INSIDE Child Life Alphabet

V is for Volition: turning Distraction into PlanneD alternate focus

Anne Luebering Mohl, PhD, CCLS and Joy Goldberger, MS

The major goal of procedural support is to empower children and their families with a sense of mastery that will carry over into future challenging situations. Often, distraction is the default intervention of choice for staff and families, and if it results in completion of the procedure, we may conclude that distraction was a useful tool. But is the goal of child life intervention just to make a procedure “go well”? Can a sense of mastery truly be gained from distraction? Employing the child’s volition to transform distraction into planned alternate focus better aligns our intervention with the goal of empowering the child.

Distraction for child life specialists often consists of holding an age-appropriate book, toy, or app between the child and the distress-provoking event to divert his or her focus from the medical proceedings. Afterwards, the child life specialist may document that “patient was supported through distraction,” but what this really means is “I drew the child’s attention away from the noxious stimulus.” When a child life specialist distracts a child, the active agent in that situation is the child life specialist. The child is relatively passive, just having their attention pulled away by the child life specialist.

Procedural success should not depend on the child life specialist’s distraction efforts, but on a child’s own coping processes. A child who is not the active agent in the interaction is not building coping skills and gaining mastery over a challenging situation.

Distraction involves the layering of one intense stimulus on top of another. For a continued on page