Bad news. Eli Lebowitz beat us all to this with a specific protocol built into the SPACE program:
SPACE-FTL is a specialized therapeutic approach designed to assist parents who have a young adult child who is struggling to transition into independent adulthood.
www.centerforwisemindliving.com
I do SPACE. It's a neat intervention as you only focus the parents accommodating behaviors that interfere with life. Honestly, as someone that came from a fairly behavioral background and does a ton of behavioral management training, it's been a really useful perspective.
1. SPACE is not about fixing the child directly, it is entirely about changing the parent’s behaviors. Parents reduce accommodations (both big and small), which sends the message: “You can handle this, and I believe in you." The paradox is that treating the parents shifts the child’s anxiety, even without direct child sessions.
2. No kid will ever 100% cured by SPACE. But they should be much more capable of adaptive and functional behaviors. SPACE is manualized and session-based. Most models run about 12 sessions, but it can be tailored.
3. The intervention uses a collaborative approach with parents: identify accommodations, plan reductions, troubleshoot pushback, and reinforce progress. Parents write supportive statements in advance so they are not caught flat-footed in emotional situations.
4. Why I like it? SPACE appeals to parents who want to be involved and take action rather than “drop their kid off at therapy." It is also useful when a child refuses therapy, since the intervention does not require the child’s participation. This makes it a strong fit for treatment-resistant families.
5. Works best in families that value active parental involvement and can tolerate some discomfort. Families who are deeply conflict-avoidant, highly chaotic, or resistant to parent coaching may struggle. Requires parents to have the bandwidth and resources to follow through.
6. SPACE reframes anxiety treatment as not just “symptom reduction” but a family systems shift. It dovetails with other models that emphasize exposure, but achieves it indirectly by restructuring family responses. Some providers use SPACE principles flexibly with conditions like oppositionality (I like Ryan Wexelblatt's the ADHD Dude model for applying to ADHD), school refusal, or even medical nonadherence.
I'm not sure whether to laugh or worry. This sounds like something the sub over on Reddit came up with. Telling that when you go to their Staff page, there's one psychologist only on staff. Mostly midlevels a number of them are LMSWs, which a quick online search reveals is not licensable for direct clinical work with patients. But their profiles on this site describe their clinical work and therapy modalities they utilize. So glorified life coaches at best.
To be fair, most of the people listed on the
SPACE website in my city
are actually solid psychologists. There are a couple LMSWs I don’t know, but the psychologists are good. Good pedigrees, good reps, probably people I'd be cool with doing an eval on my own kids.
My apologies. I did a quick google search for a site that gave a quick breakdown of the therapy. I have no idea if those specific providers are good at using the EBP. For a more comprehensive review of the literature regarding the efficacy of SPACE, I'll post the following link:
www.spacetreatment.net
Hope that helps clear things up a bit more!
If anything, interest in SPACE is probably a decent litmus test that a provider leans more evidence-based than not.
I feel like a lot of these things are parents that are not willing to tolerate their kids' distress. What’s the over/under on the modal family being an anxious mother who is either single or unattracted to her ineffectual spouse, with limited comforting stimulation, resistance to thinking about a future without the buffer of having a kid in the household, and more money than sense? Also called: “the anxious dog mom without a dog”
The entire issue of resolve is an interesting thing in psychotherapy and behavioral treatments. It's like the diabetes behavioral treatments that work, but no one can tolerate the caloric restrictions. Is it ethical to force someone to starve, to save their life? And to what degree?
On the bigger picture: most of the impairing childhood issues I see boil down to parents who cannot tolerate their kid’s distress. Honestly, that is about 99 percent of it. Most kids I evaluate are over-coddled.
Patterns I see all the time in parent work:
- Parents who overaccommodate because they cannot stand their child’s upset. This is not unique to anxiety, it shows up with oppositional behaviors, intellectual disability, and more. Sometimes kids become tyrannical and even unsafe or dangerous.
- The parents themselves are usually anxious. Often they are well-educated young professionals. In family history, there is almost always a parent who was cold, strict, or emotionally unavailable. The pendulum then swings in the other direction into hyper-warm and over-nurturing.
- Often dad is the higher-level professional, works long hours, and is more comfortable letting the kid sit with distress, although he struggles with emotional validation. Mom validates endlessly but cannot stand displays of distress. Mom usually holds the visible power in the household. Dad tends to be agreeable, not uninvolved, but more “I don’t want to make her mad” or “we have had this argument a hundred times.” Sometimes he genuinely worries he will do more harm than good. Dad might be uncomfortable bearing the role of a masculine role model.
- Mom may or may not be working, but she is always capable and talented enough to succeed professionally. Guilt about working, or not working, is usually baked into the family dynamic.
- By the time I see these families, they have usually run through individual counseling, some crunchy lifestyle or nutritional recommendations, and at least one psych eval “just to check for autism.” (Spoiler: the kid is usually rigid, intense, unhappy, but it is rarely autism. Sometimes the parents are disappointed when it is not, because now they have lost the easy label that “explains everything.”)
Teach parents that distress is normal, and often healthy. Coach them to communicate: “We unintentionally taught you that XYZ is more dangerous than it actually is. You can handle this.” Start targeting accommodations directly: going for a walk without the kid, shutting the bathroom door, and so on. Expect pushback. Sometimes it gets emotionally manipulative: “If you do not call me every six minutes at work, I will kill myself.” The fix is to bring in other adults, such as neighbors, aunts, and uncles, so the kid sees that love and support do not only come through control. You also set up support calls for when the child does handle a reduction in accommodations without blowing up.
I really like this intervention because it is concrete. It is coaching parents to both allow distress and deliver a supportive message that is not invalidating. Eli Lebowitz spends a lot of training time reminding providers that “supportive” is not the same as endless validation. It is validation plus a call to belief in the child’s ability to cope.
I have never applied it directly to failure-to-launch cases, but I would love to if I ever went into private practice (after finding a solid consultation group). You could print money doing this...
