Coaching Caregivers to Reduce Anxiety-Driven Accommodations

Anxiety takes advantage of caregivers’ two primal vulnerabilities: to keep their kids safe and comfort them when they are distressed. Accommodation is a term that describes the things that adults either do or don’t do to prevent a child from feeling distressed. Accommodation comes in two different forms: participation (e.g., answering reassurance questions, sleeping in a child’s bed at night) and modification (e.g., not going out on date nights, structuring work schedule to pick a child up from school when needed). 

Accommodation works in the short term to provide relief to children (and practically speaking it allows families to get where they need to go on time). However, in the long-term, accommodation is actually associated with more anxiety in kids-  which is unfair because parents are expending so much energy to try to prevent anxiety! 

A new exciting program out of Yale University called SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions; Lebowitz et al., 2019), found that by working directly with caregivers to gradually reduce accommodations, we can see significant reductions in child anxiety symptoms. In fact, research indicates that the SPACE program is as efficacious as individual Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for kids - our typical gold-standard treatment for childhood anxiety disorders. 

Read more about the SPACE program here!