What is Floortime?
Greenspan Floortime IS NOT DIRFloortime.
Learn about how Dr. Greenspan’s Greenspan Floortime® is different from ICDL’s DIRFloortime
While the terms “Floortime” and “DIR/Floortime” are widely used, most people don’t fully understand what Floortime is. It is crucial to distinguish Dr. Greenspan’s original approach from adaptations that have strayed from his core principles. These ‘non-Greenspan Floortimes’ have changed the terminology and definitions of important elements of his framework, impacting their application.
The Greenspan Floortime Approach represents his official version, emphasizing meaningful relationships and child-led interactions, and being a thinking-based approach. This approach helps children with developmental challenges, like autism, reach their full potential by strengthening their social, emotional, behavioral, and intellectual capacities. By adhering to The Greenspan Floortime Approach, you ensure you’re utilizing the official form of Dr. Greenspan’s framework.
summary of Greenspan Floortime’s key points:
- Child-Centered: The approach focuses on meeting children where they are developmentally (works from the ground up), building on their unique strengths and interests.
- Relationship-Based: Floortime centers on building a warm, engaging relationship between the adult and child, fostering a sense of security and trust.
- Thinking-Based: Making sure the child is doing the thinking is one of the most essential and fundamental components of Dr. Greenspan’s Floortime. Enticing the child to respond/initiate, problem-solve, create, adapt, and plan ahead are just a few of the ways we can ensure the child learning the process of ‘thinking’ and not simply memorizing and repeating like so many behavioral interventions that lead to poor generalization.
- Developmental: Floortime focuses on helping children progress through the key developmental milestones that contribute to emotional and intellectual growth.
- Growth-Oriented: It aims to help children develop their full potential beyond any diagnostic labels, promoting self-discovery and emotional health.
Fundamental Goals
- Relate (Emotionally Connect): The approach prioritizes emotional development and engaging in meaningful relationships that encourage trust, respect, curiosity, creativity, and spontaneity.
- Communicate (Interact): The focus is on playful interactions on the floor, following the child’s lead while also gently challenging them to expand their abilities. Commmunication is both a non-verbal and linguistic capacity.
- Think (Create, Plan, Problem-Solve, Adapt, etc:) For longterm learning to occur, children need to be the ones in the driver seat. this means picking the activity, but also figuring out what to do within the interaction (with our support).
the Greenspan/DIR Model: The Six Primary Developmental Milestones
(Each of these Milestones are describing elements of Relating, Communicating, and/or Thinking):
Floortime is an intervention designed to stimulate natural growth. It helps children achieve the six social-emotional Functional Developmental Milestones described in Dr. Greenspan’s Greenspan/DIR Model:
- Shared Attention and Interest in the World: The ability to be callm focused and pay attention to both people and objects and activities.
- Engagement and Building Relationships: Forming close, meaningful connections with others, and staying engaged around a broad range of emotions.
- Two-way Communication/Interaction: Responding and Initiating with others (Closing and Opening Circles).
- Shareed Social Problem Solving and Interacting with a Continuous Flow: Using gestures to get needs met and play to share wants and needs.
- Meaningful Use of Symbolic Ideas: Using words and other symbols, like pretend play, to share thoughts and ideas while explressing needs, creative ideas, and a range of emotions.
- Logical Thinking: Connecting wants, ideas, and feelings using logic and reasoning.
In essence, Floortime transforms playtime into a powerful tool for connection, growth, and development.
Benefits of Floortime:
Floortime can help children:
- Improve social and emotional skills
- Enhance communication and language development
- Develop stronger relationships with caregivers, and eventually with peers
- Increase attention span and engagement
- Foster creativity, problem-solving, and adaptibility
- Build self-confidence and interdependence
Is Floortime Right for Your Child?
If your child is experiencing challenges with social interaction, communication, or emotional regulation, Greenspan Floortime may be a valuable intervention. It’s particularly beneficial for children with autism spectrum disorder, but can also be helpful for children with other developmental delays or challenges.
Learn More…
To learn more about Greenspan Floortime, explore our website, read The Floortime Manual 2nd Edition, and consider consulting with a Greenspan Floortime professional.
For in-person services contact The Floortime Center
For any age child, you do three things:
- Follow your child’s lead- Join them in a physical and verbal manner while being playful and showing a high level of interest in them and their activity.
- Challenge- Working from the ground up, encourage and entice them to engage and interact with you.
- Expand- Subtly make changes to the challenge encouraging them to problem solve, create, adapt and communicate within longer interactions with more complex communication.
As you do all this, while staying engaged with them and making sure they stay engaged with you, you are helping her practice basic thinking skills: engagement, interaction, symbolic thinking and logical thinking. To master these skills requires using all these senses, emotions, and motor skills, as The Greenspan Floortime Approach™ explains.
Dr. Greenspan developed Floortime for families to enable them to support their child’s development. Floortime can be done at home or at a clinic, but it’s useful, especially at the beginning, to have some guidance from a comprehensive source.
The Greenspan Floortime Approach™ is the most comprehensive version of Floortime. Created by Dr. Stanley Greenspan, Floortime is both an intervention for children with special needs and a general support for healthy child development. By taking all of his experiences over decades of clinical practice, he systematized and simplified his approach into an organized set of principles and techniques. He also presented this final version in his last book, The Learning Tree.: