Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions plus
Power and Presence in Parenting
Combined in an all-encompassing workshop designed to answer the questions:
What should I do?
What keeps me from doing it?
How do I become the parent I want to BE?
There are two main goals of this group:
- To help you treat your child’s anxiety and improve their ability to manage it – even if they are refusing to be in treatment
- To empower you to be the parent you want to be and to feel good about your choices
The goal of the SPACE Program is to decrease family accommodation of a child’s anxiety. We see anxiety as a systemic/interpersonal phenomenon. The things that parents do to help a child avoid anxiety-related distress are normal responses to childhood anxiety, however, these accommodations can have a negative impact on the course of anxiety disorders as well as treatment outcome. SPACE will teach you to reduce your child’s anxiety indirectly by changing your own behavior.
To help decrease parental accommodation, emphasis is placed on the following strategies:
- Cultivate a supportive role of parents
- Restore child’s autonomy by implementing unilateral parental action
- Improve child self-regulation and coping (indirectly) and for both of you
- Develop a supportive community within this group and among your friends and family
- Remove the obstacles (internal and external) that keep you feeling powerless to help
- Minimize escalation, turn conflict into opportunities for growth
- Develop practices and skills that will help you be less reactive