Child Life

Our certified child life specialists at UMass Memorial Children’s Medical Center play a crucial role in supporting children and families facing medical challenges. Our team focuses on the needs of pediatric patients and their families, aiming to reduce stress and anxiety associated with hospitalization and medical procedures.

What To Expect from Our Child Life Specialists:

Our team help helps patients navigate the hospital experience with greater resilience and understanding.

Preprocedural Preparation

Techniques educate children about medical procedures, helping them understand what to expect and cope more effectively. This helps familiarize your child to the sights, sounds, people and sequence of events during procedures. Questions and concerns as well as coping techniques are also addressed.

Therapeutic Play

Child life specialists engage children in therapeutic play activities to promote normalization, expression of feelings and mastery of medical experiences. Play provides your child an outlet to explore feelings and concerns, as well as fulfill the developmental need to play. While building trusting relationships, the child life specialist assesses and corrects misconceptions or fantasies about the health care process.

Advocacy

Child life specialists advocate for the psychosocial needs of pediatric patients, ensuring that these needs are considered and addressed in the child's care plan.

Collaboration

Collaborating with other health care professionals, including doctors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists, provides comprehensive care that addresses the physical, emotional, and developmental needs of pediatric patients.

Child Life Services

Kids Comfort Promise

Kid's Comfort Promise (KCP) is a multidisciplinary approach to decreasing the pain and emotional stress caused by needlesticks like shots, blood draws and IVs.  We commit to our patients and families that we’ll use simple tools and techniques to make the needlestick experience as good as possible. 

Animal-Assisted Therapy Dog Program

Meet Valentina, our resident therapy dog. Valentina may hop into a patient’s bed for a belly rub or appear in the clinic for a snuggle and pat. Our Animal-Assisted Therapy Dog Program harnesses the therapeutic benefits of interactions between patients and our specially trained therapy dogs. These interactions positively impact the emotional and physical well-being of patients and families by contributing to a healing hospital experience. 

Robin the Robot

Robin the Robot is an innovative addition to the Child Life team. You may see Robin roaming the halls talking with patients, making them smile and helping them feel better. Robin the Robot is an exciting advancement in pediatric health care technology, with the potential to enhance patient care, improve efficiency, and create a more positive hospital experience for children and families.

Music Therapy

The Music Therapy Program offers a unique and effective approach to supporting the well-being of pediatric patients through the power of music. Music therapists use music interventions to address the physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of patients across various age groups and medical conditions. Music therapy plays a vital role in enhancing the holistic care and quality of life for pediatric patients, offering a therapeutic outlet that complements medical treatment and promotes healing.

Tutoring Program

To help maintain connections with teachers and classmates and to keep pace with homework, child life staff can assist you in acquiring tutoring services for schoolwork.

Special Events and Entertainment

Special events and entertainment, such as recognition of birthdays, holiday traditions, the celebration of finishing chemotherapy, and completion of treatment or going home parties, helps bring normalcy to patients. Our weekly ice cream sundae event and special entertainers, such as visiting clowns from the “Clown Care Unit,” help make your child’s hospital stay more comforting.

If you are interested in performing or holding a special event, view our Special Event Guidelines and apply to host an event.