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

As a floortime therapists this book is filled with lots of information to support any student with developmental gaps in their milestones. DIR is not just for typical students. The strategies and suggestions are great at each level.

If you are reading this review, chances are you have recently had a child or loved one diagnosed with Autism or some other developmental disorder. You have either just started looking for therapies, strategies, anything to help your child or you have been trying things for a while now that haven't been working the way you would like it to, and you're looking at this particular book wondering if Floortime can help you and your child. You undoubtedly already know there are a million different ways a parent's heart can break.So just as a brief description, DIR floortime was developed originally by Dr. Greenspan, who is deceased. Floortime is very different from ABA (applied behavorial analysis), which generally seeks to reinforce or teach desired behaviors, as in behaviors directed by the adult, by providing external motivators, like treats, or time with a special toy. When you use Floortime, you get into and capitalize on the interests of the child, engaging with them there, and slowly transition them to working up to more functional or higher level skills.Having read some of Greenspan's works, and watched some of his seminar teachings on Floortime, I actually have to say I find this manual accurate, easy to understand, and really a very nice reference for this therapeutic approach. I actually prefer using it to flipping through his books, it is very nicely laid out, concise, and easy to understand and therefore apply.As to whether or not this could benefit your child, honestly, trying it out is probably the only way you will ever know. Each child's circumstances, needs, and personalities are different. I use DIR Floortime with our son, and I can not say enough good things about it. I wish we could use DIR as his primary therapeutic approach, but his insurance only pays for ABA, and quite frankly, he doesn't respond the best to that approach, and his progress is slower using that method, so I spend time working with him using Floortime when he's not in his other therapies. Because we have a huge mountain to climb.And I can also honestly say I think this approach is beneficial for kiddos whose developmental struggles have causes other then Autism. Our son, who we adopted, and that is really only important to me that people keep in mind when it comes to his first diagnosis, because I don't want to be trolled for causing something I did not do, has Fetal Alcohol Effect, Sensory Modulation Disorder, Autism, a duplication on his 5th Chromosome, and Sotos Syndrome. The cumulative effect of those challenges can be pretty overwhelming and the scope of challenges he has faced and will continue to is breathtaking. The only one we knew about when we adopted him was the Fetal Alcohol, the rest just kept rolling in as we sought to get treatment for one concern after another. As I said, a million different ways a parent's heart can break. Truthfully, in the early stages, things were super intense, it was serious shock and awe in our household. Me doing my best to gently hold him 6 hours in the middle of the night for months on end to keep him from hurting himself because something would upset him in the night. Puking for smells, people, textures he couldn't handle. Language regression. Across the board developmental delays. Epic screaming meltdowns in public or if he was startled by a loud sound.Honestly, I could write a book describing his struggles. But basically, we had a whole lot of things going pretty significantly wrong, and I felt like I had no choice but to land like a cat and hit the ground running, so I read up on as many things as I could so I could try and come up with some sort of way of supporting him to reach the highest level of functionality and happiness in his life. Because if there is one thing that was harder than anything else about all of this, it was knowing that as hard as things were for us, his world had to feel like one epic, nonstop nightmare and as a parent whose heart was breaking for her son, I wanted to do everything I could to help him get to a better place, so I was pretty much willing to try anything and everything that had any sort of clinical basis for effectiveness.Because there are so many factors at play for him, it is truly hard to say how much of each challenge is caused by what condition. What I can definitively say is that he's made amazing progress using these techniques that is really remarkable to me, having had a front row seat to the first 4 years of his life. It may not seem so compared to a "normal" functioning child, but compared to where he was, I think he's a miracle in so many ways. He fights hard, we fight hard with him, and it is an honor and a privilege to be his mom. Your challenges and your kiddo's challenges may be more, they may be less, the amount really doesn't matter, because life shouldn't be a contest about who's got it worse. Everything is relative. I simply give a brief overview of our son's circumstances to help illustrate the scope of problems this therapeutic approach can be beneficial in addressing. Best of luck to you, whatever you decide to use and do within your own family.

therapist use it the work that we do. Good addition to our resource library.

This feels like a great summarized handbook that you can refer to when you work. Short and concise, all the strategies described simply and examples are provided. Very helpful in my work with children.

I have many books on Floortime. This one is hands down the best. It's also the best reference to give parents to use - it's written in a practical, brief and to-the-point format, without a ton of text on the page to overwhelm the reader. You can pick it up, read a page or two on that stage or that aspect of intervention and put it down and off you go, ready to deal with what comes. It's large format makes it user friendly and inviting. The authors came up with adult things to focus on for each level, for example Level one (Regulation and Engagement) has the parallel task for the caregiver of "attunement' - this is enourmously helpful to the caregiver or therapist because the inevitable question is always "what do I do?" when faced with addressing the child's constrictions in each level. It uses fairly plain language and boils it down to a simple pragmatic approach. If you what to actually do Floortime, rather than study it intensively, this book is the first book you should buy. If you are doing Floortime this is the absolute best thing to hand to parents because it's user friendly, readable, not super expensive and beautifully done. Kudos to the authors, they filled a real need with this one.

I am a speech language pathologist who works primarily with students with ASD. This book has wonderful examples and really outlines the importance of building that relationship and also being aware of yourself. This program has helped so many of my students use more spontaneous language when paired with language stimulation techniques (Help Me Talk book also on Amazon), and even seek out social interactions. DIR is such a powerful program and seems like a major game changer.

I use Dr. Davis' book in the supervision group I lead for clinicians working on their MFT and Psychologist licenses. Each week we review a section and talk about examples we've seen during the previous week, and how we plan to use it with children and parents in the coming week. It has helped broaden our discussion and focus our interventions. Thank you for a highly readable and useful compendium of valuable techniques!

Great information

Good book

I love this book, it's filled a big gap. The ideas for floortime activities are clearly written. They have been thought out by someone with a lot of experience and knowledge. Ideas for using play and our children's natural interests to help them develop their skills are the main themes. There are bite-sized activities to help develop skills in all the main areas, including attention, self-awareness and empathy. Highly recommended.

A wonderful concise summary of DIR/Floortime Model. Great for setting up programming

I really like this book