What do Child Life Specialists do?

Child life specialists are essential members of the multidisciplinary healthcare team! While other members of the team are focusing on treating the medical issue, we are focused on helping the child and family cope with their hospitalization. That’s obviously pretty broad, so I’ll break it down by some of the core things we do:

• Play: Play is the natural language of children! So to best understand them and therefore help them, we want to speak their language. Child Life Specialists offer play opportunities to not only facilitate communication, but to provide a normalizing experience in a place that does not feel normal, and maybe even make the hospital feel a little fun.

• Educate: This could be in the form of diagnosis education, procedural preparation, or teaching about medical equipment. Research shows that children will cope and cooperate better when they have more information because it gives them more predictability and therefore more control. Also, we believe children deserve the respect of understanding what’s going on with their bodies and what is going to happen to them.

• Support: The hospital is a scary place where painful things happen. We aim to be someone who families and children can trust and know we have their emotional needs in mind. We provide support during the most stressful of times such as painful procedures, bereavements, and traumas. We are also trained in child development and help tailor interventions and offer play items that support the child’s development!

• Empower: While we are supporting children and families through their hospitalization, ultimately we want to empower them with the knowledge and coping skills to get through these difficult things on their own. We do this using modeling as well as supportive and reflective language.

• Advocate: We are educated in pain control methods (pharmacological and non-pharmacological), family-centered care, and least traumatic methods for procedures. Since the rest of the healthcare team is focused on the patient’s physical wellbeing and treating the medical issue, we can be there to advocate for the things we know will help minimize the trauma.

We like to say we “wear a lot of hats” and you can understand why! This job requires a lot of strength and adaptability but I wouldn’t want to do anything else.