Greenspan Floortime is Dr. Stanley Greenspan’s play-based developmental intervention. It builds genuine emotional, social, and cognitive capacities through warm, child-led interaction rather than drilling skills or behaviors.
A milestone is an observable stage a child passes through. A capacity is the underlying ability that makes that milestone possible and continues to deepen throughout life. Dr. Greenspan’s Functional Emotional Developmental Milestones are really capacities — they don’t end when mastered; they continue to grow in complexity.
Dr. Greenspan framed his six Functional Emotional Developmental Milestones as ongoing capacities rather than one-time achievements. Shared attention, engagement, two-way communication, social problem-solving, symbolic thinking, and emotional reasoning are not boxes to check — they are capacities that deepen and expand throughout development.
Understanding development as capacities changes the intervention goal. Instead of asking ‘has the child reached this milestone?’, the Greenspan approach asks ‘how deeply has the child developed this capacity, and how can we help it grow further?’ This allows for meaningful progress tracking across the full developmental spectrum.