New Treatment for Childhood Anxiety Works by Changing Parent Behavior

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on EurekAlert.

A study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP), reports that an entirely parent-based treatment, SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions), is as efficacious as individual cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for the treatment of childhood and adolescent anxiety disorders.

Anxiety disorders, including social phobia, separation anxiety, generalized anxiety, are the most common mental health problems in childhood, causing significant distress to the child and family. With up to one-third of youth experiencing a clinically impairing anxiety disorder by the time they reach adulthood, such disorders lead to impairment in personal, social and academic functioning. When not treated successfully, anxiety disorders in childhood can cause long term impairment and an increased risk of additional physical and mental health problems.

This new study enrolled 124 children with existing clinical anxiety disorders and randomly assigned them to receive either the current front-line CBT treatment or SPACE–developed by Yale researcher, Dr. Eli Lebowitz and his team at the Yale Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.

SPACE teaches parents to reduce their accommodation and to respond to a child’s anxiety symptoms in a supportive manner that conveys acceptance of the child’s genuine distress along with confidence in the child’s ability to cope with anxiety.

The authors found that children whose parents participated in 12 sessions of SPACE were as likely to overcome their anxiety disorder as children who participated in 12 sessions of CBT, the best-established evidence-based treatment for child anxiety.

Source: EurekAlert!
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/e-ntf040220.php