Developmental Capacities for Learning Blog
Everything you need to know to implement and practice DIR/Floortime on your own
To browse all posts by topic/podcasts, go to the Start Here link.
Guests: If you hold a DIR/Floortime certificate or are a caregiver using DIR/Floortime with your child(ren) and would like to be interviewed for a podcast or write a guest blog, please Contact Us.
The Realization Phase
Photo by AbsolutVision on UnsplashAdvanced DIR/Floortime practitioner Stephanie Peters joins us today to discuss the phase that those new to Floortime go through, especially when coming from other approaches to autism supports. Stephanie is an occupational therapist...
Meaning Making
Colette Ryan joins us this week to discuss meaning making. She is a Expert Training Leader in the Developmental, Individual-differences, Relationship-based (DIR) Model with the Interdisciplinary Council on Development and Learning (ICDL), the Parent Support Specialist...
Covid-19 DIR/Floortime Resources
Here are a number of helpful developmental approach resources I've found for families during our stay-at-home period, in addition to our Resources page: FREE Dr. Gil Tippy's For on the Floor short videos for those wanting to do Floortime at home Affect Autism online...
Affect Autism’s Daria Brown
DIR Expert Training Leader and mental health professional, Gene Christian returns to interview Daria Brown, the person behind Affect Autism. She has a Masters degree in Personality Psychology, holds an advanced provider certificate in DIR/Floortime from the...
Floortime and the Coronavirus
While everyone is hunkering down and practicing social distancing, let's focus on what we know about Floortime: Floortime is about shared joy Floortime is about staying in the moment Floortime is about connection Floortime respects all emotional expression Floortime...
Anti-Bullying Day
unsplash-logoPhoto: Riccardo MionToday children are wearing pink at school to denote Anti-Bullying day. I posted a couple of videos with some extra thoughts about what to focus on today, and how the DIR Model can guide how we approach this complicated topic.
Promoting Parent Choice
This week developmentally-based Speech and Language Pathologist (SLP), and DIR Expert Training Leader, Melanie Feller returns to discuss the importance of parent choice in therapeutic approaches for children with developmental differences. She is the founder of...
A Closer Look at Impulsivity
Photo: Istiaque EmonMaude Le Roux returns this week to discuss Impulsivity and all of the factors to consider when addressing impulsive behaviour. Maude is an occupational therapist who runs A Total Approach in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. She is also a DIR Expert...
Pre-Linguistics are Pre-Social Abilities
Photo: Jason LeungMary Beth Stark joins us this week from Atlanta where she has been a speech and language pathologist for over 40 years at Floortime Atlanta and is a DIR/Floortime Expert Training Leader. She recently wrote a piece in the newsletter for the...
Strategies Don’t Support Growth
Photo: Hans-Peter GausterDIR Expert Training Leader, Clinical Psychologist, founder of the developmental transition service called Dirty Hands Developmental Alliance, and co-author of Respecting Autism, Dr. Gil Tippy, returns this week. This podcast we are discussing...
Promoting Symbolic Thinking in Small Group Settings
Photo credit: Park TroopersThis week we have a follow-up with Kristy Gose from our last podcast with her, Floortime with Family and Small Groups. Kristy is an Infant Family Mental Health Specialist, a Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR)...
From Ambiguous Loss to Acceptance
Photo Credit: ShutterstockClinical psychologist, author, and parent, Dr. Robert Naseef joins us from Philadelphia. He has run countless workshops with fellow fathers, has worked in the Middle East and Southeast Asia with families with children and adults with autism...
Incorporating DIR Goals into the Individual Education Plan (IEP)
Jackie Bartell returns this week to discuss how to incorporate Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) Model goals into your child's Individualized Education Plan (IEP) at school. Jackie is a retired Special Educator in Rochester, NY and a...
Regulation Challenges through the Developmental Capacities
Photo: Michal Parzuchowski Occupational therapist Maude Le Roux returns this week to discuss how regulation changes across the functional emotional developmental capacities in the Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) Model. Maude runs A...
The Importance of Preverbal Affective Signalling
Photo: MI PHAM This week, mental health counsellor and DIR Expert Training Leader, Gene Christian in Spokane, Washington is back with us to reiterate the importance of the preverbal affective gestural system to development. Gene says that this preverbal affective...
Uniquely Human
Photo Copyright Providence Journal Speech and language pathologist, Brown University faculty member, and Director of Childhood Communication Services (CCS), Dr. Barry Prizant joins us this week to discuss the Social Communication Emotional Regulation Transactional...
