Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD

Parenting an anxious child means facing constant challenges and questions: When should parents help children avoid anxiety-provoking situations, and when should they encourage them to face their fears? How can parents foster independence while still supporting their children? How can parents reduce the hold their child's anxiety has taken over the entire family?

Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: A Scientifically Proven Program for Parents is the first and only book to provide a completely parent-based treatment program for child and adolescent anxiety. Parents will learn how to alleviate their children's anxiety by changing the way they themselves respond to their children's symptoms--importantly, parents are not required to impose changes on their children's behavior. Instead, parents are shown how to replace their own accommodating behaviors (which allow anxiety to flourish) with supportive responses that demonstrate both acceptance of children's difficulties and confidence in their ability to cope. From understanding child anxiety and OCD, to learning how to talk with an anxious child, to avoiding common traps and pitfalls (such as being overly protective or demanding) to identifying the ways in which parents have been enabling a child's anxious behaviors, this book is full of detailed guidance and practical suggestions. Worksheets are included to help parents translate the book's suggestions into action, and the book's compassionate and personable tone will make it a welcoming resource for any concerned parent.

"If you are the parent of a child with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive problems, it is my hope that by following the steps described in these pages, you will be able to significantly reduce your child's anxiety and improve their quality of life. The steps laid out in this book are a systematic treatment approach that has been tested in clinical trials and found to be very effective. The name of the treatment program is SPACE, which stands for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. What many parents find most exciting about SPACE, and what makes it most different from other child anxiety treatments, is that it focuses entirely on parents and provides them with the tools to help their children. In fact, here's a promise: At no point in this book will parents be required to pressure their children into doing things they don't want to do. In working through this book, you'll only be trying to change the behavior of the one person you can control the most, yourself"--

In clear language and without a whiff of blame, Lebowitz hands parents the key to unhooking themselves and their children from excessive anxiety. Well organized and relatable, Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD is an indispensable guide to the SPACE program -- a unique, powerful, evidence-based method of treating childhood anxiety.

-- Dawn Huebner, PhD, and author of Outsmarting Worry and What to Do When You Worry Too Much