Children with Williams syndrome often experience considerable anxiety and associated emotional dysregulation related to specific objects, sounds, or experiences. There are few treatments developed for young children with anxiety difficulties, and even fewer evaluated for use with children with developmental disabilities. Dr. Karen Levine and Dr. Bonnie Klein-Tasman, together with graduate students at the UWM Child Neurodevelopment Research Lab have worked together to develop a manual and video examples to help guide therapists to use a play-based approach to reducing fear and anxiety. We so appreciate the families who have participated in this research to date. Parents brought their children to UWM for an weekend of therapy sessions. They were interviewed about their child’s anxiety completed questionnaires and ratings about their child’s behavior, anxiety, and fears before and after the weekend visit to UWM.
Please check back for updates. While we are not recruiting additional participants at this time, our next stage will be to get feedback from community clinicians about our training materials, and then involve community clinicians in learning this approach with families local to them; please check back for updates.
Feel free to email us at cnrl@uwm.edu with any questions.
This research is supported by a grant from the Williams Syndrome Association (#WSA0110 and #WSA0112) and the private foundation Lucidus Solutions.