Floortime Supports Parental Self-Efficacy

Photo credit: Affect Autism

What is DIR? What is Floortime? DIR Glossary

Floortime Supports Parent Self-Efficacy

by Affect Autism

This Week’s Episode

My returning guest is Dr. Colette Ryan, an Infant Mental Health Specialist who is an Expert Developmental, Individual differences, Relationship-based (DIR) Training Leader and who is part of a group starting up a new Floortime school in Toyko Japan as the Floortime Supervisor. Today we are covering a topic near and dear to Colette’s heart, parent self-efficacy, the topic of her recent PhD dissertation. She recently presented on this topic at the 2024 ICDL DIRFloortime conference. 

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Working with Parents

Colette is putting her Floortime into practice by interacting with parents daily as parents drop and pick up their children from the new school, but she also does 1:1 sessions with families on the weekends and an online class for parents every two weeks about DIR topics, supporting parents in learning the DIR model and supporting their ability to feel successful with their own child. 

DIR is new to most of the families, but Colette has been on this journey in Toyko for 2.5 years now, so has met and worked with many of the families. The school has now been opened for over 7 weeks and parents are already reporting positive experiences whereas they did not have success with school in the past.

Parent Self-Efficacy

Colette’s dissertation from Fielding Graduate University title is “The Use of DIRFloortime to Support Parental Self-Efficacy in Japanese Mothers“. She chose this topic because she loves working with parents. When ICDL started the DIR Home Program during Covid and developed modules for learning for caregivers, Colette took parent’s ideas about what they needed to learn about their own child. Part of the success of the home program was that Colette and the other coaches were providing knowledge that the parents needed to be successful with their own child.

Parent self-efficacy is the ability for a caregiver to feel they are successful and capable in supporting their child to grow and develop. With predictably developing individuals, Colette says, most parents feel pretty successful. They understand their child’s cries and cues. With a neurodivergent child, that might be a little bit harder, she explains. When caregivers are not successful with their child, it’s hard to want to play that game again if it hasn’t worked. 

If your child can’t play peek-a-boo, you’re going to stop playing peek-a-boo, Colette says. What we get to do as Floortimers to support caregivers is to help them see that maybe the child can’t reach their arms up to get picked up because motor planning is a challenge for them. Maybe peek-a-boo is hard because they’re uncertain as to where you go when you’re behind that blanket, so maybe we just hide behind our fingers instead. Maybe if they want to be picked up but can’t lift their arms up without falling over, you can get down on their level and maybe they can reach their arms straight out instead.

When a parent is successful, Colette stresses, they want to do it again and again. I shared that Brooke Barracks talked about this a few podcasts ago where her son was unable to lift his arms up to get picked up. She was able to pick up on her son’s cues to see that he wanted to be picked up, even if he couldn’t signal it the way that his twin sister did. When a parent can read a child’s cues, it makes all the difference in the world. It is very powerful when you recognize how to communicate with your child in non speaking ways and notice their communication cues. 

Supporting Parents

Some parents need more support than others attuning to their child and reading their cues. One of the gifts that Dr. Greenspan gave us, Colette shares, was understanding attunement, which is about getting a good fit with your child and understanding that just-right fit. As Floortimers, we can support caregivers in finding that just-right way to be with their child, Colette says. Dr. Greenspan did say that he never found a baby who he couldn’t engage, even if they ‘seemed’ to be in their own world, by adjusting the tone of his voice, by moving slower or more quickly, etc.

Colette suggests that we imagine that parent who is so stressed because they have not yet been successful with their child and how hard it would be to try to interact in all of those different ways and still not be successful. After awhile, self-preservation tells you to stop, she says, and parents get dysregulated. The results of her dissertation study found that if you want to support parental self-efficacy, you have to Floortime parents by supporting safety and regulation in parents.

Colette continues that we have to be able to engage with parents and support their ability to use intentional communication. We have to be able to support them in problem-solving and having ideas, because if they don’t have those, they’re not going to be able to do that with their child. Colette asks us to imagine trying to support a child through symbolic play when you’re not even regulated yourself. It is not fun because it’s too hard. I shared that in Episode 6 of Season 1 of We chose play is Colette coaching me through a video, retroactively, supporting me in self-reflecting. 

I was so overwhelmed with how much my child protested and cried, but at least he could always be soothed by picking him up and providing him with movement, which is why it was so hard for him to go to sleep and be still. Colette says to think about the effort it took from me to find that just-right thing that my child needed, and now think of the thousands and thousands of Floortime families out there and providing them with that ability to figure out that just-right way of being with their child, which can be totally exhausting. As a Floortime community, she continues, we need to hold our parents and go on this journey with our parents. 

Family and Community

Colette shares that John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, said that if a community really values their children, they need to cherish their parents. Dr. Stanley Greenspan talked about Floortime as a family approach and how you really are ‘treating’ the entire family. Parent self-regulation is huge. If you can’t be regulated, you can’t co-regulate with your child. The person who gave us parent self-efficacy was Albert Bandura, Colette continues. In her dissertation she talked about the child, the family, and the community.

She got her information about the child from Dr. Greenspan, talking about development, reminding us about individual differences, and reminding us about relationships. She got her information about the family and supporting the family from Bandura. Urie Bronfenbrenner gave her the idea about the community that supports the family. Colette says that Floortimers support caregivers by talking about following the child’s lead, about attunement, and other practices. What I hear a lot of parents saying is that the community piece is missing. 

They don’t have any Floortime providers in their area, and this is the value of parent support meetings where parents can connect. I found that parents really listen to each other. They want to interact with the people who support them–the DIR coach, but they also respond so well to that community aspect. All three layers that Colette talked about are so important. Colette continues that when we think about community in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, we talk about the extended family, the school, religion, culture, politics, etc.

We have Floortime families from