Help With Autism

Child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan developed a treatment for autism known as Floortime. Both a method and a philosophy, Floortime gets its name because the parents get down on the floor with the child in order to encourage communication with him at his level. The Floortime method does not focus on speech, motor, or cognitive skills, but emphasizes emotional development because they are all interrelated.  Greenspan believes that an autistic child can build a larger circle of interaction accompanied by an adult who engages the child at his most current developmental level, participates in the child’s activities and following his lead, building on the individual strengths of the child.  Once Floortime becomes a mutally shared process between parent and child, the parent is instructed how to move the child toward the milestones, known as “opening and closing circles of communication”. 

The ultimate goal of Floortime is to help the child achieve the six basic milestones necessary to master emotional and intellectual maturity for her level.  Greenspan defines the six milestones as: self-regulation and interest in the world; intimacy and love for the world of human interpersonal relations; two-way communication; complex communication; emotional ideas; and emotional thinking.  The autistic child has a challenging time achieving these rites of developmental passage without treatment, due to difficulty processing and responding to sensory information, and sometimes poor physical control.
 

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