Stanley Greenspan (born 1941) is a child and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who is currently a Clincal Professor at George Washington University Medical School. He lives in Betheseda, Maryland .

In 1962 he earned a A.B at Harvard University, and four years later graduated from the Yale Medical School . In 1975, he became a founder of the Zero to Three Foundation , the national centre for children and families, and was president of that foundation until 1984. Other work for the organisation included being Chairman of the Diagnostic Classification Committee from 1988 to 1996.

Since 1975 he has written four monographs and 21 books including The Course of Life: Psychoanalytic Contributions to Understanding Personality Development with G H Pollock in 1980, with an update in 1989-90. He has also created two videos including First Feelings, which is an introduction to his orientation into social-emotional development. Both in the popular press and in peer-reviewed articles, he has written about a wide variety of subjects that affect child and human development.

Developmental Individual Difference Relationship Model/Floortime

Beginning in the 1980s Greenspan built upon research into social-emotional development to create a proprietary intervention for children with deficits in relating and communicating. This method is known as Developmental Individual Difference Relationship Model or more popularly as floortime.

Its basic premise is that children learn skills from the relationships which they have with their caregivers and other people significant in their lives. It was developed in response to the needs of the increasing population diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders , who were then being either served by behavioural methods or cognitive skills, and other impairments of development and learning.

Relationships, according to Greenspan and Weider , are essentially developed in playful interactions.

Greenspan's theory of development is that children grow, from birth to 6 years, in 6 different milestones:

• Milestone 1: Self-Regulation
• Milestone 2: Intimacy
• Milestone 3: Two-Way Communication
• Milestone 4: Complex Communication
• Milestone 5: Emotional Ideas
• Milestone 6: Emotional Thinking

His focus on individual differences is meditated through the sensory system, the processing system and the motor system.

His focus on relationships means that the parents work with the child directly on creating an emotional relationship.