SPACE Parent Training

At Atlanta CBT, we work with parents who feel stuck in a familiar and exhausting loop: your child is anxious, you’re doing everything you can to help, and yet the anxiety—and the family’s stress—keeps growing and it is getting in the way of living a good life. You are concerned about your child’s long term well-being at this point.

You may be navigating avoidance, reassurance-seeking, school refusal, bedtime battles, escalating conflict, or rituals related to anxiety and or OCD. You might feel pulled between supporting your child and unintentionally reinforcing anxiety-driven patterns.

We get it!

This work provides clarity, structure, and a plan you can follow.

Understanding SPACE

Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) is a research-backed treatment for youth with anxiety disorders and OCD, created by Yale researcher Eli Lebowitz, PhD.

SPACE is different from traditional child therapy:

  • Children are not directly involved in treatment

  • Instead, parents engage in the parent training sessions

  • The focus is helping parents change patterns at home that keep anxiety and avoidance going

Even though the child is not in the room, SPACE is designed to reduce the child’s anxiety by changing what happens around the anxiety, consistently and strategically.

Parent-focused, evidence-based model

In SPACE, parents learn how to shift their own responses so their child can move toward (rather than away from) anxiety triggers. A central focus is identifying and reducing accommodating behaviors—well-intended parenting actions that make life easier in the short term but strengthen anxiety over time.

For example, a parent might help a child face fear of the dark by creating a formal plan that reduces parental over-involvement in nighttime routines—while increasing the child’s ability to tolerate distress and build confidence.

The principles of SPACE can be applied from young children through young adults, including families experiencing “failure to launch.” 

What parents learn in SPACE: identifying accommodation patterns

Parents learn to recognize the subtle (and often understandable) ways anxiety shapes family routines, conversations, and decision-making.

Common accommodations can include:

  • excessive reassurance

  • helping a child avoid feared situations

  • taking over responsibilities to prevent distress

  • changing family routines around anxiety or OCD

Reducing accommodation gradually and effectively

Change is structured and strategic, not abrupt.

Parents learn how to:

  • reduce accommodations in a stepwise way

  • tolerate their own distress while staying calm and supportive

  • respond consistently—even when anxiety spikes at first

Increasing supportive responses that build resilience

SPACE emphasizes support without rescuing.

Parents learn language and behaviors that communicate:

  • warmth and confidence

  • belief in the child’s capacity

  • steady leadership during distress

 

SPACE is especially helpful for parents/caregivers who:

  • feel caught in cycles of reassurance, conflict, avoidance, and repeating

  • see anxiety or OCD limiting their child’s functioning (school, sleep, friendships, independence)

  • feel unsure what “helping” should look like now

  • want a structured plan that reduces distress without escalating power struggles

  • need a parent-focused option when the child is unwilling to participate

Some of the main anxiety-related problems treated with SPACE: 

Separation anxiety

Social anxiety

Generalized anxiety

Fears and phobias

Panic disorder and Agoraphobia

Selective mutism

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Picky eating (ARFID)

Atlanta CBT provides SPACE parent training via telehealth

 

Heidi M. Wood, LCSW, Dr. Rochelle J. Holtzman and Dr. Julia Buch Wamstad offer SPACE parent training virtually, allowing parents to participate from separate locations and making services accessible across Georgia and beyond. 

SPACE Parent Training usually includes 8-12 weekly 60 minute sessions. 

Inquire here about SPACE Parent Training.