Career Investigation Assignment 2
Career Investigation Assignment
Ariana Thomas
HMS- 146
February 15, 2019
Child Life Specialist
Child life specialist help children and families understand and cope with a child’s hospital experience. Hospitals can be frightening for children and families that are in hospitals, but it is a child life specialist job to ease the experience. In order to do this, they help the children express themselves and participate in play therapy. To support the parents, child life specialist offers them education and emotional support for everyone in the family. They must enjoy working with children of all ages. It is important to know how to communicate with children and simplify a complicated procedure to explain to the patient and parents.
Child life specialist are usually the first person to meet the families. If there’s abuse involved in the situation then a social worker will meet with the family first, but if the patient or sibling is scared, then a child life specialist will come into action. In order to help the patients who are scared, questions are asked to help reduce anxiety: “What are you most scared of? Is it the doctors or being away from home?” This helps find what the patient is most stressed about and try to ease their worries. Child life specialist do many other things such as administrative duties. In some programs, there may be specialist who handle the donations, special events, and training. Special events include holiday parties, such as Halloween, Christmas, and valentine’s day. This makes children feel at home and make them feel like they’re not missing out on anything just because they’re in the hospital.
Child life specialist can be found wherever children are found in the hospital. They spend most of their days running around. A full-time week is 40 hours and hospitals child life programs are either opened from Monday- Friday or seven days a week. Work hours are typically 7:30am to 7:30pm, but late evenings are often required in the pediatric emergency room, and some positions require working on weekends and holidays.
In order to become a child life specialist, you must earn a four-year undergraduate from a university. All aspiring child life specialist must complete 10 college-level courses related to child life such as human development, family dynamics, counseling, sociology, therapeutic recreation, expressive therapies, cultural diversity, biomedical ethics, and even pediatric nursing. While getting y...
