In today’s evidence-based healthcare culture, child life specialists must demonstrate knowledge and skill not only in clinical care, but also in planning and evaluating the impact of their interventions—yet few resources exist to provide research skills and support for these practitioners. To adequately evaluate, improve, and innovate patient and family outcomes, it is essential that all providers understand the key inquiry pathways of research. Combining clinical examples and skills with candid advice from seasoned child life specialist researchers, this text scaffolds the concept of inquiry into feasible units of action. From identifying a clinical question to assembling a team, designing a project, collecting and analyzing data, and reporting on results, it guides students, professionals, and administrators in actively exploring and improving healthcare outcomes for patients and their families. Case examples from the authors’ own experiences as clinicians and researchers serve to demonstrate how to seamlessly translate clinical skills into those needed for success in research, ensuring that child life specialists remain active contributors to today’s research evidence on the needs of children and families during healthcare encounters.

This textbook, the first to focus on child life assessment, educates seasoned child life specialists and child life students about the significant impact that robust psychosocial assessments have on child life interventions for children and families coping with hospitalization, chronic illness, and life transitions. Child life specialists engage in a cyclical process of assessment, planning, intervention, and evaluation to support healthy development and coping. The authors guide readers through current, evidence-based child life assessment practices and propose future directions for the growing child life profession. The book opens with chapters discussing the foundations of child life assessment including its history, moves to tools and approaches, then considers specific settings and populations, and concludes with future directions for the profession. Case examples and professional perspectives make explicit assessment applications to child life practice.

By Richard H. Thompson, Edgewood College, Madison, Wisconsin, and Gene Stanford, Children's Hospital, Buffalo, New York. With a Foreword by Jerriann Myers Wilson. Child life services include providing emotional support, structuring therapeutic play programs, psychologically preparing children for medical procedures, enhancing the hospital environment, and acting as the child's and parents' advocate. This book covers them all. It begins by describing the provision of these services in a typical case and by reviewing the relevant literature. The authors then discuss parents' needs and parent involvement, the hospital play program, and ways in which the hospital environment contributes to children's reactions. Equally thorough information is presented on the relationship of child life to other disciplines; supervision of volunteers, students and staff; and the development of a child life program. The text's balance of tools, techniques and guidelines makes it valuable not only to child life specialists, but also to nurses, occupational and recreational therapists, social workers, and other hospital personnel.

Child life is a profession that draws on the insights of history, sociology, anthropology and psychology to serve children and families in many critical stress points in their lives, but especially when they are ill, injured or disabled and encounter the hosts of caregivers and institutions that collaborate to make them well. Children and their families can become overwhelmed by the task of understanding and navigating the healthcare environment and continue to face challenges through their daily encounters. It is the job of child life professionals to provide care and guidance in these negotiations to serve as culture brokers, interpreters of the healthcare apparatus to family and child and the child to medical professionals. Despite the best efforts to provide quality, sensitive psychosocial care to children and their families, they remain vulnerable to lingering aftereffects. The goal of this revised edition is to help prepare child life specialists to deliver the highest level of care to children and families in the context of these changing realities. Each chapter has been substantially revised and two new chapters have been added. This book will be a valuable resource for not only child life specialists but also nurses, occupational and recreational therapists, social workers and other hospital personnel.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

The assessment of young children's development and learning has recently taken on new importance. Private and government organizations are developing programs to enhance the school readiness of all young children, especially children from economically disadvantaged homes and communities and children with special needs. Well-planned and effective assessment can inform teaching and program improvement, and contribute to better outcomes for children. This book affirms that assessments can make crucial contributions to the improvement of children's well-being, but only if they are well designed, implemented effectively, developed in the context of systematic planning, and are interpreted and used appropriately. Otherwise, assessment of children and programs can have negative consequences for both. The value of assessments therefore requires fundamental attention to their purpose and the design of the larger systems in which they are used. Early Childhood Assessment addresses these issues by identifying the important outcomes for children from birth to age 5 and the quality and purposes of different techniques and instruments for developmental assessments.

This leading course text and practitioner reference has been extensively revised with 90% new content, covering a broader range of child and adolescent problems in more concise chapters. Prominent authorities provide a comprehensive framework for evidence-based assessment. Presented are methods and tools for developing effective diagnoses and case formulations, building strong treatment plans, monitoring progress, and documenting outcomes. Chapters are packed with practical guidance, handy tables, and sample instruments. Illustrative case material is included. Prior edition title: Assessment of Childhood Disorders, Fourth Edition, edited by Eric J. Mash and Russell A. Barkley. New to This Edition *Many new authors and topics, reflecting over a decade of research and clinical advances. *Updated for DSM-5 and ICD-11. *Chapters on additional disorders: obsessive–compulsive disorder, persistent complex bereavement, and body dysmorphic disorder. *Chapters on transdiagnostic concerns: sleep problems, risky behaviors, and life stressors. *Four chapters on the "whys" and "hows" of using assessment in each phase of treatment. *Disorder-specific "starter kits"--lists of essential checklists, rating scales, interviews, and progress measures, including links to exemplary free measures online. See also the editors' Treatment of Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence, Fourth Edition.

This popular book guides clinicians and students in assessing and treating common childhood problems. Written in a highly accessible style, the volume presents an overview of healthy development, examines risk and protective factors for psychopathology, and spells out a behaviorally oriented model of assessment and treatment planning for children aged 2-12. Each problem-focused chapter reviews the literature on the topic at hand and provides step-by-step guidelines for practice, illustrated with helpful case examples. Featuring appendices that describe widely used assessment instruments, the book also contains more than 20 reproducible measures, clinical forms, and parent handouts, ready to photocopy and use.

When children and adults apply for disability benefits and claim that a visual impairment has limited their ability to function, the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) is required to determine their eligibility. To ensure that these determinations are made fairly and consistently, SSA has developed criteria for eligibility and a process for assessing each claimant against the criteria. Visual Impairments: Determining Eligibility for Social Security Benefits examines SSA's methods of determining disability for people with visual impairments, recommends changes that could be made now to improve the process and the outcomes, and identifies research needed to develop improved methods for the future. The report assesses tests of visual function, including visual acuity and visual fields whether visual impairments could be measured directly through visual task performance or other means of assessing disability. These other means include job analysis databases, which include information on the importance of vision to job tasks or skills, and measures of health-related quality of life, which take a person-centered approach to assessing visual function testing of infants and children, which differs in important ways from standard adult tests.