The role of a Certified Child Life Specialist (CCLS) is shaped by setting, patient needs, and context, but at its core lies expertise in child development and in how illness, injury, disability, and hospitalization can disrupt it. At Komansky Children’s Hospital, that expertise is put into practice through developmentally appropriate preparation, education, therapeutic play, and coping strategies. The goal is to reduce fear, pain, and trauma while centering each child’s cultural, developmental, and family context.
This work naturally extends into advocacy – a pillar of child life practice. Child life specialists advocate at the bedside by shaping care around individual needs, across disciplines. Underpinning all of this is a simple but profound belief: children have rights within the medical environment—the right to comfort, to choice, and to information. When children feel informed, respected, and supported, they develop emotional safety—the sense that they can trust both the environment and the people within it.
That trust is the foundation of healing, and building it is central to our work.
As the field and patient needs evolve, so do the priorities for Child Life Services at Komansky. Supporting children through fear and anxiety remains essential, but it should not be the limit of our ambition. Too often, fear is treated as inevitable. Children enter medical settings unsure whom to trust, anticipating pain, and sometimes already carrying the effects of medical traumatic stress. But this assumption warrants reconsideration. At a time of growing pediatric mental and behavioral health concerns, it is worth asking why avoidable fear and pain remain normalized—and whether the same preventive mindset applied to physical health should extend to psychosocial well-being.
Research and experience alike show that poorly managed pain and distress in childhood can lead to persistent fear and long-term avoidance of healthcare. What is not prevented early can breed avoidance long term. We envision a model that prevents healthcare-induced distress before it takes hold—one where children develop coping skills alongside strong immune systems, and where they feel informed, empowered, and engaged across all care settings.
Changing this trajectory requires reaching children sooner. At Komansky, child life specialists are integrated into primary and ambulatory care settings where children are seen, ideally, long before crisis or hospitalization. When a young child learns they can ask questions, that adults will be honest, and that their comfort matters, they begin to form a fundamentally different relationship with healthcare. By embedding developmentally appropriate, atraumatic practices into routine care—through preparation, support, pain prevention, and clear communication—we help children build coping skills before anxiety becomes the default.
Through a preventive lens, child life has the potential to reshape how children engage with healthcare altogether.
Child life has always been about more than helping children endure healthcare—it is about shaping how they experience it. This reflects a broader shift in medicine, one that recognizes the inseparability of physical and emotional well-being. The experiences we create in childhood extend far beyond discharge, influencing how individuals engage with healthcare throughout their lives. By centering children’s rights, prioritizing emotional safety, and advancing preventive, relationship-based care, they are not only improving individual experiences—they are helping define a new standard for pediatric care.