Floortime with Family and Small Groups
Photo: Daniel CheungThis week we have a new guest from Fresno, California. Kristy Gose is an Infant Family Mental Health Specialist, a Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) Expert Facilitator and trainer, and a professor at Fresno City...
Fostering independence
DIR Expert Jackie Bartell returns this week to discuss how to provide expectations for children with developmental differences in order to foster independence and developmental progress in the Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) model. I...
The Move Towards Developmental Approaches
Photo: Timothy Eberly Returning this week as our guest is Dr. Joshua Feder, a child and family psychiatrist in Solana Beach, California using the Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) model, an Expert DIR Training Leader, and an advocate with...
Floortime Review
Clinical psychologist, Andrea Davis, returns this week to review a Floortime session of me playing bowling with my son. Dr. Davis is the founder and director of the Greenhouse Therapy Center in Pasadena, California (not "Greenwood" as I accidentally said in the...
FOODTIME: A developmental approach to picky and rigid eating
This week, Jake Greenspan returns to discuss the new FOODTIME program. Jake is the co-founder and co-director of The Floortime Center in Bethesda, MD, the son of late, great Dr. Stanley Greenspan who created the Developmental, Individual differences,...
The P.L.A.Y. Project
Joining us this week is developmental, behavioural pediatrician Dr. Rick Solomon who is the medical director and founder of the PLAY Project, which is derived from the Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) model. He discusses what the PLAY...
Sensory and Developmental Poetry Workshops
Donnie Welch of Donnie Welch Poetry joins us today. He is a Poet and Educator who runs poetry workshops around New York City for students with developmental disabilities. He is the Creative Writing Teacher at the Rebecca School in Manhattan. The poetry workshops that...
What is scripting all about?
Photo: Annie Spratt Joining us this week is Jehan Shehata-Aboubakr, a speech and language pathologist at Clinical Communication Consultants in Thornhill, Ontario (just north of Toronto) where she practices with a functional pragmatic and DIR/Floortime approach. She is...
Taking the Outcome Out of Play
Photo: Aaron Mello Play has been the new buzzword making a comeback in early child development (go figure), but there are many misconceptions about what play actually is. A new series of courses from the Neufeld Institute that I have been taking shed light on...
A review of Developmental Social Pragmatic interventions
Speech and language pathologist Amanda Binns returns this week to discuss her new publication entitled, "Developmental social pragmatic interventions for preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review" co-authored with Janis Oram Cardy. It is an open...
Focusing on Regulation
Photo: Annie Spratt Clinical psychologist and DIR Expert Training Leader, Ira Glovinsky returns this week to discuss factors affecting self-regulation, the development of it, and a number of things we can do about it. This follows our discussion from last time on The...
Remediation versus Accommodation
Occupational therapist, DIR Expert Training Leader, owner of A Total Approach in Glen Mills, PA and the new Maude Le Roux Academy, Maude returns this week to discuss a topic that is important to consider when planning an approach to support the person you care about:...
Dirty Hands Developmental Alliance
DIR Expert Training Leader, Clinical Psychologist, and co-author of Respecting Autism, Dr. Gil Tippy, returns this week to introduce his latest project, a developmental transition service called Dirty Hands Developmental Alliance in Sonoma County, California which is...
From Dysregulation to Intent
Photo: Nathan Anderson Mental health counsellor and DIR Expert Training Leader, Gene Christian joins us from Spokane, Washington this week to share how adults with extreme developmental differences can benefit from DIR/Floortime. I was introduced to Gene in ICDL's...
And then comes puberty…
Photo: Allen Taylor Following up from last week's podcast about supporting the development of self-regulation, this week's podcast takes it a few steps further into adolescence where we have a slew of new developmental processes to support, especially when our...
Supporting the Development of Self-Regulation
Photo: Xavier Mouton Photographie This week, continuing and building on the last podcast on The Foundation for Regulation, speech and language pathologist Amanda Binns joins us to discuss her new publication from the Journal of Communication Disorders, "The...
Floortime is about Connection and Shared Joy: Part 3
Happy New Year! What better way to start the new year but with another Floortime video? This is part 3 of a series we featured here and here of a young adult and his father. This video example followed the previous two, after Dad received parent coaching in...
