Challenging children with autism to reach developmental milestones
Floortime
therapy is an essential aspect of the DIR/Floortime intervention
aimed at helping children with developmental disorders grow and
develop past their diagnoses. The therapy involves joining a child’s
world and pulling them into a shared world where they can develop key
social, emotional, language and intellectual abilities.
Floortime
therapy was developed by Dr. Stanley Greenspan for helping children
learn through meaningful learning interactions that are orchestrated
while taking into account the child’s functional emotional
developmental capacities, that is, their ability to relate,
communicate and think. Effective Floortime therapy also requires
taking into account individual sensory processing differences.
Children on the autism spectrum often face difficulties processing
sensory stimuli from their environment. They may by hypersensitive,
under-sensitive or a mix of both to sensory stimuli such as sound and
touch. A therapist (or parent/teacher) who is not considerate towards
these differences could alienate the child much before the therapy
starts to progress.
Joining
the child’s world
The
first step of a Floortime therapy session, which usually lasts for 20
minutes or more and can be conducted by a parent, teacher or a
professional therapist, is an attempt to join the child’s world by
following their lead.
If
a child is wandering and jumping around the room, you may start doing
the same. If a child is moving their truck around on the floor, you
could make a tunnel with your hands through which they could drive
the truck.
Respecting
a child’s interests establishes a sense of warmth and intimacy
between the caregiver and the child. This is essential for making the
second step of a Floortime therapy session possible.
Gently
pulling the child into a shared world and helping them develop
essential functional emotional developmental capacities
The
second step of Floortime therapy involves playfully challenging the
child to master essential functional emotional developmental
capacities that include the successive abilities to:
- Attend to the environment while remaining calm and organized
- Relate to others
- Engage in purposeful, two-way communication
- Engage in complex communication
- Form ideas
- Stringing ideas and emotions together to form a more complex chain
Developing
these capabilities require parents, teachers and therapists to
attempt to engage the child’s senses and motor skills in order to
pull the child into a shared world that challenges them to hone their
ability to relate, communicate and think.
This
can be done through an unlimited means of creative and innovative
activities that should be based on the child’s current abilities
and their sensory processing differences. For example, with a child
who’s hypersensitive to stimuli such as touch and sound, you’d
have to be soothing yet compelling in your interactions. For a child
who is under-sensitive to such stimuli, it would be effective to be
energetic and stimulating so that the child wants to pay attention
and engage in an interaction.
The Floortime therapy model should not be restricted to isolated therapy
sessions. Rather, it should be applied throughout the course of the
day. The aim of all or as many interactions as possible during the
day should be to join in the child’s world and challenge them to
build their ability to relate, communicate and think.
Rebecca
School in New York is a therapeutic day school for children with
autism spectrum disorders or other developmental disorders. The
school programs are established upon the ideologies of the DIR
model/Floortime therapy. To know more about Rebecca School, you may
visit: http://www.rebeccaschool.org/
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