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To play with children, enjoying it and meeting the interests and needs of the child? Communicate in such a way that later it would be easier for him to communicate with others? This is the dream of many parents. But what about psychotherapy?
When a child does not know how to play with other children, is constantly naughty, does everything out of place, when he has difficulties with coordination of movements, parents act differently: they scold the child, take him to the doctor, or simply leave everything as it is in the hope that someday his behavior will change.
If adults talk little to the baby, do not support his attempts to play, the child has difficulties. Gradually, he stops responding to words and actions addressed to him, closes. “I call him, but he does not come. I scream, but he just doesn’t notice me, ”the tired mother says bitterly.
Why is her little son behaving this way?
Perhaps the boy simply does not hear his mother’s words due to hearing problems. Or hears, but does not understand speech well. Or he wants to approach, but he cannot mentally build a trajectory of movement and therefore does not dare to overcome the space that separates him from his mother.
Behavior that adults do not like often serves as a signal that something is going wrong in a child’s life. Children suffer when parents expect from them what they, due to their individual characteristics, simply cannot do. The Flortime method is aimed at just this: to find the causes of difficulties, to find out what kind of failure occurred in development.
What are the children missing?
Many children today are not as curious as their parents at their age, they begin to sit and walk later, it is more difficult for them to communicate. The reason is that today’s children spend a lot of time in “packaging” – carriers, playpens, high chairs, car child seats.
Such devices make the life of parents more convenient and protect the child from dangers. But at the same time, they narrow down his ability to explore the world and himself. The child is fastened, and his movements are limited, he can no longer turn around, let alone roll over.
The bad thing is that the vestibular apparatus, the part of the brain with which we determine our position in space, does not develop.
Children “in the package” stay in one position for a long time
As a result, they do not know how to change their posture, they feel insecure in open space, it is difficult for them to distinguish between right and left. “Packaging” limits the child’s field of vision, so many children find it difficult to correlate the visual perception of the shape, color, volume of an object with tactile sensations.
And the simplest actions – to take a cup, toss and catch a ball – cause difficulty. And the number of such difficulties is increasing, as the life of parents becomes more and more stressful and they are more willing to use different devices.
Child psychoanalyst Stanley Greenspan noted that when adults do not force a child to do what they themselves consider necessary, but try to understand what fascinates him and join his activities, then the child is involved in interaction with them. There is an opportunity step by step to develop his emotions, intellect, motor skills of the body.
The task of an adult is to establish a trusting relationship with the child and be attentive to his personality: what he likes, what he can already do, and what is not yet. Not just to train individual skills, but to make the child want to communicate, to be interested and this interest would encourage him to social, emotional and intellectual development.
Stanley Greenspan called his approach DIR (Developmental Individual-difference Relationship-based model, that is, a developmental model based on relationships, taking into account individual differences), and floortime (Floortime, literally – “time on the floor”) became a practical part of this approach.
In the 1980s, Stanley Greenspan tried floortime with children with autism who find it difficult or impossible to communicate with other people. And I saw that the method contributes to the development of any child, if the parents continue the work begun by the psychologist and help their son or daughter develop curiosity1.
Who is it suitable for?
Floortime – method of family psychotherapy. But the presence of all family members at each session is not necessary. The one who spends more time with the child comes to the meeting with the psychologist. It is advisable to invite brothers (sisters) to the session if the child has difficulties in communicating with them.
Therapy can be started with the smallest children (up to a year old), carried out with adolescents and adults (in this case, a specially constructed conversation takes the place of the game). Meetings take place 1-3 times a week for 50 minutes.
Therapy lasts from several months to several years. The duration depends on how quickly parents acquire the skills to effectively communicate with children.
How does this happen?
Flortime requires a calm environment. Toys are scattered on the floor. The child is given the opportunity to choose one of them and start playing, and the psychologist watches him. Then he joins the game and again looks at the reactions of the child.
For example, if you cover a toy with your hand, the child tries to remove the adult’s hand in order to see the toy again. By 8 months, children already know that, even if they disappear from visibility, objects do not disappear forever.
Therefore, if an older child turns away or cries when they lose sight of a toy, it is possible that there has been a developmental failure due to which the child has not developed an idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbthe constancy of reality.
Then the psychologist comes up with games that will help the child make sure that the toys do not disappear.
Stanley Greenspan and his staff have created detailed charts for each stage of a child’s development, listing the corresponding skills. If the child lacks some skills, the psychologist determines what stage of development they correspond to, and in the game, as it were, returns with the child to this stage and helps him go through it again, filling in the existing gaps.
In other sessions, the psychologist can complicate the game plots by adding new situations, descriptions, tasks, encouraging the child to solve them, to show resourcefulness. He invites parents to come down to the level of their children—literally, to get down on the floor to play.
The pleasure that the child will receive from the game and his new skills will become an incentive for his development.
Goals of therapy
Parents sometimes honestly admit: “I can’t play. It’s boring!” For some, children’s games seem like a meaningless activity, and someone is afraid, for example, that the child will suddenly burst into tears or get angry. This prevents them from playing freely with the child, and he, in turn, becomes shy and closes. Communication fails, and both get upset.
The psychologist in this case can become an intermediary between parents and children. Sometimes, to help the child, the psychologist works in collaboration with a neurologist, speech therapist and massage therapist.
The central part of the method is the process of increasing “communication cycles”. They are also called communication cycles or communication circles. Any dialogue is like ping-pong: as if we take turns hitting the ball, trying not to let it fall: I say something, you answer, I answer your answer. Usually we communicate like this without noticing how we do it.
And yet it is a skill we are born with.
The mother smiles at the baby, he smiles back, seeing this, she laughs with joy, and he, hearing her laughter, perks up, waving his arms. This is the cycle of communication. Or a one-year-old child throws a toy, the mother picks it up and gives it to him, and he throws it again. The child is interested: how the toy falls, what sound comes from, he learns the world and at the same time communicates with his mother, who supports the game, giving him pleasure.
Some children, like one-year-old Vasya, cannot look in the face, they look away, and this can become an obstacle to recognizing facial expressions and understanding the feelings of other people. How to make Vasya start looking in the face?
The psychologist may make a face or make an unexpected sound to get his attention. Or he will take his favorite toy in his teeth – an adult aunt holds a bunny in her teeth, how strange! Maybe Vasya wants to take the bunny away, and interaction will arise. Next time, he will look the psychologist in the face to see if he has anything strange in his teeth … And gradually learn to maintain eye contact.
Five-year-old Lena pushes other children. The psychologist finds out that it is difficult for her to recognize speech by ear, it is not clear what the children are saying, and she is angry with them for this. But she also understands adults better when they speak slowly and separately. And the psychologist teaches parents to give her short and clear instructions.
Flortime opens up the opportunity to understand what the child’s difficulties are and eliminate them, so that it becomes easier for him to communicate and more interesting to live.
1 S. Greenspan “The tyrant child. How to find an approach to five “difficult” types of children” (Lomonosov, 2010); S. Greenspan, S. Wieder “On “you” with autism. Using the Floortime method to develop relationships, communication and thinking” (Terevinf, 2013).