Stanley I. Greenspan, Developer of ‘Floor Time’ Teaching, Dies at 68
By DAVID CORCORAN
Published: May 4, 2010
Dr. Stanley I. Greenspan, a psychiatrist who invented an influential approach to teaching children with autism and other developmental problems by folding his lanky six-foot frame onto the floor and following their lead in vigorous play, died April 27 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 68 and lived in Bethesda.
Marty Katz/washingtonphotographer.com
Dr. Stanley I. Greenspan in 1989 demonstrated his teaching methods with a mother and her son.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said his wife, Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, who was co-author of several of his more than 30 books.
“Floor time,” as Dr. Greenspan called his approach, is used in special-education classrooms and clinics around the world, though it remains controversial — as do all early-intervention treatments for autism. An opposing approach that relies on strict behavioral goals and checklists has been more intensively studied and is more widely used in the United States.
Dr. Greenspan encouraged parents, teachers and therapists to get down on the floor with children, even very young ones, and engage them with gestures and words to build warm relationships and expand their world of ideas — many times a day, if necessary.
In a 2002 therapy-session video that can be seen on his Web site, he joins a mother and her distracted, barely verbal 22-month-old son on a rug strewn with toys, including a cardboard crown. After half a minute of unfocused play, Dr. Greenspan urges the mother: “Try to enter into his world a little bit more. So if he’s got the crown and he doesn’t want to put it on, you put it on. Say, ‘I’ll be the queen.’ ”
In a few moments the boy is putting the crown on his own head, his mother’s head and Dr. Greenspan’s head, and — to his mother’s surprise — using words and giggles to say what he wants.
The Harvard pediatrician and behavioral expert Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a longtime colleague and co-author with Dr. Greenspan of “The Irreducible Needs of Children”