Floortime Strategies to Promote Development in Children and Teens: A User's Guide to the DIR® Model / Edition 1

by Andrea Davis

Overview

Floortime is a highly effective intervention approach for children and adolescents with autism and other developmental disorders. Now there's a step-by-step guide for parents to LEARN and professionals to TEACH the DIRFloortime® model of helping young people with social, emotional, and cognitive challenges.

This guide takes the research-supported developmental approach to treatment and breaks it down into a curriculum of simple, sequenced strategies you can use right away to support the social and cognitive development of children and teens. Quick instructions and examples for each method are laid out for easy viewing in the midst of a play session. Certified DIRFloortime experts explain the theoretical background and the basics of how to play and interact with children in ways that motivate them, make the most of their natural interests, and help them develop critical new social, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Whether you're a professional or parent, this practical, ready-to-use Floortime guide is an essential addition to your intervention toolkit.

WHY USE DIRFloortime?

• Proven effective—research-supported, field tested, and rooted in developmental psychology
• Targets the key cognitive and social-emotional capacities children need to thrive in the real world
• Promotes learning and growth through play and interaction
• Fosters warm, attuned parent-child relationships
• Meets your specific needs—apply DIRFloortime strategies in developmental order or use them as standalone teaching tools
• Gives you quick catchphrases that make strategies "stick", so you can use them anytime, anywhere
• Encourages caregiver self-reflection and self-awareness—a key part of helping children and teens develop their own self-reflection skills
• Leads to children and teens becoming joyful, spontaneous, flexible, creative, and empathic human beings

PRACTICAL MATERIALS: Each DIRFloortime strategy comes with a clear description and enlightening examples of how to apply it in a variety of real-life scenarios. The appendix walks you through 11 effective strategies for helping children and adolescents reduce challenging behaviors.

Help children develop crucial skills:

• Regulation and Attention
• Social Engagement and Attachment
• Reciprocity
• Social Problem Solving
• Self-Awareness
• Empathy
• Imagination
• Emotional Thinking
• Logical Thinking
• Complex Thinking
• Self-Reflection

DIR® and DIRFloortime® are registered trademarks of The Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders, Inc.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781598577341
Publisher:	Brookes Publishing
Publication date:	08/01/2014
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	229,591
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Andrea Davis received her B.A. in psychology from Swarthmore College, M.A. in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship in infant mental health and early childhood disorders at Brown University Medical School. She returned to the west coast to join the UCLA Department of Pediatrics as Director of Research for the FOCUS project intervention study and to open a private practice in Pasadena, California. This practice grew into Greenhouse Therapy Center, a psychological center providing psychotherapy to individual adults, couples, parents, adolescents, and children from an attachment theory perspective. Greenhouse also offers intensive in-home Floortime or relationship-based developmental intervention for children and adolescents with developmental disorders and their families.

Lahela Isaacson, M.S., LMFT, has devoted her professional career to working with children with special needs using the DIRFloortime® model. Ms. Isaacson received her B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University. She earned her M.S. in marriage and family therapy from Seattle Pacific University. Soon after graduating she was introduced to the DIRFloortime model and was captivated. Ms. Isaacson currently works at Greenhouse Therapy Center as a DIRFloortime supervisor and program manager.

Michelle Harwell, M.S., LMFT, is an expert training leader and supervisor in DIRFloortime® and an infant mental health and early intervention specialist. She maintains a thriving private practice in Los Angeles, California, where she sees clients across the age spectrum: infants, children, adolescents, and adults. She also works as an infant mental health consultant at Elizabeth House, where she helped to secure grant funding through the Pasadena Child Health Foundation to provide mother–infant psychotherapy to at-risk homeless mothers. Ms. Harwell received her B.A. in English literature from the University of Oklahoma, M.A. in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, and M.S. in marriage and family therapy from the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. She dedicated her postgraduate training to the areas of development, attachment, trauma, and neuroscience and is currently completing her Ph.D in psychoanalysis from The Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Ms. Harwell is a well-respected speaker, trainer, and supervisor who provides professional development and consultation to therapists and families.

