Opening Walker’s heart and mind

Following a mix of confusing opinions from pediatricians and specialists, the Staceys’ began to worry that their child would never walk, talk, and perhaps even hear or see. But Walker was lucky — his parents would not accept defeat. Author Pat Stacey describes the day-to-day fears, obstacles, small milestones, and eventual success her family faced as they struggled to bring their son into full contact with the world. Stacey was invited on the “Today” show to discuss her book, “The Boy Who Loved Windows,” and offer a first-hand account of the “floor time” treatment model pioneered by Stanley Greenspan, M.D. Here's an excerpt:

Even though the doctor told us that Walker was normal — that his Apgar scores were high — I was troubled less by how this baby appeared and more by some quality in his awareness. He had looked past me the first moment I saw him. In fact, his gaze became an obsession of mine in the hospital. He wouldn't look at me as he lay in the small plastic bassinet. He wouldn't look at me when he nursed, either. It was as if he didn't notice either Cliff or me, or Elizabeth, who, beaming, sat on the extra hospital bed, holding him in her lap. I felt an emptiness. The word that came to mind, a word I never told anyone, was "scarecrow." My baby, our baby, had a scarecrow quality — thin, loose, vacant.

By the time Walker was five months old, it was clear something was wrong. We knew we were losing him; he was slipping away into the shadows. "Perhaps he's just uncomfortable because of his perpetual cold," suggested our family practitioner casually. Yet by now Walker still couldn't look at me at close range. Worse, he gazed away more often than he looked at us. He seemed more interested in the light that flooded into the house through the slatted blinds than in our daughter or us. He searched the windows, obsessively, compulsively. What was it about those windows? They seemed somehow significant to him. When he looked out, which he did now almost constantly, it seemed he wasn't just staring blankly but that he was reading something into the light, or the frame, or the blinds, as if there were an entire scene being played out for him there between the dust motes and the windowpanes.

Whatever one called Walker’s problem, Dawn (his physical therapist) felt he would surely be receiving a diagnosis of autism within a year if we didn’t act, and act quickly. By fortunate coincidence, Dawn was primed to do something that was out of the ordinary in her practice. Just three months before she met Walker, she had read an article by Stanley Greenspan and his colleague Serena Wieder in the journal “Zero to Three,” outlining an effective new approach for treating toddlers and babies with symptoms of autism. She was intrigued, excited.

One day she came to my house with yet another article. It was a prepublication draft of a "chart review" of Greenspan's 200 patients with autism. She explained to me that Stanley Greenspan was a child psychiatrist well known for his work in child development. He had spent sixteen years studying the subject at the National Institute of Mental Health, which led to a new philosophy of emotional development — for which he had won the Ittleson Award, the American Psychiatric Association's highest honor for research in child psychiatry. In his years at NIMH, Greenspan arrived at sophisticated criteria for understanding and defining emotional maturity and began to map out its phases. He applied recent research about how babies and toddlers "process" the vast amount of sensory information available to them each day. On the basis of his insights, Greenspan designed a therapeutic model to help children with a variety of problems. He called it D.I.R. (developmental, individual-difference, relationship-based model) or, informally, "floor time." (A year after Dawn discovered Greenspan's work through articles, he made the approach available to the public in his 1998 book, “The Child with Special Needs.”)

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