Expanding the impact of DIR/Floortime worldwide

By Stuart Shanker, D.Phil, ICDL Vice President

From the very beginning that we started working together, Stanley Greenspan and I began to dream about a Building Healthy Minds project that would be a scaled-up version of DIR/Floortime, something that would benefit all children everywhere. Our idea was that we would work with parents, teachers, physicians, clinicians of different disciplines, community leaders, and policy-makers on developing their understanding of the core capacities that promote a child’s wellbeing and practices that enhance these capacities.

We outlined these ideas in the last chapter of The First Idea and our short monograph on Toward a Psychology of Global Interdependence: A Framework for International Collaboration. These books attracted a fair bit of attention in the province of Ontario. Last year the province introduced it’s Early Learning Program, a universal kindergarten initiative for all 4 and 5-year olds; but rather than trying to ‘schoolify’ young children – i.e., expose them to the rigors of formal education at younger and younger ages – the program is designed to enhance children’s core capacities, based very much on the DIR/Floortime model. (See key publications that formed the backdrop for the Early Learning program,:the Early Years Study 2 - Putting Science into Action and Every Child Every Opportunity ) Similar efforts are now well advanced in British Columbia and underway in several other provinces in Canada. For example, there is a great interest in better understanding the important role of self-regulation in education. 

At a time when interest in early child development was escalating rapidly, I soon began receiving invitations from around the world to come lecture and advise government agencies on these ideas. Just this year alone I have conducted lecture tours/workshops in Latin America (Colombia, Peru and Mexico); Eastern Europe (Hungary, Romania and Serbia); Africa (Madagascar); and I am currently on a two-week tour of Australia, where I visited DIR Faculty member, Kathy Walmsley, OTR. In the fall I will be returning to Madagascar and then going to New Zealand. These are great opportunities to create local connections between the growing number of international DIR/Floortime professionals and policy makers. As you can see, DIR is beginning to have a world impact. We are truly beginning to have a global impact.