Floor time
Floor Time (also known as Developmental Individual-Difference, Relationship-Based Model, or DIR) is a treatment
method that was developed by Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a child psychiatrist who has conducted copious research in the
area of child development and published numerous articles on the subject.
According to Greenspan, there are six developmental milestones. He states that appropriate emotional experiences
during each stage will help develop critical cognitive, social, emotional, language and motor skills as well as a
sense of self-respect.
Such milestones are:
1. Having the ability to take notice of the things around him and be interested in them while also being
able to calm himself. During this stage the manner in which infants modulate and process sensations is an important
contributor. Children may either be hypersensitive (too easily stimulated) or hyposensitive (need a lot of sensory
input to be stimulated). Children’s sensitivities may vary with each sense (touch, smell, and hearing) or from day
to day (sometimes hyposensitive, sometimes hypersensitive).
2. Being able to enter into relationships with other people. At this stage children start to recognize sounds
and sources of speech. They begin to scan the world for familiar faces and objects, and pay attention for 30
seconds or more. This ability to be intimate forms the basis of all future relationships and cements motor,
cognitive & language skills.
3. Communicating with others, including gestures (this must be a two-way conversation – not simply talking
“at” someone else). During this phase, the child first realizes that his actions cause reactions. This is the
beginning of gestural dialogues that lead to the opening and closing of circles of communication. The experiences
of two-way communication help children form a basic sense of intentionality. This leads to learning fundamental
emotional, cognitive and motor lessons.
4. Creating a complex problem solving process. At this stage the child starts to link gestures into
complicated responses. The number and complexity of closed circles begins to increase. Growing gestural dialogues
become preludes to speech. The child develops the ability to create complex gestures and to string together a
series of actions into an elaborate and deliberate problem-solving sequence. This growth in expressiveness and
complex gestures also increases creativity.
5. Developing ideas. During this stage the child learns that symbols represent things and that each symbol is
an idea, an abstraction of the concrete thing, activity or emotion with which the world is concerned. The ability
to create ideas begins, which leads to pretend play. The more the child experiments with pretend play, the more
comfortable he becomes with the world of ideas.
6. The ability to take ideas and make them real and logical. At this stage, the child begins to express
feelings, using words instead of actions. The cause of their feelings becomes linked to specific actions or events.
(I.e. I am happy because I am playing with Mommy.) These links between feelings and actions help the child to
predict future occurrences. The child also starts to build bridges during play and link them into logical
sequences. The child starts to understand the emerging concepts of space and time in a personal and emotional way.
There is also an increase in verbal communication and problem-solving skills.
Children achieve these milestones at different ages. Each milestone is mastered and is a foundation for the next
stage. Greenspan discusses all of these stages in great depth in his book, The Child with Special Needs. The book
also has many useful strategies and examples.
Floor Time is less time intensive than is ABA, which requires two to five hours per day. The idea is to develop a
relationship with the child to help draw him or her into a desire to interact with the world. The relationship is
created by devoting Floor Time to the child’s interests and by the caregiver joining in the child’s activities,
initially on his or her level and performing the same actions as the child. Later, when the child has accepted the
relationship and is comfortable with having someone join in the activity, the caregiver will introduce changes
designed to initiate communication or other desired actions. By doing so, the child’s behavior is shaped in small
steps and allows him or her to begin meeting the six milestones.
For example, if the child is sitting on the floor lining up plastic animals, the caregiver will sit on the floor
with the child and join in the lining up of the animals in the same manner as the child. Once the child has
accepted this, the caregiver might place one of the animals out of order or line them up in a way the child will
want to change. The purpose of this is to get the child to communicate in some manner what he or she wants you to
do with the animal.
Floor time
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