Supporting Your Child’s Development: A Guide for Parents
Using the DIR® Model and FEDCs at The Children’s Centre
What Are the FEDCs?
The Functional Emotional Developmental Capacities (FEDCs) are part of the DIR® Model—a developmental framework that helps us understand and support each child’s unique growth. The first six FEDCs are:
- Regulation & Shared Attention – Staying calm, alert, and connected with others.
- Engagement & Relating – Forming warm, trusting relationships.
- Two-Way Communication – Exchanging gestures, sounds, and words meaningfully.
- Complex Communication & Problem-Solving – Using ideas to express needs and solve problems.
- Emotional Thinking – Understanding feelings, intentions, and perspectives.
- Building Bridges Between Ideas – Connecting thoughts and emotions to form logical thinking.
Our Approach at The Children’s Centre
At The Children’s Centre, we use the DIR® Model to support development across the lifespan. We take a developmental approach to help individuals overcome their challenges.
We meet each child where they are, starting with their best and strongest capacities. This builds confidence, trust, safety, and most importantly—RELATIONSHIP.
We believe that all children want to succeed and do well. Our focus is on motivation—helping children know they have the ability to do well, the autonomy to make decisions, and the desire to relate when they feel good with others. A diagnosis may describe behaviors, but it does not define who a child is.
💡 Key Principles for Parents
1. Start Where Your Child Is
- Observe your child’s current abilities and interests.
- Begin with their strongest capacities—this builds confidence, trust, and safety. Most importantly, it builds relationship.
- Yet, presume competence.
2. Support Regulation Through Engagement
- When your child is regulated (calm and alert), they can engage.
- Use engagement to support their regulation.
- When your child is regulated and engaged, they can interact—and interaction is our goal.
3. Use Affect to Give Emotional Meaning
- Use your affect—facial expressions, tone of voice, pace, and size of movements—to give emotional meaning to what your child is experiencing.
- Use affect to support regulation:
- Down-regulate when your child is too high.
- Up-regulate when your child is too low.
- Look for what feels “just right.”
4. Attune to Your Child’s Feelings
- Co-regulation is not just telling your child they need to or should feel okay.
- It’s about acknowledging your child’s feelings and demonstrating how to down-regulate.
- Your emotional presence helps your child feel safe and connected.
5. Focus on the Process, Not the Product
- Focus on how you get there, not just where the goal is.
- When you focus on the process, your child can pay attention to how to get there and see the big picture—the forest, not just the tree.
6. It’s Okay to Fail
- It’s okay to experience rupture.
- What matters is how we repair and start again.
- This teaches resilience, emotional flexibility, and trust.
7. Support Purposeful Action
- Your goal is to help your child move, talk, and respond purposefully—with intention, not randomly.
- Celebrate when your child shows you new ideas. You’ll be surprised by how many ideas they come up with!
8. Safety First—Boundaries Matter
- Supporting development doesn’t mean letting your child do whatever they want.
- Safety comes first. Children need to learn how others might say “no.”
- What we want to see is your child using their ideas to engage in shared problem-solving—solving challenges through interaction with you.
9. Attention Comes from Meaningful Interaction
- You can’t train attention directly.
- You see attention and focus when your child is regulated and interested in interacting with people and their environment.
- Children often zone out or look distracted when things feel too hard, not meaningful, or not safe.
10. The Gift of Time
- Give your child time to process what they hear, see, and feel.
- What we want is not just compliance or following instructions.
- What we want is for your child to be creative, to think about how to solve problems, and to become independent.
- Hand-over-hand support or having them only follow your ideas won’t teach independence—give space for their ideas to emerge.
11. Meaningful Experiences Build Development
- If you teach something meaningless, your child may learn it—but they won’t develop from it.
- If your child never feels empathised with, they won’t learn to be empathetic.
- Provide experiences that help your child feel good, feel understood, and feel connected—this is how emotional development grows.
Final Thoughts
Your relationship with your child is the foundation of their development. By tuning into their emotional world and supporting their FEDCs, you help them build the skills they need for lifelong learning, relationships, and well-being.
By Joan Ng | DIR Expert Training Leader | Specific Needs Educator