The DIR® Model and Floortime™ Play Intervention is a framework (developed by Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D. and Serena Wieder, Ph.D.) for understanding and improving interventions with infants, children and adults who have challenges in relating, communicating and thinking, including autism spectrum disorders.
DIR® is the acronym for Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship-based. Developmental refers to the critical necessity that we fully understand where your child is developmentally in order to plan an effective treatment program. Individual Difference refers to the unique biologically-based ways your child takes in, regulates, responds to, and comprehends sensations such as sound, touch, and the planning and sequencing of actions and ideas. Relationship-based refers to the process through which an effective treatment program is delivered, i.e., the affect-based interactions with caregivers, therapists, educators, family and others that are tailored to your child’s individual differences and developmental capacities and designed to enable progress in attaining and mastering the Six Developmental Milestones:
- Self-regulation, mutual attention, interest in the world;
- Co-regulation, intimacy, engagement, falling in love;
- Two-way communication, purposeful emotional interactions, reciprocity;
- Complex communication, shared social problem solving;
- Emotional ideas, creating symbols and ideas, representational thinking; and,
- Emotional & logical thinking, building logical bridges between ideas.
It is well known that the essential learning interactions that enable the different parts of your child’s brain to work together and build successively higher levels of social, emotional and intellectual capacities are fired by your child’s natural emotions and interests. Floortime™ is a dual-focused technique that calls on the interaction provider (i.e., the therapist, educator, family member, etc.) to use or follow your child’s natural emotional interests (or lead) to create or design the challenges that propel your child towards greater and greater mastery of his or her social, emotional and intellectual capacities. These Relationship-based interactions typically occur during playtime and may actually occur on the “floor,” but also include conversations and interactions in other environments.
Because of the importance of their emotional relationships with your child, parents, family members and peers are critically important in the design and delivery of DIR® Model and Floortime™ Play Intervention. The DIR® Model and Floortime™ Play Intervention is a collaborative, interdisciplinary team approach that typically involves speech therapy, occupational therapy, educational programs, mental health (developmental-psychological) intervention and, where appropriate, augmentative and biomedical intervention.
To briefly summarize an incredibly complex subject, the overarching objective of the DIR® Model and Floortime™ Play Intervention is to enable your child to attain and master the Six Developmental Milestones as a healthy foundation for developing his or her social, emotional and intellectual capacities rather than exclusively focusing on his or her specific skill set and isolated behaviors.
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Research courtesy of ICDL.