The Foundation for Regulation
DIR Expert Training Leader, psychologist Ira Glovinsky joins us again this week to discuss his new Early Child Development video series. He has a background in psychology and special education and runs The Glovinsky Center for the Child and Family in West Bloomfield,...
The new Connection Coder app
Photo credit: Symplay Dr. Josh Feder from sunny Solana Beach, California, where he is a father of a grown autistic son, a compassionate child and family psychiatrist using the Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) model and an Expert DIR...
Early Literacy the Developmental Way: Part 4
It’s been awhile since our last early literacy update! In January you read about how we’ve started working on literacy with our son followed by updates in March and again in May. We are using Reading Recovery as our model. It's a developmental approach that focuses on...
Floortime Tips for Behavioural Challenges at Home
Photo: Sydney Rae Behavioural challenges can pop up from time to time in our children and this is to be expected. But sometimes, even when we read behaviour as communication, are aware of...
Floortime Tips for Behavioural Challenges at School
Photo: Austin Pacheco Behavioural challenges can pop up from time to time in our children and this is to be expected. But sometimes, even when we read behaviour as communication, are aware of our child's unique sensory processing profile, are attuned to our child,...
Floortime is about Connection and Shared Joy: Part 2
This week we have another great Floortime example with the young adult and his father whom we featured a few months ago. If you recall, Dad has been receiving parent coaching in the Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) model. He continues...
Theory of Mind
Photo: Jonathan Daniels Maude Le Roux returns this week to discuss Theory of Mind: what it is, why it's important, and how to foster its development in our children with developmental...
Self-Regulation Starts With Us
Photo: Tim Goedhart Last time, Dr. Stuart Shanker shared that the missing piece in the DIR/Floortime randomized controlled trial study at York University was the mental health...
Self-Reg and DIR/Floortime
Today Dr. Stuart Shanker speaks with us about how Self-Reg came about. Self-regulation is the first functional emotional developmental capacity in DIR/Floortime, and Dr. Shanker was the...
Dhamma and D.I.R.
This week, child and family psychiatrist, Dr. Joshua Feder, who is also an Expert DIR Training Leader, returns to share some insights about how Floortime fits in with Buddhist philosophy. This is material that was presented at the Interdisciplinary Council on...
Growth and Gaming
I am delighted this week to share with you a wonderful interview with Atlanta Licensed Professional Counsellor and DIR Expert Training Leader, L. Mike Fields about Gaming and Floortime! I heard...
Affect is your #1 resource to connect with your child
Do you find it hard to keep your child engaged with you? Is it hard to have an ongoing back-and-forth interaction without them losing interest or moving away? It could be that you...
Circles of communication in Floortime
Photo: Nathan Anderson More and more research is demonstrating what Dr. Stanley Greenspan and Dr. Stuart Shanker told us in The First Idea years ago: that we develop within emotional...
Can you ‘teach’ emotions?
In Floortime, we talk a lot about emotions: emotional awareness, early social-emotional capacities, using emotional expressions, accepting all emotional expressions in our children, etc. We...
Why ‘challenging’ and ‘expanding’ are essential for human growth
Photo: Thiago Cerqueira In Floortime we talk about meeting the child where they are Developmentally ('D') and taking into account their unique sensory profile and Individual differences...
Early Literacy the Developmental Way: Part 3
It's time for our third early literacy update! In January you read about how we've started working on literacy with our son, then we had an update in March. This 'report' is about the progress since then, using Reading Recovery as our model, a developmental approach...
Being versus Doing
Photo: Bruno Nascimento Jackie Bartell is back with us this week for a fantastic discussion about a concept so essential to the Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based...
Floortime is about Connection and Shared Joy: Part 1
I often hear parents say that they have a hard time finding examples of how to do Floortime with an adolescent or young adult. We've provided a few references to Floortime with adolescents including the introduction of the Threshold Community Program, here with Dr....
Floortime Feedback
A few months ago we reviewed a Floortime video with psychologist Dr. Andrea Davis of the Greenhouse Therapy Center in Pasadena, California, and co-author of her User’s Guide to the DIR Model. She gave me some suggestions to try going forward. Today we will review my...
Early Social-Emotional Capacities
Photo: Justin Peterson Today we are discussing one of the biggest challenges for many caregivers who choose DIR/Floortime for their children with developmental differences. Returning...
Autism and Medication
Last December, we spoke with Dr. Joshua Feder about repetition in autism therapy. He returns today to speak with us from his practice in Solana Beach, California about autism and medication. Is...