RDI focuses on cultivating the building blocks of social connection—such as referencing, emotion sharing, coregulation, and experience sharing—that normally develop in infancy and early childhood. RDI is a family-based program, where trained consultants support families to alter their interaction and communication styles. There is a period of parent education, followed by an assessment of both the child and the child-parent relationship. After that consultants support the family through a set of specific objectives to build a "guided participation" relationship between parents and child that will allow the child to once again become a "cognitive apprentice" to the parents. Once the cognitive apprenticeship is in place, the family can move on to specific cognitive remediation objectives for the child. These are developmentally staged objectives designed to restore optimal neural connectivity through a series of "discoveries" and "elaborations".
