Home Programs

Home Programs and Floor Time

When parents work at home with their child with appropriate guidance, they can make the child's everyday environment work for change. The parent-child relationship, and the everyday environment can provide a powerful partnership with developmental therapy or play therapy. It can greatly increase the quantity of work the child receives. Moreover, when parents and therapist(s) are working together, the quality of the work is enhanced.

Home programs can emphasize behavior management, especially when parents are having difficulty exercising appropriate authority over their child's behavior. Parents must be in charge if children are to grow and develop to their potential. Parents must avoid the extremes of helplessness on the one hand and aggression or punitive authoritarian behavior on the other hand. It is important that behavior management programs graduate to facilitating the child's emotional development. Important goals here are the ability to manage his or her own behavior through reflection and processing the behavior; taking responsibility for behavior; and making age-appropriate decisions about behavioral alternatives. Behavior charting can be an important part of behavior management.

Stanley Greenspan has developed techniques for parents which he calls "Floor Time." The emphasis of floor time is on parents' interactions with children at their level. Greenspan recommends two types of floor time: child-centered play and problem-solving. During child-centered play, the parent follows the child's lead, so as to maintain motivation and interest, helping to increase or expand the child's abilities. Greenspan emphasizes the importance of the emotional, or affective, aspect of development. He stresses that the child's interest and joy in learning and growth guides the developmental work and makes it most effective. Problem-solving floor time involves discussion of behavior, problems, and decisions that the child has experienced in daily life. This must also have a playful quality, but focuses on verbal description, expression, and problem-solving. It tends to focus more on events in the child's daily life.

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