SUPPORT FOR PARENTING AN ANXIOUS CHILD IN HOUSTON
Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions in Houston
Evidence-based parenting support from a Houston therapist with specialized training in Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE).
Caretakers Make a Major Difference for Anxious Children
When your child is struggling with anxiety, OCD, or ARFID, it can be hard to know what to do. You want to help your child overcome their distress and anxiety, but what you’ve done so far hasn’t seemed to have helped.
When you work with an expert therapist and learn to use the evidence-based SPACE parenting model, you can shift from accommodating their anxiety to supporting their growth. You can learn to cope with your child’s anxious responses, and your whole family can develop new rhythms to face distress head-on.
We Support Parents of Children Experiencing:
Generalized anxiety
School anxiety
Fears and phobias
Panic disorder
Separation anxiety
Agoraphobia
Social anxiety
Selective mutism
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
Picky Eating (ARFID)
Failure to launch
Houston OCD & Anxiety provides individualized, evidence-based treatment for children (ages 8 and up), adolescents, adults, and parents.
What’s happening when you’re parenting an anxious child?
It can be incredibly difficult to watch your child struggle. Parents are biologically wired to protect their children from pain and distress, and when you see your child overwhelmed by fear, your instinct is often to soothe, rescue, or make the discomfort go away. That impulse isn't a sign that you're doing something wrong; it's a reflection of how deeply you love and care for your child.
When your child is dealing with OCD, an anxiety disorder, or picky eating, it’s common as a parent to rearrange your routines to avoid triggers for your child’s anxiety.
For example:
If they refuse to try new foods, you might only serve certain foods for dinner.
If they’re socially anxious, you might stay away from celebrations, crowded spaces, parks, and birthday parties.
If they struggle to sleep on their own, you may allow them to sleep in your bed well past the toddler years.
While these accommodations soothe your child’s anxiety in the short term, this avoidance makes anxiety stronger in the long term. Your child’s anxious reactions may escalate, and their anxieties can grow, even though you’re doing your best to help them. As a caregiver, you are the person your child looks to for guidance on how to handle life. When you accommodate anxiety, you teach your child to do what anxiety says, to stay dependent on you, and look outside themselves for solutions to their distress.
With some simple changes, you can teach them to face their anxiety, recognize their strengths, and overcome their fear.
What is SPACE?
Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions
You’ve tried accommodating your child’s anxieties, and it’s left you feeling stuck in a life that revolves around those anxieties. Plus, your child is still anxious!SPACE is a research-backed parenting approach developed to help you change your behaviors in ways that help your child change theirs.SPACE will help you:
Understand how you are accommodating your child’s anxiety.
Learn how to be supportive toward your child when they’re distressed, instead of accommodating their anxieties.
Cope with your child’s anxious behaviors without anger or escalation, and show them how to cope with anxiety without resorting to avoidance.
With some simple changes in how you parent, you can teach your anxious child how to face their anxiety and overcome their fear.
Ready to get started?
Parenting an anxious child isn’t easy, and it isn’t something you have to try to do alone. The therapists at Houston OCD and Anxiety can help you learn to use parenting skills that support your child to overcome anxiety and fear, instead of rebuilding your life around it.
When you’re ready to help your anxious child thrive, we’re here to help.
Frequently Asked Questions About Parenting an Anxious Child in Houston
Here are the answers to the questions we are asked most often at Houston OCD and Anxiety. If you don’t see your question answered here, we welcome you to reach out. We’re here to help!
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After an intake evaluation, you’ll begin having regular individual outpatient sessions. They’re around 60 minutes long and can occur either virtually or in-person, at our Houston office.
Each session will start with a review of your week, including how you have used SPACE at home since the last session.
Your therapist will celebrate your successes and help you learn from, and pivot around, things that didn’t work. You may work on new parenting skills, coping tools, or support approaches, practicing in therapy before you enact changes in real life.At the end of the session, you’ll review what you’ve covered and set goals for the next week.
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Even if your children are older and their anxieties are leading them to avoid taking steps to develop normal independence, learning SPACE techniques at Houston OCD and Anxiety can help your whole family.
SPACE can help you recognize the ways you are accommodating your child as they avoid normal milestones. From there, you and your therapist can work together to create a plan that helps you move away from accommodation and toward support. You’ll start encouraging exposures to anxiety triggers, changing your behavior so your child isn’t as able to turn to avoidance to cope.
You’ll also learn how to better handle your child’s responses to the changes, and you’ll have a safe space to work through any frustrations or fears that come up during this process. -
Caregivers are integral to a child’s life. Your behavior influences their growth, mental well-being, and ability to cope.
You are the one who decides how your household operates, and you have a lot of control over the opportunities and experiences your child has, so you are key to helping them face their anxieties.
There’s nothing wrong with having your child attend therapy, but when you attend parenting therapy and make changes in how you parent, you can change your child’s life! -
SPACE recognizes that reducing and removing accommodations for anxiety leads to your child having to face their fears. This can lead to anxious reactions, which can be hard to deal with as a parent!
Instead of an abrupt removal of all accommodation, SPACE starts with smaller anxieties and removing smaller accommodations, helping you and your child to build resilience. From there, you will help your child face their more intense anxieties.
SPACE also focuses on increasing parental support of your child as they experience distress, instead of removing the distress. It also helps you cope with your child’s reactions, making parenting through anxiety easier for you. These changes may be hard at first, but you can do this!With the SPACE approach, you’ll be better able to help your child experience and tolerate anxiety, which in turn reduces the impact anxiety has on their daily life and their development.
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Anxiety disorders, OCD, and ARFID are not phases your child will grow out of. They’re disordered patterns of relating to the world, and they cause real, disruptive distress for your child.
Without treatment, your child’s social, cognitive, and emotional growth can be stunted. Helping them now can help them for the rest of their life. -
SPACE is not just “tough love”. It includes both encouraging your child to engage with anxiety triggers, AND building up their coping skills. You start with smaller, less distressing anxieties and work up to their most severe ones, building their confidence and reinforcing their ability to cope.
SPACE is not just throwing your child in the pool to learn to swim; it’s teaching them safe swimming in the shallow end, even when they’re nervous, then encouraging them to try the diving board. -
One of the major benefits of SPACE therapy is that you, the adult, are the one who attends therapy. Research on the SPACE approach has been shown to be as effective as CBT for anxious children.
For children who haven’t had a lot of success in therapy before, SPACE may be a more effective model. It’s a different approach, using parental behavior changes to help your child grow into tolerating distress, while also helping you cope with anxious behaviors.
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We are invested in keeping you and your child safe. SPACE isn’t meant to be a sudden, shocking set of changes that send your child into an anxiety spiral. It’s meant to be a gradual adjustment in routines that requires your child to face exposures to anxiety triggers, over time.
Dangerous or destructive responses are often triggered by extreme overwhelm. Starting smaller and building up your child’s abilities to withstand distress can help reduce these extreme responses when you remove accommodations that previously prevented them.
SPACE also supports you in managing your child’s reactions and your reactions to their behavior. It will equip you with parenting skills that help you de-escalate your own responses and help you guide your child so they can cope more constructively with difficult emotions.
