Parenting Support to Help Your Anxious Child
When children struggle with anxiety or OCD, it is only natural that parents want to help. Help may take the form of reassurance, changing routines, or putting into place steps to prevent the distress. While parents take these steps from a place of caring, these steps can be making the anxiety worse. The SPACE program- Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions- provides a different approach.
A key principle to understand is that parents make little or no progress when they focus on changing their child’s behavior, but if parents focus on controlling their response to the behavior, they have greater success in supporting anxiety reduction in their child. This change in how a parent responds can reduce symptoms while also building a child’s confidence and resilience, the “I can do it” feeling we want for all children.
An important concept in the SPACE program is helping parents see the difference between support and accommodation. Accommodation includes behaviors like repeated reassurance, avoiding situations, or doing tasks for the child. In the short term it may appear that these measures are providing relief, but this will only be short term. A bigger concern is that the message your child is receiving is “I can’t handle discomfort on my own.
SPACE teaches parents to replace accommodations with supportive responses, which in turn, help reinforce for the child that they are capable of doing difficult things on their own. Support means acknowledging your child’s feelings, voicing confidence in their ability to sit with being uncomfortable, and providing firm and loving boundaries. The goal for the parent is to communicate both empathy (“I know this feels really scary’) and strength (“and I believe you can handle it”).
Children build confidence not by avoiding anxiety, but by experiencing that they can handle it and be ok. SPACE empowers parents to create change, even if their child is resistant to therapy.
If you are interested to learn how you can respond in a way that helps your child better handle their anxiety, then the SPACE program is for you. We, at A Balanced Approach offer on-going parenting sessions in either group or individual format that will educate you on how to support your child and give them the opportunity to build confidence, resilience and lasting coping skills. Contact us to learn more about this powerful approach so that your child can better manage their anxiety.