Greenspan Floortime, Social-Emotional Growth, and Setting Boundaries

How Boundaries and Challenges Facilitate a Child’s Social Emotional Growth

The most profound truths are often the simplest. There is an old Latin phrase, once the motto of a sixth-century monastery, that carries a powerful message for modern parenting: Succisa virescit.

Its translation roughly means, “When cut down, we grow back stronger.”

In an age where we often try to remove all obstacles from our children’s paths, Succisa virescit reminds us that growth comes from overcoming challenges, not avoiding them, and even sometimes failing.  Thinking, creating, expressing, and adapting are all fundamental elements of Social Emotional Health and children develop these through challenging themselves or being challenged by others.  Any experience that encourages or necessitates the use of our problem solving, flexibility, communication, logic, tolerance, etc. are types of challenges.  Some of the earliest challenges children experience involve the setting of boundaries. 

Starting as early as 12 months, a child begins to understand the difference between an approving face, like one with a smile, and a disapproving face, like one with a frown.  This is often the first type of limit a child experiences. Threse early boundaries help children learn to explore their world within safe boundaries.  Learning what’s ok and not ok to do by receiving natural feedback from a caregiver in the form of an emotional expression also becomes the first time a child is challenged to take into consideration another person’s perspective (the seed for developing Theory of Mind).  The focus should not be placed on whether children are being challenged or not, but instead how we support and nurture them through those challenges.

The Greenspan Floortime Approach: Challenging for Growth

By integrating the idea of the developmentally appropriate challenges with the relationship-based principles of The Greenspan Floortime Approach®, children can feel supported while being “stretched”
 and experiencing challenges.  Dr. Stanley Greenspan recognized the importance of meeting children on their level—both developmentally and physically—to maximize communicating, interacting, and learning. This is the foundation for both setting boundaries and challenging them to grow:

1. Setting Growth-Oriented Boundaries (The Necessary ‘No’)

• Developing and/or Deepening the Relationship
  • To benefit from and constructively learn from a boundary, a child should have a relationship of trust and respect with the person they are receiving the boundary from.  This will ensure that the boundaries are seen as coming from a place of love and are not simply seen as simply punitive or hurtful. 
• Boundaries exist to support, protect, and educate, not simply punish and/or “teach a lesson”.
  • They are the essential guardrails that facilitate the emotional health and relationships that drive our behavior, communication, and thinking. By maintaining firm but gentile, predictable limits, we create opportunities/challenges for a child to regulate their emotions, process their frustration, and ultimately discover a more flexible solution. This struggle to adapt within a boundary is where emotional growth occurs.

2. Challenging for Growth (The Next Step)

• The Greenspan Floortime Approach® was explicitly designed to help children progress and grow into their best/optimal selves.
  • This growth is fostered by challenging them to grow from the ground up and naturally expand their social emotional capacities within meaningful relationships. By first meeting children on their level, we connect with them and in-turn them with us. 
• Developmentally Appropriate Challenges and Boundaries.
  • Depending on where a child is within their developmental process, boundaries and challenges can be effectively delivered by making sure they are tailored to the child’s developmental age and abilities, and not their chronological age. If delivered in a manner the child can process and co-regulate through, this becomes a moment of growth. The adult’s supportive yet firm delivery encourages the child to stretch their regulation and fortitude, building new neural pathways and emerging stronger than before.

(Neuroscience confirms this: the struggle itself triggers the release of neurotransmitters that signal the brain to pay attention and form stronger neural connections. When we remove all struggle, we risk raising children who are fluent in answers but fragile in process.  However, if the “struggle is too much (too threatening), then the learning process becomes ‘overwhelming’ and growth shuts down.)

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References:

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Wellman, H. M. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. MIT Press.

Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 21(1), 195–200.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.

Morris, A. S., Silk, J. S., Steinberg, L., Myers, S. S., & Robinson, L. R. (2007). The role of the family context in the development of emotion regulation. Social Development, 16(2), 361–388.

Black, J. E., & Greenough, W. T. (1986). Developmental and experiential effects on dendrites and spines of cerebellar Purkinje cells. Developmental Brain Research, 29(1), 159–165.

Benson, E. S. (2002, November 1). The synaptic self. Monitor on Psychology, 33(10). https://www.apa.org/monitor/nov02/synaptic