You Already Know Your Child.

DIR/Floortime is a developmental, relationship-based approach that considers three important parts of your child's development:

D — Development

Where is your child developmentally, and what capacities are beginning to emerge?

I — Individual Differences

How does your child uniquely experience and respond to the world through their sensory, motor, communication, emotional, and processing differences?

R — Relationships

How can relationships and meaningful interactions help support development?

Floortime puts these ideas into practice through playful, responsive interactions built around your child's interests and developmental needs.

If your family has participated in more traditional therapies, Floortime can sometimes be confusing at first.

You may be accustomed to seeing a therapist begin with a predetermined activity or skill:

"We're going to complete this puzzle."

"We're practicing this word."

"We're working on following this direction."

A Floortime therapist may instead notice that your child walks into the room and becomes fascinated by a cardboard box.

And suddenly...

They're playing with the box.

As a parent, you may understandably wonder:

"What are they actually working on?"

The answer could be quite a lot.

That cardboard box might become an opportunity for:

Connection → Communication → Motor Planning → Problem Solving → Flexibility → Emotional Regulation → Imagination

The therapist still has therapeutic intentions. What changes is how they get there.

Instead of requiring the child to engage with a predetermined activity, the therapist may use something that is already meaningful to the child as the starting point for interaction and development.

The box isn't the therapy.

The interaction and developmental capacities being supported within the experience are.

This series is designed to help you understand everything behind a DIR/Floortime session and help you integrate Floortime techniques into your everyday routine!

Over 12 parent-friendly lessons, we'll move through development step by step.

Part 1 — Seeing Your Child Through a Developmental Lens

Understand the foundations of DIR/Floortime and begin shifting from "How do I change this?" toward "What might my child be communicating?"

Part 2 — Regulation Comes First

Understand your child's nervous system, co-regulation, and why regulation creates the foundation for engagement and learning.

Part 3 — Becoming a Regulation Detective

Explore your child's sensory world and learn how sensory processing can influence emotions, attention, play, eating, movement, and participation.

Part 4 — Connection Before Correction

Discover why shared enjoyment, attunement, and relationships are such powerful foundations for development.

Part 5 — Follow Their Lead

Learn how to enter your child's world, use their natural interests, and know when to follow versus gently expand an interaction.

Part 6 — The Communication Dance

Learn to recognize communication beyond words and build longer, richer back-and-forth interactions.

Part 7 — Don't Solve It Too Quickly

Discover how everyday challenges can become opportunities for communication, agency, persistence, and shared problem solving.

Part 8 — Building Flexible Thinkers

Understand flexibility, transitions, frustration, negotiation, and how to introduce change without making compliance the goal.

Part 9 — From Meltdowns to Regulation 

Learn to recognize signs of overwhelm, support your child through big emotions, and reconnect after difficult moments.

Part 10 — The Power of Pretend

Explore how imagination and pretend play support communication, emotional development, flexibility, and thinking.

Part 11 — Helping Ideas Grow

Learn how play develops into storytelling, cause-and-effect thinking, perspective taking, planning, and logical reasoning.

Part 12 — Bringing Floortime Into Everyday Life

Bring everything together and learn how to naturally support development within family routines, relationships, play, and community experiences.

You want to better understand why your child responds the way they do.

Your child is receiving DIR/Floortime therapy and you'd like to better understand what you're seeing in sessions.

You want to support development at home without feeling like you have to become a therapist.

You want to better understand regulation, sensory processing, communication, flexibility, play, and emotions.

You want practical ways to support development within everyday family life.

Or perhaps you've simply thought:

"I know my child. I just want to understand how to support them even better."

That's exactly where we'll begin.