As current/future CLS', we recognize the impact a medical diagnosis has on family stress, so lets focus on the resilience component. How can child life impact family resiliency? How do you hope to impact family resiliency? Provide an example of either a support you hope to implement or a gap in service that could be implemented that not only recognizes the stress of a medical diagnosis, better supports resiliency in some meaningful way.
Maintaining Normalcy and Routine: By facilitating therapeutic play, art, and educational activities, CLS help maintain the child's typical roles and routines, which reduces the feeling of chaos and loss of control for both the child and parents. Maintaining normalcy is a core element of family resilience.
Enhancing Communication: CLS act as interpreters, translating complex medical jargon into simple, honest language the child (and sometimes the parents) can understand. This clear communication reduces uncertainty and empowers the family to participate in shared decision-making.
Strengthening Sibling Support: CLS specifically address the needs of siblings, who are often overlooked. By offering support groups or one-on-one sessions, they validate siblings' feelings and teach them how to positively interact with their ill brother or sister, which preserves the crucial sibling subsystem within the family.
I hope to impact family resiliency by serving as a consistent source of emotional and developmental grounding in a chaotic medical environment. My goal is to shift the family's focus from "What is wrong with our child?" to "What is right and strong with our family?" by:
Focusing on Strengths: Identifying and highlighting pre-existing family strengths, such as strong communication, flexibility, or humor, and helping them apply these strengths to the current medical challenges.
Facilitating Meaning-Making: Helping parents and children integrate the medical experience into their family narrative in a way that emphasizes growth and competence, rather than just trauma. For example, celebrating the child's courage during a difficult procedure as a "superpower."
Empowering Parental Confidence: By modeling effective coping techniques and preparation strategies for parents, I can increase their sense of competence and control in managing their child's illness, which is vital for long-term family functioning.
A significant gap in service, particularly in busy outpatient clinics or smaller hospitals, is a lack of Trauma-Informed Post-Discharge Resiliency Check-ins.
Child Life Specialists (CLS) play a crucial role in building family resiliency by focusing on strengths, promoting coping mechanisms, and maintaining family integrity amidst medical stress.
Family resiliency is the capacity of the family unit to withstand and rebound from stressful life events, such as a child's medical diagnosis. CLS impact this by:
Promoting Adaptive Coping: CLS provide children and siblings with developmentally appropriate preparation, teaching them coping strategies (e.g., deep breathing, distraction) that turn a stressful event into a manageable experience. When the child copes well, parental stress is significantly reduced, strengthening the entire family unit.