Greenspan Floortime is Dr. Stanley Greenspan’s play-based intervention to build the emotional, social, and cognitive capacities described by the three-legged stool: relate, communicate, and think.
Dr. Greenspan used the three-legged stool metaphor to describe three interdependent capacities: Relate (form warm emotional connections), Communicate (engage in back-and-forth exchange), and Think (generate flexible, creative, logical ideas). Like a three-legged stool, if any leg is missing, the whole structure is unstable.
Every Floortime session builds relating through emotional engagement, communication through circles of back-and-forth interaction, and thinking through the complexity and novelty of play. This is why Floortime is comprehensive — it builds all three legs as an integrated whole, not one capacity in isolation.
For children with autism, all three legs of the stool are typically affected. Greenspan Floortime addresses all three simultaneously by building the relational foundation first, which creates the conditions for communication and thinking to develop naturally from within.