Adrienne is a Certified Child Life Specialist with professional experience in in hospitals and community organizations supporting children and families as they navigate medical experiences or understanding and coping with a medical diagnoses. 

Through her work with children and families, Adrienne saw how often adults shy away from a hard conversation with a child – either to shield the child from the hard, or because the right words can be hard to find. Adrienne saw it again and again within her work how a child would either have a misconception about what was happening to them, why they were being supported by doctors, or what a process entailed. Adrienne gravitated towards these intervention opportunities to support a child’s understanding of anatomy, medical diagnosis explanation, and thus supporting overall coping and feeling of mastery over the medical experience. Adrienne felt there was more that could be done to foster these conversations at home to create a more long term, engrained learning and understanding opportunity.

That experience helped shape Child Core’s approach: combining child development and medical knowledge with storytelling to create resources that help adults have clearer, more honest, and more supportive conversations with children. Helping to take the scary out of the conversation from the adult’s perspective, and the scary out of the unknown from the child’s perspective.

Outside of Child Core, Adrienne lives in Amsterdam with her husband and son, where she loves a good cup of coffee at the cafe around the corner, or to travel to the different old cities of Europe