Read an Excerpt

https://brookespublishing.com/resource-library/introduction-to-dirfloortime/

Table of Contents

About the Authors
Foreword
How to Use This Book
Introduction
Acknowledgments

Core Methods A. Basic Strategies to Promote Social-Emotional and Intellectual Development
A.1 Follow cues: Provide sensitive interactions by following cues
A.2 Be responsive: Always respond to all communication
A.3 Build upward: Meet your child or teen at current developmental capacity
A.4 Use play: Use play and playfulness as primary means to engage and teach
A.5 Use natural interests: Capitalize on natural interests to elicit higher skills
A.6 Use problems: Set up situations that invite child-initiated solutions
A.7 Pretend play: Create opportunities to use ideas in symbolic (pretend) play
A.8 Embrace feelings: Help embrace a wide range of feelings
A.9 Enrich ideas: Help enrich ideas or stories in play and conversation
A.10 Self-reflect: Take a reflective stance toward yourself in interactionsCore Methods B. Understanding and Addressing Individual Differences in Processing Profiles
B.1 Child's profile: Identify and understand your child's or teen's profile of strengths and weaknesses
B.2 Adult's profile: Consider your individual differences
B.3 Adapt yourself: Adapt your interactive style to your child's or teen's unique profile
B.4 Calm or energize: Provide motor or sensory inputs as needed to calm or energize
B.5 Home design: Set up the home environment to accommodate the unique sensory profile
B.6 Sensory connections: Provide daily sensory-motor relational experiences
B.7 Practice in play: Provide daily planned play activities to address processing challenges Capacity 1. Regulation and Attention: Attaining a Calm, Alert, Attentive State
1.1 Support regulation: Help your child or teen get regulated before expecting more
1.2 Notice and adjust: Notice and adjust your intensity to support an optimal arousal level
1.3 Calming choices: Offer choices for help in calming down
1.4 Lengthen attention: Attend to and join interests to expand focus and attention
1.5 Avoid flooding: Support regulation at early stages of upset to avoid emotional "flooding"
1.6 Practice in play: Practice modulation regularly in fun, playful ways Capacity 2. Social Engagement: Getting Involved and Connected
2.1 Joint attention: Develop joint attention
2.2 Gaze tracking: Attend to the pattern of gaze
2.3 Share pleasure: Facilitate experiences of mutual joy
2.4 Mirror emotions: Mirror your child's affect by matching facial expression, tone of voice, and tempo
2.5 Emphasize affect: Exaggerate your expression of affect (feeling)
2.6 Interact: Turn every action into an interaction
2.7 Advance the agenda: Promote the child's or teen's agenda
2.8 Be necessary: Be the means to an end—be necessary
2.9 Use anticipation: Use anticipation to increase the capacity for mutual attention Capacity 3. Reciprocal Social Interaction: Initiating and Responding Playfully
3.1 Invite circles: Entice to initiate and respond
3.2 Total communication: Do not rely on words alone—use the total communication system
3.3 Wait enough: Wait long enough for responses in order to allow for slower auditory, cognitive, or motor processing speeds
3.4 Sportscaster/narrator: Be the sportscaster/narrator
3.5 Playfully persist: Challenge the child or teen to close follow-up circles
3.6 Easy choices: Offer easy choices if needed
3.7 Communication temptation: Play games requiring initiation
3.8 Consider questions: Carefully craft your questions and statements Capacity 4. Complex Communication: Using Gestures and Words to Solve Problems Together
4.1 Stretch interactions: Stretch out interaction chains to 50 or more circles in a row
4.2 Don't judge: Express interest in all attempts to communicate
4.3 Feign ignorance: Expand reciprocal communication by pretending to be ignorant
4.4 Assign meaning: Treat all play actions as if they are goal-directed
4.5 Playfully obstruct: Use playful obstruction to expand interactions and encourage joint problem solving
4.6 Devise problems: Set up the environment to promote independent problem solving
4.7 Genuine self: Allow more of your genuine self in interactions
4.8 Social flow: Enhance understanding of emotional meaning and flow of social interactions Capacity 5. Symbolic Play: Creating and Using Ideas
5.1 Use pretend: Create opportunities for pretending
5.2 Animate: Bring the characters to life
5.3 Plot thickening: Deepen the plot and add complexity
5.4 Instigate creativity: Expand the opportunities for creativity
5.5 Vary emotions: Broaden the emotional themes
5.6 Challenge and support: Take on dual roles within the play
5.7 Enrich play: Vary the forms of symbolic playCapacity 6. Emotional and Logical Thinking: Making Sense of Oneself, Others, and the World
6A: Emotional thinking

6.1 Narrate: Empathically narrate feeling states
6.2 Highlight emotions: Emphasize the emotional aspects of life
6.3 Reflect: Reflect on all feelings
6.4 Encourage empathy: Help put on another's shoes
6.5 Play therapeutically: Use play to help master overwhelming feelings

6B: Logical thinking

6.6 Build bridges: Help build bridges between ideas
6.7 Elaborate: Ask elaboration questions to encourage logical connections
6.8 Incite thinking: Help your child or teen become an independent thinker
6.9 Make connections: Help the child or teen connect three or more ideas in a logical sequence
6.10 Event planner: Sequence, plan, and communicate about the past and future
6.11 Organize and summarize: Bring the child or teen back to the main idea
6.12 Debate: Use debate to challenge the child or teen to connect ideas and develop logicCapacities 7-9. Complex Thinking: Multicausal, Gray-Area, and Reflective Thinking
7. Promote multicausal thinking
8. Develop gray-area thinking
9. Encourage reflective thinkingAppendix
X.1 More Floortime: Increase Floortime play proportional to increased expectations and challenges
X.2 Find behavioral clues: View behavior as a meaningful clue
X.3 Choose behaviors: Choose and target the most important behaviors
X.4 Take manageable steps: Teach new behaviors in manageable steps
X.5 Make modifications: Modify the schedule and the environment to reduce the likelihood of problem behaviors
X.6 Notice and mention: Notice and mention all the small steps in the right direction
X.7 Preview: Rehearse and preview expected behaviors and new situations
X.8 Post rules: Agree on, post, and enforce written household rules
X.9 Provide visuals: Provide visual reminders and visual schedules
X.10 Provide support: Provide empathic responses to expressions of negative emotion
X.11 Grant wishes: Grant a wish imaginatively References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Provides strategies for teaching joint attention, social reciprocity, and emotional regulation skills that are generally difficult for parents and educators to address yet vital to the social development of individuals with ASD.

Dr. Deb Leach

“Offers clear and practical techniques for building rich and vital connections with family members, caregivers, teachers, and other helping professionals. When we construct these foundational capacities, we have the basis for better thinking, communicating, and learning.

Joshua D. Feder