New Treatment for Childhood Anxiety: Change Parent Behavior

In today's world, people have been having anxiety attacks because of the lack of knowledge about the future, especially now that there is a pandemic, and no one is sure when this will end. However, besides adults, children and even adolescents are also having the same feeling.

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health issues among children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). As reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), depression and anxiety have increased over time. Children ages 6 to 17 increased from 5.4 percent in 2003 to 8 percent in 2007, and 8.4 percent in the years 2011 and 2012. However, the CDC said that only 6 in every 10 children are diagnosed.

Symptoms of Anxiety

• Difficulty sleeping
• Fear of socializing and separation from loved ones
• Refusal to go to school
• Physical complaints

SPACE: A New Treatment Method

SPACE or the Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions is a program wherein parents are taught to focus on changing the way they behave and respond to their child's anxiety symptoms by supporting them. 

According to the Yale School of Medicine psychologist responsible for developing the SPACE training, Eli Lebowitz, Ph.D., the main goal of this training is for parents to show acceptance and validation of the child's experience and showing confidence in the child's capability to cope with anxiety. 

Lebowitz said that children with severe behavioral problems do not always respond well to their therapies. Adding to that, he said that parents play an essential role in the treatment of their children. 

Parents are required to attend weekly meetings with a therapist asking questions about how they respond to their children when they are anxious. Then the parents would be allowed to practice supportive responses until they become more natural and impactful. 

Once the parents become natural and impactful to their children, the therapist will then work with the parents to map out all the ways in how they accommodate their children. 

Lebowitz excitedly reported that he found that when parents followed the procedure consistently, increase their support and decrease their accommodations, the children's anxiety improved significantly. He said that it could be possible for the children to be cured of their anxiety disorders without having to meet with the therapist at all.

SPACE works just as well as CBT

A study by the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) reports that SPACE is as effective as individual cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for treating childhood and adolescent anxiety. 

The study involved 124 children with an anxiety disorder and randomly assigned them to either SPACE or CBT treatment. And children whose parents underwent 12 sessions of SPACE were as likely to overcome the disorder as those children who underwent 12 sessions of CBT. 

CBT has been known as the best-established evidence-based treatment for childhood anxiety known to humanity. 

Approximately 60 percent of children have been found not to exhibit symptoms that can be categorized as having an anxiety disorder following both treatments, based on the assessments conducted by independent evaluators who were blind to the treatment that the group of parents and children received.

Subjects who underwent SPACE showed 87.5 percent improvement in their symptoms as compared to CBT with 75.5 percent improvements. However, there is an equal improvement in children and parents after completing anxiety symptoms questionnaires for both treatments. Both treatments were rated highly satisfactory by the parents and children.