The Dirfloortime: Fill & Download for Free

If you choose to see life as an adventure rather than as a tournament that you are either going to win or lose, you might be able to relieve yourself of the grief that I experienced in the early months. I didn’t understand that my life was going to be more interesting than I ever could have imagined. I met amazing people and it was truly a journey that taught me about myself, the brain, human nature, and I learned about great parenting and how it works, lessons that have lasted two decades and I am very close to my children. My son is now an amazing young man—interactive, independent, an educator in his own right, and a writer. We were lucky. We didn’t just work with people who wanted to train autism out of our him. We began working with Dr. Stanley Greenspan, one of the world’s leading experts on autism and child development. His approach was to keep the child interacting and he showed us how we could slow down or speed up our methods in order to reach our son where he was at. He taught us to put our shared experiences and time together as the most important moments of the day. Those early months and years of discovering were vital and exciting and life changing for all of us. I recommend looking for therapies (like the one we used — (see DIRFloortime) that reinforce the psychological and developmental health of the child and family system — to see that once you start interacting, a lot is possible. Consider also looking into diet and other ways to improve immune function, which will help calm brain functions that support interactive moments. Yes, it’s a lot of work and not always fun. But, go for the baby steps and you’ll see that life can be as sweet as it ever was—even more so because now you have meaning and a purpose and you can let everything that is false fall away. Experts on happiness are now seeing that the problem with happiness is that it is not what humans were made for; we were made for meaning. A brain that needs help, a heart that needs reaching, represent the highest calling. I feel fulfilled and so do so many of my friends with special needs kids no matter where they are. I know one family whose Downs Syndrome child was vice president of the school, the happiest kid you’ll ever meet. I know a family with a son with severe autism who take him to concerts and they all rock out together. Meanwhile, some very typical kids are depressed, drug addicted, and lonely as can be. The head of the football team kills himself. There are not guarantees in parenting and there is no perfection. The only thing we can do is offer closeness and interaction, which is what Greenspan taught us—not how to be a perfect family but how to be a close to our kids.