A founding principle of ESDM is teaching within the way the child best learns, and play is a vital part of the learning process.  Research shows that functional skills emerge and develop in the child's natural environment first and enable the child to generalize to other situations and cope with a range of changing environmental demands (Bricker & Cripe, 1992; Hart & risky, 1995). The home can be an ideal setting for therapy, as young children typically thrive when they are in familiar surroundings and surrounded by the people and objects that are the most meaningful to them.