What made you first interested in becoming a Child Life Specialist? 👍

 This is an interesting question for me.  As I have said, I had no idea what a Child Life Specialist was until my first diagnosis in 2008.  In thinking, without my tumors, I would have had a very different path for my education, which funny enough probably would have been in education.  But I digress, two of my four interviews talked about having a traumatic event in their childhood that lead to their become a Child Life Specialist, whether to themselves or a family member.  

June talked about the hospitalization of her brother:

"My older brother was a cancer patient at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Boston Children's Hospital when I was very young. I was his bone marrow donor twice, two and a half and three and a half. And then he unfortunately passed away when I was five. But I still have memories from our time in the hospital and we have pictures with our child life specialists. So I kind of always had in the back of my mind growing up and, you know, I ended up going down that path and I love it.
So it's really cool. And it's especially cool to be back at I'm at Children's right now, Boston Children's. So it's really interesting to be back at the place that we spent a lot of time at when I was a kid. And now kind of being on the other side is is really cool."

Shayla, herself was a patient in a childrens hospital:

"So when I was about like four four, I had some like bladder and kidney problems and I needed several because I don't know if you're familiar with that procedure. And those are very traumatizing for adults even. Right.  And so I had I was being seen at a community hospital and then my dad works at Johns Hopkins. And so my parents ended up taking me there. And my mom just being kind of the overprotective, wanting to really help her child through. It was like, we need more help. This isn't working.  And Hopkins obviously had child life. And I work with a child life specialist. I ended up needing surgery as well. Nothing nowadays the surgery is very minor, but this is still traumatizing. Twenty years ago, this happened, so. Yeah, I was in the hospital for several days and work with child life, and so that's how I kind of found out about them. But I didn't really want to become a child life specialist until the beginning of college."

With this all being said, why do we have to go through trauma to learn about these positions?  Other trauma related occupations are widely known in society: social workers, counselors, psychologists, therapists, etc.  But Child Life Specialists are very rarely shared to the public.  Why is that?  Are they only idolized when needed?