## Core Methods A: Strategies to Promote Social-Emotional and Intellectual Development

A.1 Follow Cues: Provide sensitive interactions by following cues  
A.2 Be Responsive: Always respond to all communication  
A.3 Build Upward: Meet your child or teen at current developmental capacity  
A.4 Use Play: Use play and playfulness as primary means to engage and teach  
A.5 Use Natural Interests: Capitalize on natural interests to elicit higher skills  
A.6 Use Problems: Set up situations that invite child-initiated solutions  
A.7 Pretend Play: Create opportunities to use ideas in symbolic (pretend) play  
A.8 Embrace Feelings: Help embrace a wide range of feelings  
A.9 Enrich Ideas: Help enrich ideas or stories in play and conversation  
A.10 Self-Reflect: Take a reflective stance toward yourself in interactions

### Core Methods B: Understanding/Addressing Individual Differences in Processing Profiles

B.1 Child’s Profile: Identify and understand your child’s profile of strengths/weaknesses  
B.2 Adult’s Profile: Consider your individual differences  
B.3 Adapt Yourself: Adapt your interactive style to your child’s or teen’s unique profile  
B.4 Calm or Energize: Provide motor or sensory inputs as needed to calm or energize  
B.5 Home Design: Set up the home environment to accommodate the unique sensory profile  
B.6 Sensory Connections: Provide daily sensory-motor relational experiences  
B.7 Practice in Play: Provide daily planned play activities to address processing challenges

### Capacity 1. Regulation and Attention: Attaining a Calm, Alert, Attentive State

1.1 Support Regulation: Help your child or teen get regulated before expecting more  
1.2 Notice and Adjust: Notice and adjust your intensity to support an optimal arousal level  
1.3 Calming Choices: Offer choices for help in calming down  
1.4 Lengthen Attention: Attend to and join interests to expand focus and attention  
1.5 Avoid Flooding: Support regulation at early stages of upset to avoid emotional “flooding”  
1.6 Practice Modulation: Practice modulation regularly in fun, playful ways

### Capacity 2. Social Engagement: Getting Involved and Connected

2.1 Joint Attention: Develop joint attention  
2.2 Gaze Tracking: Attend to the pattern of gaze  
2.3 Share Pleasure: Facilitate experiences of mutual joy  
2.4 Mirror Emotions: Mirror child’s affect by matching facial expression, tone of voice, & tempo  
2.5 Emphasize Affect: Exaggerate your expression of affect (feeling)  
2.6 Interact: Turn every action into an interaction  
2.7 Advance the Agenda: Promote the child’s or teen’s agenda  
2.8 Be Necessary: Be the means to an end--be necessary  
2.9 Use Anticipation: Use anticipation to increase the capacity for mutual attention

### Capacity 3. Reciprocal Social Interaction: Initiating and Responding Purposefully

3.1 Invite Circles: Entice to initiate and respond  
3.2 Total Communication: Do not rely on words alone—use the total communication system  
3.3 Wait Enough: Wait long enough for responses in order to allow for slower auditory, cognitive, and motor processing speeds  
3.4 Sportscaster/Narrator: Be the sportscaster/be the narrator  
3.5 Playfully Persist: Challenge the child or teen to close follow-up circles  
3.6 Easy Choices: Offer easy choices if needed  
3.7 Communication Temptation: Play games requiring initiation  
3.8 Consider Questions: Carefully craft your questions and statements

### Capacity 4. Complex Communication: Using Gestures/Words to Solve Problems Together

4.1 Stretch Interactions: Stretch out interaction chains to 50 or more circles in a row  
4.2 Don’t Judge: Express interest in all attempts to communicate  
4.3 Feign Ignorance: Expand reciprocal communication by pretending to be ignorant  
4.4 Assign Meaning: Treat all play actions as if they are goal directed  
4.5 Playfully Obstruct: Playfully obstruct to expand interactions and joint problem solving  
4.6 Devise Problems: Set up the environment to promote independent problem solving  
4.7 Genuine Self: Allow more of your genuine self in interactions  
4.8 Social Flow: Enhance understanding of emotional meaning and flow of social interactions

### Capacity 5. Symbolic Play: Creating and Using Ideas

5.1 Use Pretend: Create opportunities for pretending  
5.2 Animate: Bring the characters to life  
5.3 Plot Thickening: Deepen the plot and add complexity  
5.4 Instigate Creativity: Expand the opportunities for creativity at every opportunity  
5.5 Vary Emotions: Broaden the emotional themes  
5.6 Challenge and Support: Take on dual roles within play  
5.7 Enrich Play: Vary the forms of symbolic play

### Capacity 6. Emotional & Logical Thinking: Making Sense of Oneself, Others, the World

6A: Emotional Thinking  
6.1 Narrate: Empathically narrate feeling states  
6.2 Highlight Emotions: Emphasize the emotional aspects of life  
6.3 Emotional Curiosity: Reflect on all feelings  
6.4 Encourage Empathy: Help put on another’s shoes  
6.5 Play Therapeutically: Use play to help master overwhelming feelings

6B: Logical Thinking  
6.6 Build Bridges: Help build bridges between ideas  
6.7 Elaborate: Ask elaboration questions to encourage logical connections  
6.8 Incite Thinking: Help your child or teen think for him- or herself  
6.9 Make Connections: Help child connect three or more ideas in a logical sequence  
6.10 Event Planner: Sequence, plan, and communicate about the past and future  
6.11 Organize and Summarize: Bring the child or teen back to the main idea  
6.12 Debate: Use debate to challenge the child to connect ideas and develop logic

### Capacities 7–9. Complex Thinking: Multicausal, Gray Area, and Reflective Thinking

7 Promote multicausal thinking  
8 Develop gray-area thinking  
9 Encourage reflective thinking

### Reducing Problem Behaviors

X.1 More Floortime: Increase Floortime play proportional to increased expectations/challenges  
X.2 Find Behavioral Clues: View behavior as a meaningful clue  
X.3 Choose Behaviors: Choose and target the most important behaviors  
X.4 Take Manageable Steps: Teach new behaviors in manageable steps  
X.5 Make Modifications: Modify the environment & schedule to reduce problem behaviors  
X.6 Notice and Mention: Notice and mention all the small steps in the right direction  
X.7 Preview: Rehearse and preview expected behaviors and new situations  
X.8 Post Rules: Agree on, post, and enforce written household rules  
X.9 Provide Visuals: Provide visual reminders and visual schedules  
X.10 Provide Support: Provide empathic responses to expressions of negative emotion  
X.11 Grant Wishes: Grant a wish imaginatively