Key Points at a Glance: Waldon and DIRFloortime: Learning with the Heart and Hands

Both approaches support the child's holistic development—in different yet complementary ways.

DIRFloortime strengthens relationships, emotional security, and communication. The Waldon Method promotes self-efficacy, movement, and independent learning through active engagement. Together, these two approaches create space for development: children can feel safe and secure while discovering and understanding the world at their own pace.

After all, children need both: a secure relationship and the freedom to take initiative on their own.

Excerpt from „Learning to Learn with Autistic Children“ by Sibylle Janert, Reinhardt Verlag, Munich, October 2026.

How do the Waldon Method and DIRFloortime complement each other?

The Waldon Method and DIRFloortime use different tools but share a common goal: the comprehensive, holistic development of the child in all their individual uniqueness. While DIRFloortime strengthens interpersonal relationships, the Waldon Method fosters a sense of inner self-efficacy through active engagement with the world of objects. Together, they form a powerful foundation for inclusive, developmentally sensitive learning:

‚It’s a wonderful method for the children. It brings about changes in both parents and children in a short amount of time. Incorporating DIR Floortime into the process—or combining the two—is a lot of fun for everyone,‘ writes a colleague following a Waldorf course.

DIRFloortime

• Focus primarily on the interactive, interpersonal aspects of development: relationships, communication, emotions, and the development of symbols
• provides the child with warmth, security, closeness, and emotional response

Waldon

• Strengthens the individual, cognitive, and action-oriented aspects: self-efficacy, exploration, and active learning through movement, grasping, doing, and handling objects
• provides the child with clarity, security, structure, and the ability to take action

The Waldon Method helps children, through movement, to engage in activities using their hands, experience structure, understand the principles of reality, and thereby build cognitive foundations. It thereby creates the experiential level on which ‚young‘ children can physically experience and learn to understand fundamental concepts such as space, direction, cause and effect, and object permanence, independent of language or social interaction. DIRFloortime uses this space to specifically promote emotional growth and relational experiences, and creates the relational level—that is, the „secure emotional field“—in which learning becomes possible in the first place.

Building Relationships with Heart and Hands

Both areas of development initially proceed in parallel and then converge in the developmental domain described in DIRFloortime as the ability to triangulate and engage in collaborative, complex problem-solving (FEDC 4). Here, the child is now increasingly able to collaborate with another person on a specific topic or problem over an extended period of time in a spirit of partnership, without having to withdraw from the interaction.

This corresponds to the complementary stage of development that Geoffrey Waldon referred to as ‚capacity for continuity‘—that is, the ability to actively engage with the world of objects, recognize patterns, and pursue actions over an extended period with increasing perseverance, e.g., moving objects purposefully from one place to another in sequence, consciously implementing decisions, and being able to plan new variations.

While DIRFloortime brings the emotional and social dimension into play here, the Waldon Method lays the motor-cognitive foundations. Together, they help the child connect with the world both „with the heart“ and „with the hands.“ These two strands always run parallel in early development and should also be taken into account in early intervention, because children need both the emotional security of a relationship and the opportunity to learn and understand the world independently and at their own pace through undisturbed solo play.

A holistic view of man

The holistic view of human nature underlying these ideas is based on the assumption that people possess universal abilities and potentials that are inherent to them and can develop under sufficiently supportive conditions, regardless of disability, impairment, or diagnosis. In this respect, relationship-—such as DIRFloortime and the Waldon Method—fundamentally differ from behaviorist methods, which view autism as a ‚congenital‘ deficit or biological defect that can only be compensated for through training and therapy by adopting more adaptive behaviors and modifying its disruptive symptoms.

In contrast, the DIR model is based on the assumption that emotions and emotionally attuned relationships are fundamental to all of a child’s subsequent development, including language, cognition, play, learning, and social behavior, whereas the Waldon Method supports these goals by using a child-centered pre-linguistic approach to help the child engage in hands-on activities through movement, experience structure, and thereby build cognitive foundations.

Excerpt from the book: Learning to Learn with Autistic Children. Sibylle Janert, Oct. 2026, Reinhardt Verlag, Munich HERE order