Support for your child can start with support for you.
Parent coaching at OCDMN is grounded in evidence-based approaches, including SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions). We help parents and caregivers respond more effectively to OCD and anxiety, reduce patterns of accommodation, and support a child's growing ability to handle distress, uncertainty, and everyday challenges.
Anxiety and OCD rarely stay contained to one person.
When a child is struggling, parents often find themselves changing routines, answering the same questions, helping with rituals, negotiating around avoidance, or trying to prevent distress before it starts.
Parent coaching focuses on the parts of the pattern you can influence. The goal is not to become less supportive. It is to find ways of supporting your child that do not accidentally give OCD or anxiety more control over family life.
Reassurance loops
Your child repeatedly asks whether something is safe, okay, contaminated, dangerous, or certain and has difficulty moving on.
Rituals & rules
Family members are pulled into checking, repeating, arranging, cleaning, confessing, or doing things in a particular way.
Avoidance
Plans, activities, foods, places, people, or routines are increasingly organized around preventing anxiety or discomfort.
School & bedtime
Mornings, separation, bedtime, school attendance, or other transitions have become frequent sources of anxiety and conflict.
Parents doing more
You find yourself taking over tasks, speaking for your child, changing plans, or doing increasingly more to keep things moving.
Everyone feels stuck
You understand that anxiety is driving the pattern, but it is difficult to know what to say or do differently in the moment.
Parents do not create OCD or anxiety. Parent work focuses on changing the responses around symptoms because those responses are one part of the cycle families can directly influence.
Helping in the moment can sometimes keep anxiety going.
Family accommodation happens when people around a child change what they do in response to anxiety or OCD. Accommodation usually comes from care and a very understandable desire to make distress smaller.
The tricky part is that something that brings relief right now can sometimes make the anxious pattern more powerful over time. Parent coaching helps families identify where that is happening and develop realistic, gradual alternatives.
The goal is not to remove support. It is to shift from helping your child avoid distress toward helping them learn that they can handle it.
Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions.
Parent coaching is the broader service we offer. SPACE is one evidence-based, parent-based treatment approach we may use within parent coaching for childhood and adolescent anxiety and OCD. Depending on your family's needs, sessions may follow the structured SPACE model or draw from SPACE principles alongside other evidence-based strategies.
SPACE works directly with parents and caregivers rather than requiring the child to participate in sessions. The approach combines strong emotional support with planned reductions in family accommodation, helping parents communicate confidence in their child's ability to cope while changing responses that may be reinforcing anxiety.
The standard SPACE treatment model is typically delivered over approximately 10–12 sessions. Your actual course of parent coaching may be shorter or longer depending on your family's needs, goals, and whether SPACE is being used as the primary treatment model or as part of broader parent coaching.
Communicate support
Validate that anxiety is difficult without communicating that your child is unable to handle the feeling, uncertainty, or situation.
Identify accommodation
Look closely at the ways family members may be changing routines, providing reassurance, participating in rituals, or helping with avoidance.
Make a planned change
Choose specific accommodations to reduce and prepare for how to respond supportively when anxiety increases as the pattern begins to change.
Your child does not need to attend SPACE sessions. That can make parent-based work especially useful when a child is reluctant to participate in therapy or when accommodation itself is an important treatment target.
Practical work on what is happening at home.
Parent coaching is active and specific. Sessions focus on understanding the current pattern, deciding what response to change, planning how to communicate that change, and adjusting the plan based on what happens between sessions.
Map the pattern.
Identify triggers, your child's response, how caregivers respond, and what happens next.
Pick a target.
Rather than changing everything at once, choose a specific accommodation or family response to work on first.
Decide what to say and do.
Develop language, boundaries, and supportive responses that you can actually use when anxiety shows up.
Learn from what happens.
Review what worked, where the plan became difficult, and what needs to change before trying the next step.
Parent work can stand alone or complement your child's treatment.
There is not one right way for every family to begin. Some parents start coaching while their child is already in individual therapy. In SPACE, parents can also do meaningful treatment work even when the child is not participating directly in sessions.
Parent coaching focuses on your response.
Sessions work with caregivers on accommodation, reassurance, boundaries, supportive communication, and how the family responds when anxiety or OCD shows up.
Individual therapy focuses directly on the child.
When appropriate, a child or teen may also work directly with a clinician using ERP, I-CBT, CBT, or another treatment approach based on what is maintaining their symptoms.
These approaches are not competing options. For some families, changing caregiver responses and providing direct treatment to the child work best together.
What to know before getting started.
- Session Length
- Typically 50 minutes
- Rate
- $175 per 50-minute session
- SPACE Length
- Typically about 10–12 sessions, with flexibility based on clinical needs
- Format
- Virtual and in-person options may be available depending on clinician and location
- In Person
- OCDMN, 370 Selby Ave, Suite 215, Saint Paul, MN 55102
- Who Can Join
- Parents, co-parents, guardians, and other involved caregivers
- Payment
- Private pay
Start with what is happening at home.
You do not need to know whether SPACE, parent coaching, or individual treatment is the right next step. Tell us what you are seeing, what you have already tried, and where your family feels stuck.