How Child Life Leaders Can Provide Planned Resources That Help Specialists and Teams To ‘INSPIRIT’ Resilience In Trauma Environments That Hold Risk of Compassion Fatigue

In their daily work, or in volunteer work during crisis situations, child life specialists are often called to provide care to children and families experiencing trauma. The presenter will incorporate her experience of companioning traumatized children and families in a team approach during deployments. Supporting others through traumatic experiences can heighten feelings of vulnerability, as well as the flame of genuine compassion. This calling puts specialists and teams at risk for compassion fatigue, and child life leaders can lessen the impact of vicarious trauma. This webinar encourages leaders to take self-care seriously and support their teams with ongoing personal and professional transformation for helper resilience. 

Optional Advance Reading: This webinar may be even more generative for those who pre-read Bounce: Living the Resilient Life (Wicks, 2010). Individuals may use Appendix B: An Individual Reflection Guide. Pre-reading could be configured as group professional development with any style of book club discussion format desired; copies might be provided by a hospital’s medical library or an educational fund.

Participants will be able to:

-Aid their teams to access precise resources that help caregivers and relief workers mediate stress and bounce back with self-care protocols supported by accountability partners 

-Guide their teams to compare and contrast three templates for creating a self-care prevention plan especially relevant to Child Life 

-Encourage themselves as leaders to incorporate debriefing as a low-cost and non-threatening structured approach to help teams and specialists: a) reflect to understand their emotions and experiences of helping, b) identify ways to better manage caregiver stress, and c) heal as a group.

-Analyze how a ‘companioning’ model for playroom facilitation (a) can influence how deployed Child Life Specialists stay present to traumatized children in videotaped testimonials, (b) eases role ambiguity by specifying emotional and spiritual elements of childcare, and (c) could be used to debrief facilitated support of children’s needs for safety and coping 

-Help their specialists and teams consistently boost optimism with resilience-building strategies by utilizing online exercises from positive psychology websites.

Suggested Domain: Professional Responsibility

This webinar is part of our Established Professionals programming.