About

As a Child Life Specialist, I am devoted to providing holistic care by serving and engaging with pediatric patients and families of all backgrounds. I value the importance of partnering with the healthcare team to create a child-friendly, healing environment to minimize fears, encourage normalization, and promote optimal development. I utilize my knowledge of family systems and child development to provide children with therapeutic and medical play opportunities, procedural preparation and support, medical education, and emotional support to guide and empower.  

One of my earliest memories as a student at Bank Street College of Education was sitting in a child development class as the professor posed the question, “What lens are you looking through?” In other words, what experiences in life have transformed the way in which you interact with the world around you. As I took a seat on the train that night, I realized I chose to sit next to a person based on how they made me feel. Whether it was their outfit, their demeanor, or even their smell, I inadvertently had placed them above or below me on a human scale. I had judged them without knowing their story, and perhaps at the heart of my choice was fear and ignorance clouding my lens. This question has continually shaped my graduate experience and my study in the field of child life. 

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Within the last couple years, a new question emerged from my research and work in the healthcare setting, how do I create opportunities for individuals to tell their story. In other words, how do I create a space to listen and to ultimately take witness of another’s life? Listening, requires me to stop, to position my own body and mind in an attitude to receive. Listening, requires me to take witness of what is being unsaid through body language, tone of voice, and rhythm of syntax of the story teller. Listening, requires me to acknowledge their story without interjecting my own. Listening, may call me to a place of understanding, to truths, to beauty, and to love. 

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Child life professionals have the opportunity to work with many different people groups, diverse cultures, and a multitude of languages. Creating a space to hear a patient or family member means also giving them a voice in their language. Children’s literature, signs, and documents only in English restricts a patient from participating in their own healthcare, it restricts their choice, and sends a message that their voice does not matter. In New York alone there are over 800 languages, which you'll hear if travel along the subway lines or stop to listen.

This website was created to help assist the needs of patients and families you may encounter in the healthcare setting; helping you advocate for your patients by working with your hospital to increase resources and transform your own therapeutic practice through knowledge and diversity.