Parent and Family Therapy

We partner with families to strengthen communication, build parenting strategies, and support the child’s progress across home and school settings.

Parent Management Training (PMT)

Parenting a child with anxiety, behavior concerns, or neurodevelopmental challenges can be exhausting and overwhelming. PMT offers direct coaching to help parents become more confident and consistent in managing difficult behaviors, supporting independence, and reducing family stress. It can be provided alongside a child’s individual therapy or as a standalone service for caregivers.

PMT includes teaching parents how to increase positive behaviors using encouragement and rewards, how to set clear expectations, and how to follow through with effective consequences when needed. It also addresses the emotional toll of parenting and gives caregivers space to process their own reactions while learning tools to develop and maintain boundaries and reduce escalation.

PMT may draw on several evidence-based models, including:

  • Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT)

  • SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions)

  • Behavioral strategies for ADHD, oppositional behavior, and daily living skills

  • Emotional coaching and caregiver self-regulation strategies

SPACE: Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions

What is SPACE?

SPACE stands for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions and is a parent-based treatment program for children and adolescents with anxiety, OCD, and related problems.

SPACE was developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center and has been tested and found to be efficacious in randomized controlled clinical trials.

Who are space groups for? Who is the patient?

SPACE aims to treat children and adolescents with anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Although children do not have to attend SPACE sessions - they are the patients! When SPACE treatment is successful children feel less anxious and function better following treatment. 


Some of the main anxiety problems treated with SPACE include:

Separation anxiety, Social anxiety, Generalized anxiety, Fears and phobias, Panic disorder and Agoraphobia, Selective mutism and Obsessive-compulsive disorder

who participates in treatment?

Parents (and other caregivers) participate in SPACE treatment sessions. In most cases the child or adolescent does not need to attend the treatment sessions.

What happens in treatment?

Parents who participate in SPACE will learn skills and tools to help their child overcome anxiety, OCD or related problems.

The treatment focuses on changes that parents can make to their own behavior, they do not need to make their child change. 

The two main changes that parents learn to make in SPACE treatment are to respond more supportively to their anxious child and to reduce the accommodations they have been making to the child symptoms. 

Providers at Child and Family Therapy Collective

Eleanor Ezell, LCSW, Clinical Director