Since 2001, I have been working with families in the NJ/NY area and abroad using a comprehensive Developmental evidence-based treatment approach based upon DIR/Floortime to treat infants, toddlers, young children, adolescents and adults diagnosed with autism spectrum and other related developmental and social-pragmatic language based challenges. A fundamental core part of my practice is to consistently guide you and all family members in each session to emotionally understand and connect with how your child is navigating his/her world and at each stage help cultivate all of your child's typical Functional Emotional Developmental capacities of attending, relating, engaging and full social pragmatic communication/language.
This includes learning how to join-in and attribute purpose and meaning with respect to how your child is navigating his/her world; cultivating your child's simple to complex back and forth two-way social-emotional problem solving interactions during daily routines with others and across space with use of gestures, words and phrases; simple to complex symbolic/pretend play activities where your child from an embodied sense-of-felt-safety can begin to move forward and elaborate upon feelings and more complex ideas; full social-pragmatic communication/language development and peer-relationship skills. 60 minute sessions are in your home or family setting.
Sessions in your home or in familiar activities outside the home are always the most optimal setting for you to be guided in your engagement with your child in deepening shared attention, simple to complex regulation/co-regulation, two-way problem reciprocal solving, symbolic play and pragmatic language/communication with you, peers and others.
As a matter of professional responsibility and ethics we will never as many practices who offer DIR/Floortime insist that your child needs a minimum of 5 or more hours per week in order for therapy to be effective. We find this in many instances to be unjustified, extraordinary misleading and unethical.
*As an integral part of our DIR/Floortime based therapy, we strongly encourage all our families to confidentially submit 10-15 minutes of video clips per week of child/parent or child/peer interactions. We do this so we can track and discuss any concerns or challenges you may have in the implementation of your child’s skills outside of our regular sessions. We review and discuss video clips of you and your child or child and peers outside of our regular sessions each week at no additional cost.
Virtual sessions which have proven to work extraordinarily well due to the structure and nature of DIR/Floortime where at each moment we are guiding the child/parent interaction is an option for families where scheduling is problematic or who live outside the geographical area. All initial phone/virtual consultations are quite extensive and non-fee based. https://www.dirdirectory.com/united-states/fort-lee/dirfloortime-practitioner/neil-samuels
