Meltdowns

1. Attention and Regulation
2. Engaging the World
3. Interaction and Communication
4. Shared Problem-Solving
5. Meaningful Use of Ideas
6. Logical Thinking
7. Multi-Causal Thinking
8. Comparative and Gray-Area Thinking
9. Reflective Thinking

1. Follow
2. Challenge
3. Expand

Building Healthy Minds
(for young children)
Playground Politics
(for older children)
Great Kids
(for all children) 

Floortime Library

Meltdowns

Helping Infants, Children, and Adolescents Overcome Behavior Problems, Aggression and Tantrums

Taught by Stanley Greenspan, M.D.

This workshop presents basic principles for helping children with special needs, including autism spectrum disorders, overcome different kinds of meltdowns and aggressive behaviors. Through descriptions of a number of cases, Dr. Greenspan illustrates the principles involved in age groups ranging from infants to adolescents. This workshop is especially helpful for parents and all professionals who work in educational, home, office, or clinical settings. (7 hrs.)

We hope you enjoy the online Workshop and want to thank you for your participation.

Attention and Regulation

(Develops between 0-3 months)

Milestone Description: Your child is calm, has interest in sights, sound, touch, movement, and other sensory experiences, and has purposeful responses to them.
If the score is under 6, harness your child’s attention by pulling them into activities that they enjoy.

Engaging the World

(Develops between 2-7 months)

Milestone Description: Your child increasingly displays expressions that convey intimacy and relatedness.
If the score is under 6, use warm affect to entice and draw out your child’s engagement.

Interaction and Communication

(Develops between 3-10 months)

Milestone Description: Your child participates in a range of back-and-forth interactions that involve emotional expressions, sounds, hand gestures, and the like to convey intentions.
If the score is under 6, encourage and challenge your child to respond to and initiate with purposeful intent.

Shared Problem-Solving

(Develops between 9-18 months)

Milestone Description: Your child engages in many social and emotional interactions in a rhythmic pattern and understands emotional signaling so as to solve a problem or get a need met.
If the score is under 6, support your child’s initiative to come up with increasingly more multifaceted solutions to a problem.

Meaningful Use of Ideas

(Develops between 18-48 months)

Milestone Description: Your child begins to use meaningful words or phrases and interactive pretend play with caregivers or peers to convey emotions and ideas.
If the score is under 6, encourage your child to express their internal wants, needs and opinions rather than recite labels and facts.

Logical Thinking

(Develops between 3 and 4 years)

Milestone Description: Your child builds logical connections between meaningful ideas.
If the score is under 6, assist your child’s curiosity by asking lots of who, what, and why questions about the interests that motivate them.

Multi-Causal Thinking

(Develops between 4 and 6 years)

Milestone Description: Your child gives multiple reasons for a feeling or idea and makes simple, opinion-based comparisons.
If the score is under 6, encourage your child to express longer and more sequential stories, organize instructions, and list preferences.

Comparative and Gray-Area Thinking

(Develops between 6 and 10 years)

Milestone Description: Your child uses degrees of differences in explaining and comparing feelings, relationships, and objects in nuanced situations.
If the score is under 6, ask questions that allow your child to compare and see things in degrees rather than all or nothing.

Reflective Thinking (Thinking off an internal standard)

(Develops after 9 years and continues to develop throughout life)

Milestone Description: Your child evaluates and reflects on feelings, him- or herself, and events in the world. Develops internal standards to define their sense of morality.
If the score is under 6, foster your child’s sense of self by supporting discussion of their own beliefs, morals, and reflections on experiences.

Follow: Follow your child’s lead–in other words, don’t take over the pretend play or game.

Challenge: Challenge your child to be creative and spontaneous.

Expand: Expand the action and interaction to include all or most of your child’s senses and motor skills as well as different emotions.

Affect: is the expression of emotion through facial movement, body language, voice tone. These all convey how we feel inside. ‘Emotion’ is a close but not exact synonym.

Co-regulation: is a specific kind of interaction between two people who are communicating, where the listener and the speaker continually adjust their tone, facial expression, and words because of the other’s reaction. The communication can also be non-verbal.

: stands for Developmental-Individual Differences-Relationship, the basic elements of the developmental model pioneered by Dr. Stanley Greenspan in his seminal 1979 book Intelligence and Adaptation.

Functional emotional capacities: refers to the social, emotional, and intellectual capacities that are the focus of the DIR� Model.

Functional Emotional Developmental Questionnaire: is the formal name for the Greenspan Assessment for development and sensory processing, which assesses the social, emotional, intellectual, and sensory capacities of the child.

Opening and closing circles: is the interaction when a person (the opener) makes a sound comment or gesture and the partner (the closer) responds to the communication in a manner that addresses it. The opening and closing create two-way communication or, in other words, a circle of communication. When there are many circles in a row, there is a rhythmical continuous flow of communication. This is the third stage of Greenspan’ DIR� Model. Regulation: is the adaptive side of sensory modulation, that is, being able to handle sensations calmly.

Sensory modulation: is our ability to take in sensory experience–sound, vision, touch, smell, and taste–and movement and filter the experience to create a response to it. For some of us, certain sensations overwhelm. For others, they underwhelm. In either case, they can affect how we engage with those around us.

Sensory processing: is our ability to organize and understand the information we take into our senses from the environment.

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Study Questions

  1. What is the Greenspan/DIR model?
    1. An intervention that follows a chronological order to teach skills.
    2. Something you do to mitigate affective experiences available to children.
    3. Teaching a behavior to address a specific symptom a child displays.
    4. A model used to identify a child’s social-emotional strengths and weaknesses.
  2. Which is NOT a part of the Greenspan approach?
    1. Relating within meaningful, positive relationships
    2. Communication across all therapeutic curriculums
    3. Teaching a child an outcome, what to say, and what to do
    4. Encouraging a child to do the thinking
  3. The Greenspan approach is a parent-_____ approach and a therapist-____ approach.
    1. supported; centered
    2. centered; supported
    3. supported; directed
    4. advocated; centered