What is Child Life?
To sum it up in as few words as possible, Child Life is “play as a healing modality” for children.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is the art projects we used to do as children in school or other programs. Their main goal was to work on our creativity, abstract thinking, and structure and be an outlet for the rambunctiousness we so easily possessed. These activities, though, are never considered outside an environment of “well” children, and that’s where Child Life comes in. Not only does it bring these projects to children who are “sick,” it has additional purposes of allowing children and family members or therapists to gain insight into a child and how they perceive things around them since children let down their guard during these times according to a play therapy article on Healthline. Who would have thought that playing could be healing?
Experiences of a Child Life Specialist
I had the privilege of volunteering with a Child Life Specialist during my undergraduate studies and saw first-hand how impactful the service was.
An average day of Child Life in the outpatient clinic at the hospital looked like this:
A parent/guardian, sometimes both, came in with the patient and sometimes other siblings for the appointment. Volunteers would greet them and then ask if the children wanted to play/color/or talk to us. Sometimes children were apprehensive about us. This was understandable since most of them had associated the hospital with “bad” things and didn’t want to meet any more potentially “bad” people, but eventually, they would come over to us. Other times, children were very open to joining us to color or play cards.
Benefits of Child Life Services
Through this time together in the waiting room, other volunteers and I could see children come in scared, quiet, or worried and slowly shrug off all cares as they immersed themselves in play. With their minds unburdened from worry, they could talk to us about their hospital visits, school life, and anything else they deemed important. Not only did it help the patients, but it also helped the families.
Siblings would understand that their sibling was sick, and all that meant for them was that they had restrictions to follow for their sibling’s health. When the patient would go back to the appointment with the parent/guardian(s), we would be able to stay in the waiting room and keep talking to the siblings and get them to realize that it wasn’t their sibling’s fault they were sick and that as siblings they had a big job of being a support system and reassure them that they were strong enough to do it and were amazing because of it. There were even times when we spoke to the parent/guardian(s) while the children played to encourage them on the journey and relieve them of their worries about their child in pain for even an hour or so.
It was easy to see that Child Life Services benefited everyone in the family even though it mainly focused on children. If play therapy is so beneficial to young people, my only question is, why are we not using it for adults as well?
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Be sure to check out our other blog posts to learn more about living a mentally healthy life as a Christian.
