The Greenspan Floortime Approach®, Dr. Greenspan’s version of floortime, is considered the original developmental intervention. Created in the 1980s, one of his first books, “The Essential Partnership”, co-authored with his wife, Nancy Greenspan, he popularized the term floortime as a way of getting on the floor and connecting with your child at their level to deepen the relationship and facilitate social-emotional growth. This book was written for all parents, because child and caregiver interactions, especially in the first three years of life are crucial, if not the most important aspect of achieving social and emotional health for a child.
While these types of experiences and interactions between child and caregiver early in life are necessary for healthy growth, when children have developmental challenges and special needs, it is NOT usually because these interactions are missing. It’s because the child is often unable to learn from the experiences that they are being provided. Their caregivers may be joining them on the floor, but the child is not able to connect with them. They are too distracted or overwhelmed by the environment or possibly under-stimulated in a more passive, withdrawn state, and sometimes a combination of the two. These differences in the way children perceive the world around them, both physically and emotionally, make them less able to learn from their environment.
Developmental interventions are becoming an increasingly popular label for programs used in the therapy world for children with special needs. While developmental interventions are better than behavioral interventions, it’s important to understand that not all developmental interventions are created the same. Their differences can affect the potential of a child. Each developmental intervention uses different teaching/learning techniques that will affect the child’s growth.
Developmental interventions are supposed to meet the child where they are ‘developmentally’. This is different from behavioral interventions, which try to say a four-year-old needs to be doing four-year-old things. If we have a four-year-old who’s not talking and is communicating at the age of a 12-month-old, a developmental intervention would say, “Let’s start working on the communication skills of a 12-month-old and build up from there.” We must build from the ground up. That is one of the most important core tenants of developmental intervention. You’re working from the ground up and not working on age-expected chronological goals. After all, can you run before you learn to walk, or can you do algebra before you learn to add and subtract?
In order to help children achieve success, we must figure out where a child is developmentally and not push them too far or too fast. If a child is pushed outside their ‘comfort zone’ then the child’s ability to learn can shut down. To find a child’s ‘comfort zone’ most developmental interventions use a technique called following the lead. This was a term popularized by Dr. Greenspan when he first started writing about Floortime, but currently, many groups are defining this technique differently.
In the Floortime community, some groups define following a child’s lead as simply pointing at and commenting on what the child is doing. If the child is playing with the ball, they say, “Ooh, look at the ball you got.” For a child who’s aware of their social environment, that’s great. They look at you and they show you the ball. For a child who’s playing with the ball and is in their own world, they’re going to ignore you, just like they’ve been doing prior to that. Sometimes with heightened affect and enthusiasm, you can capture their interest, but most of the time following a child’s lead needs to be more than just a comment about and pointing at what they’re doing. Instead, following a child’s lead truly means joining the child as well as following them, not simply following them around the room. Identifying and understanding their interests, what they need, and then physically/verbally joining them within those needs are all necessary pieces to successfully follow a child’s lead. If they’re playing with a ball, then we play with the same ball or we pick up our own ball and now we’re each rolling a ball. Being on the sidelines commenting on a child rolling a ball isn’t enough to create a real connection.
We also need to make sure we are joining at their developmental level. Are they using the toy like a 4-year-old, or are they using the toy like a 1-year-old? If they’re using the toy, like a 1-year-old, we shouldn’t be teaching them what a four-year-old would do with a toy. Instead, we need to be expanding what a 1-year-old would be doing with the toy. This means that if they’re rolling the car back and forth in a repetitive way, maybe we roll it further, down a slide, or roll it under something. Now we’re gently expanding the use of the car or ball, but we’re not forcing the child to use the car as some sort of vehicle that needs gas and drives to the store.
What people don’t realize is that when an adult jumps in and starts teaching a child what is chronologically correct for them to be doing therapeutically or socially, it is no longer a developmental intervention. It is now a behavioral intervention because we are teaching them a specific adult-led outcome based on their chronological age, not their developmental age. This difference is one of the most fundamental issues in achieving optimum growth for many children. If we try to teach a child the answer, we are doing the thinking for them. However, if we nurture a child’s ability to think, problem-solve, and create, then they develop the processes necessary to be successful throughout life. It is the process of thinking and adapting that allows us to be successful, not simply someone telling us the answer and us repeating it or following the instructions. In that scenario, the adult is doing the thinking.
While developmental interventions that follow a child’s lead are better than behavioral interventions that force children to sit down and perform a specific task, the second step of challenging and expanding the child is essential to make sure the child is doing the thinking, being creative, problem-solving, and learning to adapt. If we can achieve that, just as The Greenspan Floortime Approach® does, then we can achieve the amazing results that Dr. Greenspan achieved with so many children. However, if all we do is take the popular techniques that people identify with around Dr. Greenspan’s work and generalize them to other approaches that just lead to more adult-led teaching, we may achieve slightly better gains than behavioral interventions, but we will not achieve the optimal gains that most children are truly capable of.