adult children often find themselves in a desperate bind and need professional help to increase the family’s functioning. Each family’s circumstances are unique, and I offer compassionate therapy to help families overcome these challenges.
How is Failure to Launch treated?
The SPACE FTL approach is parent-based and integrates specialized therapeutic techniques to target some of the underlying issues contributing to delayed independence.
SPACE FTL: SPACE can help reduce symptoms of FTL while helping parents gain confidence and concrete tools for change through collaborative parenting strategies.
Increase Supportive Responses: SPACE FTL maintains an encouraging and loving parental stance. It respects the adult child’s unique abilities and challenges with motivation. SPACE FTL is not intended to be threatening or punitive.
Decrease Accommodation: Parents will be supported in developing and implementing a strategic plan to increase their adult child’s functioning by gradually changing their own behavior in a targeted, gentle, and systematic way.
What are the goals of SPACE FTL therapy?
Whether in-person in Ventura, or through Telehealth across California, our work will focus on building skills for parenting highly dependent adult children, reducing parental anxiety, and fostering self-efficacy to help young adults successfully launch into independent or interdependent living. Our goal is to create a supportive environment that empowers clients and their families through each step of the transition into healthy adulthood.
What are the core characteristics of Failure to Launch?
Failure to Launch is not yet an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V-TR), however, the condition is seen in clinical practice and research settings, and is experienced by the sufferers themselves and their parents. It’s important to note that there is not a single cause of Failure to Launch and like most mental health conditions, there is a complex interplay of factors that create the condition.
Failure to Launch is a combination of psychosocial behaviors and not due to a physical disability or severe mental illness. People who are not employed because they are raising young children or caring for aging parents do not meet the criteria for Failure to Launch.
Over the age of 18
Not in educational, employment, and training (NEET)
If enrolled in school or vocational program, not participating in a meaningful way
Living at home or housing paid for by parents
What are other common features of Failure to Launch?
Disrupted sleep
Social isolation
Excessive media consumption (eg. video games, online communities, adult content)
Highly dependent on parents for basic tasks
Mental health problems—often anxiety disorders, OCD, ADHD
Physical health problems—sedentary lifestyle, lack of sun, sleep problems
Can be present in young adults and any age of adult
Longterm chronic problem without intervention
Reduce Parenting Stress With Therapy
You may be experiencing significant stress if you are parenting a child with an anxiety disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Parents of highly dependent adult children or “failure to launch” suffer signifiant stress, shame, and often withdraw socially, which compound stress with depression. Understanding the origin of parenting stress and developing a realistic plan to move forward is crucial to managing your mental health and thriving as a parent.
What are common sources of parenting stress?
Anxiety, Phobias and OCD: It’s normal and natural to try to help a child’s anxious worries and obsessional fears. Responding to children’s concerns with care is a sign a good parenting. When parenting children or teens with an anxiety disorder or OCD parents can find themselves in a stressful cycle (with good intentions) of trying to remove all triggers and sources of discomfort. This is called family accommodation. While the motivation behind family accommodation is pure, it often causes significant distress for parents and in the longterm, actually increases the child’s anxiety and family’s difficulties. SPACE Treatment and/or therapy for parents can help reduce parental stress from accommodation.
Competing Responsibilities: We can’t be in two places at once, yet it can feel like our careers and children need us to do exactly that. Juggling work, keeping the house in order, feeding everyone, and taking time for our own self-care and relationships creates pressure. Stress and risks of mental health problems is amplified when we don’t have support or if we’re struggling to keep up financially.
Concerns About Child Development: Worries about your chid’s development can lead to many hours researching on Google, sacrificing your sleep and creating cycles of rumination and dread. Many parents fear that they are not making the right choices for their child's development, and these fears often increase when children have diagnosed chronic illness, neurodevelopmental delays (eg. ASD, ADHD), behavioral problems, and mental health disorders like anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Societal Expectations: Sometimes cultural norms don’t fit for your child or family. For example, you may choose to educate your child in a non-traditional way because you believe that’s best for them, but stress and anxiety show up when faced with intense scrutiny from the in-laws. Social media provides a distorted view of other people’s family life, and many parents compare themselves and feel they fall short when not living up to “perfect” standards. Comparison can negatively impact mood and increase anxiety with mental preoccupation with parental performance.
Behavioral Challenges: Managing a child's difficult behavior or frequent emotional dysregulation can be stressful. Parents may lack confidence in their ability to respond effectively, and they may face judgment from loved ones and strangers. It’s common for parents to receive conflicting messages about the best approach to behavioral problems, furthering anxiety, stress and exhaustion.
Cultural Concerns: Stress and anxiety about a child’s safety at school due to bullying and violence is a reality for many US parents. Parents of highly dependent adult children or “failure to laugh” may have worries about the economy or how their adult child will manage if parents can no longer support them.
Strategies for Managing Parental Stress
Practice Self-Compassion: Acknowledge that it’s normal to experience parenting challenges and that you are not alone in this journey. If your stressors feel out of the range of normal, or your stress makes it difficult to function, therapy may be warranted. Be kind to yourself and recognize that a “good enough” parent is the best kind of parent.
Reduce Family Accommodation: Family accommodation of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, phobias, and anxiety are known to increase parental distress. Get professional help to learn more sustainable ways to support your child with anxious fears using the SPACE Treatment Program for child anxiety.
Enlist Supporters: Surround yourself with a supportive network of friends, family, a faith community, or parenting support groups. Sharing experiences, giving, and receiving support for parenting challenges can help alleviate feelings of shame and isolation.
Prioritize Holistic Health: Make time for activities that restore mind and body like exercise, nutritious food, hobbies, therapy, and being outside. It’s true we need to put our oxygen masks on first. Caring for ourselves directly benefits our children.
Implement Relaxation Techniques: Calming practices, such as deep breathing or meditation, can help ground into the present moment you when you feel yourself beginning to spiral into rumination or an online research rabbit hole.
Set Boundaries: Learn to protect the white space on your calendar by saying no to overcommitments. Consider setting better boundaries on work hours, distracting notifications on your phone, and media consumption to help reduce anxiety and stress.
Seek Professional Help: If parenting stress and anxiety feel like too much to carry on your own, consider reaching out for help from a licensed therapist who is also a parent and understands the challenges.
Parenting can be a deeply rewarding journey filled with joys and challenges. By recognizing the sources of stress and employing intentional coping strategies, we can carve out a more balanced and fulfilling experience with our children.
SPACE FAQs
Will my child be forced to participate in exposures for their anxiety disorder or OCD?
No. The SPACE approach to child anxiety and OCD does not force children to participate in treatment. Children are not coerced to do anything they don’t want to do.
Why should I attend therapy when the problem is with my child?
The SPACE approach values your role as parent the most important person in your child’s life with the greatest potential for positive influence and change in your child’s behavior. While you did not cause your child’s anxiety disorder or OCD, you can play a pivotal role in their recovery similarly to your child getting a medical illness like a cold or flu you didn’t cause the illness but you can help to nurture their recovery.
Will anxiety or OCD treatment with SPACE be effective if my co-parent isn’t on board?
There are workarounds for unique situations that involve co-parents, parental discord, and splitting time between two homes where parents have different styles.
How many sessions will I need in SPACE treatment?
Treatment is both a structured protocol and flexible approach based on your child’s or family’s needs. On average, the SPACE program is about 12-16 weeks, but your specific treatment length may vary based on your child’s particular mental health symptoms and family dynamics.