Child Life Specialist

juillet
Wed, 03 Jan 2018 05:27:48 +0000

I swear I wanted to be everything between middle school and the end of college, and child life specialist was one of the many careers I considered after volunteering in a children’s hospital in college in the school room and working with some child life specialists. (Many years later, I ended up briefly working with some child life specialists again - apparently, a lot of them use video games in the hospital as therapeutic tools! :D)

They’re exactly what @gumbymom already said, professionals who work in hospitals with children and families who get long-term care in those facilities. Often the children have some kind of illness or disability that requires them to stay in a hospital or other care facility long-term - like cancer, a traumatic serious injury, a heart condition, physical therapy, etc.

The best ways to find out how to get to some kind of career is 1) look at job descriptions for that career; you can do this by searching a job site like Indeed.com; and 2) look at the resumes of people who already have those jobs. You can find them on LinkedIn. Based on my prior knowledge (and poking around a little more), although there are programs in child life you don’t have to limit yourself to that - a majors are psychology, human development and family studies, and child/human development (as mentioned above). Since many jobs simply say ‘or related majors,’ you could probably also do it with a BA in social work, and probably even sociology as long as you do an internship and preferably get the certification.

The Association of Child Life Professionals maintains the requirements to sit for the exam to get your certification: http://www.childlife.org/certification/students/requirements-for-2019-2022. You also have to do an internship with at least 600 hours under a child life specialist who’s qualified to supervise you (the requirements for that are on the same page, including a link to a database of internships). My impression is that the internship is usually taken up either your senior year of college or during the last year of a master’s program (example at St. Jude’s: https://www.stjude.org/treatment/services/support-services/child-life/for-students/child-life-internship-opportunities.html.)