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The program teaches parents how to enable their child to experience anxiety
If your child has been diagnosed with anxiety or signs of anxious behavior, you know that it can be devastating to watch. Our first reaction as parents is to intervene and try to alleviate the source of their anxiety by trying to "fix" their problems, whether through a therapy or any form of adaptation. But a new study reveals that parents' reaction to their child's anxiety can often make things worse, not better.
An experimental program that treats parents, not children, is part of a Yale University study to address children's anxiety by teaching their parents a new way to respond. "Parents' responses are an essential part of anxiety in children," says Eli Lebowitz, psychologist at Yale School of Medicine and designer of the training.
Parental Support for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) is a parent-based treatment that reduces parents' anxiety about the child's anxiety, which shows that our response (which is usually comforting) can often be counter-productive and increase the anxiety of our children instead of helping them.
"These accommodations exacerbate the anxiety in their child, rather than reduce their anxiety," said Lebowitz. So, how can we try to comfort our child and interpose ourselves to try to help our children make the situation worse? Lebowitz says it's because our children depend on us to "make things better" instead of learning to manage themselves.
A certain amount of anxiety during childhood is normal, but according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, one in eight children in the United States suffers from an anxiety disorder. Research shows that "untreated children with anxiety disorders are more likely to have poor outcomes in school, to miss important social experiences and to abuse psychoactive substances". It is essential to determine how a parent can positively affect the anxiety of his child.
"When you offer a lot of housing, the unsaid message is," You can not do that, so I'm going to help you, "he said, to combat this, the SPACE program is changing the dynamic and teaches parents how to step back and let their child learn to manage their own anxiety by supporting them throughout their journey.
This is a considerable difference from cognitive behavioral therapy, the most common approach to treating anxiety. CBT attempts to identify and modify negative thought patterns and teach positive behavioral changes in the person suffering from anxiety. But for children who are suffering, Lebowitz believes that parents play a greater role in the treatment and future outcomes of their child's ability to manage it successfully.
A study of this approach was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in March and the results were positive for those who followed the SPACE program. "Family housing and parental stress were significantly reduced in both treatments, with a significantly greater reduction in family housing after SPACE, compared to CBT," the study reveals.
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