Level 1: Regulation and Interest in the World – This process begins immediately after birth.  As the baby takes in sensory experiences, they must learn to distinguish different sounds, smells, and sights.  And, they must learn how to organize themselves in the  presence of a variety of stimuli.  If those early sensory experiences are overwhelming, though, the baby can tune out the world and lose their desire to interact. This stage focuses on staying calm and actively taking in information from the world, as well as sharing attention with others.

Level 2: Engaging and Relating – Between ages 2-5 months, babies are learning how to express themselves to be understood and are beginning to experience the joy of an engaging relationship.  They learn that coos bring mom, and that cries can, too, but in different ways.  They are beginning to experience different emotions and to distinguish between them.  Babies of this age are able to obtain joy from interactions that are nurturing and responsive, and to develop a desire to be part of a relationship.

Level 3: Intentionality and Two-Way Communication  - By about 6 months of age, babies begin to transform emotions into signals for communication.  There are many different types of exchanges going on now between the caregiver and the baby.  The baby learns to read the caregivers’ cues, and to respond with cues of their own.  Babies are learning that their actions are purposeful and they can participate in two-way, logical interactions.

Level 4: Social Problem-solving – Between 9 and 18 months, babies take two-way communication and begin to solve problems.  They learn to use that communication to get physical and emotional needs met.  They can take their mother’s hand and pull them to the pantry and point to a cookie.  These interactions become increasingly complex, leading to higher levels of intelligence.  Important developmental steps during this timeframe include shared social problem-solving, regulating mood and behavior, forming early sense of self.

Level 5: Creating Symbols and Using Words and Ideas – By 18 months children’s motor skills have developed to the point where they can appropriately use their mouth muscles and vocal cords.  To understand words and language, children must first be able to engage in complex emotional signaling (separating actions from perceptions and holding images in their minds).  Language develops because images acquire meaning through many emotionally relevant experiences and exchanges.  So, instead of merely laughing, he can verbalize “funny.”  Symbols or words can now be used instead of having to carry out actions.  This allows new flexibility in reasoning, thinking, and problem-solving.

Level 6: Emotional Thinking, Logic, and a Sense of Reality – By about 2 ½, children have become better at connecting these symbols together logically, making possible thinking and reflecting.  They learn how one event leads to another, how to link ideas together, how ideas operate across time and space.  Ideas can explain emotions and organize their knowledge of the world.  Logical thinking now leads to new skills, such as debating and scientific reasoning.  Children can now make up games and play games with rules.
 
On a typical development trajectory, children will usually achieve all 6 of these foundational levels by the age of four or five.   If the child has ASD or other developmental challenges, these levels may take much longer to achieve.  DIR stresses the importance of working through ALL of the levels, in order, as each level builds the foundation for the next.  And, it is difficult to obtain the higher developmental levels of abstract thinking, perspective-taking, etc without mastering the lower levels. 

For older children, Dr. Greenspan has added in three additional levels.

Level 7: Multi-causal and Triangular Thinking - In this stage, children move beyond simple causes for reasoning and move to multi-causal thinking.  (Maybe Alex doesn't want to play with me becuse he doesn't like me, or because he's already playing with Breanna, or because he's afraid I'll break his tower.)  Triangular thinking is beign able to compare and contrast two things.  ALso, if one friend can't play, he can ask another to play.  To learn multi-causal and trangular thinkging, children must be abel to invest emotion into more than one possibility.  At this stage, children ca nunderstand family dynamis in terms of relationships among different people, rather than just in terms of whether they get their own needs met.

Level 8: Gray-area, Emotionally-Differentiated Thinking - This kind of thinking enables children to begin understanding varying degress or relative influence of things.  This is important for school, as there, chicdren often must weigh factors and relative influences.  This also helpful with peers, as  this kind of thinking offers new ways to solve problems and children can now compromise.

Level 9:  A Growing Sense of Self and Reflection on an Internal Standard - By puberty and early adolescence, more complex emotional interactions help children progress to thinking in relationship to an internal standard and a growing sense of self.  Children can now judge experience and they can say things like "Boy, I was really mad - more than usual."   Or, they can look at a peer's behavior and say, "That is OK for them, but not OK for me. "  Children can now make inferences and can think in more than one frame of reference at a time.  They can create new ideas from existing ones, they can consider both the past and the future.  This allows for a higher level of intelligence and more mature thinking. 

After the ninth level is reached, people continue to develop throughout life.  There are as many as seven more stages.  Human development doesn't stop, even for those on the autistic spectrum.  Those later stages includes:

1) An expanded sense of self that includes family and community relationships
2) The ability to reflect on one's future
3) A stable, separate sense of self (which allows young adults to remain secure when separating from their nuclear families)
4) Intimacy and commitment (including long-term commitments such as marriage, home ownership and a career)
5) Parenthood and other nurturing roles
6) Broadening perspectives on time, space, the life cycle and the larger world
7) A sense of responsibility to the environment and future generations, along with a sense of perspective on ones' place in the grand scheme of things.

Development is constant.  If supported, children with ASD, with regulatory and other developmental disorders, can move developmentally.  As you can see, it seems outragoeous to assume that anyone could reach these higher stages without attaining function in the lower, foundational levels.  Our children just need more support.  If we go back and work on development of the lower levels, children CAN move forward and reach higher levels of development, of thinking, and of relating.