Dir Floortime Therapy with an Ergotherapy Perspective

What is DIR Floortime Therapy?

The DIR model is a relationship-based model that considers developmental and individual differences and is called 'therapy with play' and 'play on the ground' approach.

The goal of the floor play model is not just to deal with the child's surface behavior and symptoms, but to build the foundations for healthy development.

With this approach, parents learn to develop important critical skills that are derailed or missed during their child's development. These are many sensory, emotional, cognitive, social, motor, language and social skills, such as establishing a warm and happy relationship with other people, communicating meaningfully and purposefully (with gestures, then words), and thinking logically and creatively in a variety of ways.

As occupational therapists working in the pediatric field, we aim at maximum efficiency for the child and family by combining sensory integration therapy with floortime.

Group Therapy in Pediatric Rehabilitation

Pediatric occupational therapists aim to increase children's independence and participation in daily living activities by addressing sensory, emotional, social, behavioral, perceptual, motor, cognitive and environmental problems.

Pediatric occupational therapists examine the root cause of problematic behaviors observed in children with a holistic perspective, accepting that every child is different from each other and create a client-centered intervention plan. It uses sensory integration information during treatment to address the sensory and motor base, which helps the child learn new skills more easily. It determines the strong and weak points of the child and creates a therapy program together with the parents.

Pediatric occupational therapists work with areas such as autism spectrum disorder, specific learning disability, frostbite syndrome, nutritional disorder, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, motor coordination disorder, sensory processing disorder.

As two pediatric occupational therapists, we evaluate our clients' individual differences and developmental capacities in detail and decide on the most appropriate pairings and create group therapies for 2, 3, 4 people. We support the sensory processing, self-regulation, body awareness, motor planning, development of gross and fine motor skills, which we apply according to the individual needs of each child, with sensory integration therapy.