With board games decorating the walls and picture books on the shelves, Room 111 of the Olen Hendrix Building at Harding University in Searcy looks like it would be better occupied by kindergartners than college students. That’s what makes it the perfect place for teaching college students who are working toward careers in therapy and advocacy for children and similar fields.
Crystal Whittington, assistant professor of family and consumer sciences, said she loves the room. In the colorful classroom that also has a mock hospital room in the corner, her students have opportunities to pack carts full of activities for children waiting in emergency rooms, learn how to talk with parents and children about a child’s terminal disease and gain insight into how to advocate for children who have been through trauma.
Whittington was born in Little Rock, and when she was 14, her family moved to Rose Bud to be near her grandparents on her mother’s side.
“We have a close family,” she said. “Both of [my grandparents] have passed away. … They were very special.”
After graduating from Rose Bud High School, Whittington attended Harding University, where she studied family and consumer sciences.
“I thought I wanted to do parent education,” she said. “My internship was with a program that served parents who had lost custody of their children. The internship should have only lasted one semester, but I actually, on my own, continued for a full year because I wanted to see reunification.”
Whittington said she worked with those families to teach parents skills they needed to perform everyday tasks in order to regain custody of their children. Many parents had to be taught how to go grocery shopping or bathe a child. Unfortunately, none of the families she worked with was reunified, so her goals shifted.
“We know that preventing the situation from reaching that point is the best thing to do,” she said. “I started my master’s degree at Harding. My focus was on child life, and during that time, I picked different facets of development and families. I was able to customize parts of my degree because there were not degrees for child life at that time.”
With those customizations, Whittington became certified as an infant-massage instructor so she could focus on infant mental health and attachment. She also did an internship in the child life department at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, where she certified as a child life specialist.
Three years after completing her master’s degree, Whittington started her doctorate in leadership in family and consumer sciences education with Iowa State University. Her research focused on parents and nursing staff working with children born at 28 weeks or earlier.
“I think all the parents I had had 24-week-old infants, so their survival rates were very questionable,” she said. “My control was that the parents could not have touched their babies yet. … I would interview them the next week if they agreed. It was so powerful.”
Whittington said she was a little put off by the language used by the nursing staff she interviewed initially.
“I felt like they used a lot of control language,” she said. “It was all, ‘I let the parent,’ ‘I don’t let the parent,’ ‘I tell them when.’ I thought it was a negative, but the more I listened and processed it, I realized it was protective language. They felt the need to protect the babies’ physical well-being, and they didn’t understand how we could safely use parents and how the attachment process works.”
Still, Whittington knew how important the parent-child contact can be for infants. Through her research, she worked with the staff at Arkansas Children’s Hospital to implement an infant-massage protocol.
“The protocol had to be very strict and go through a lot of rigorous debate with the physicians,” she said. “Unless they’ve changed it, you have to have a physician’s permission. It starts with just a one-hand firm contact. You can’t look at the baby at the same time. You can’t talk to the baby at the same time. You can actually overstimulate them so easily that they may stop breathing. It can be very dangerous.”
Right before the final semester of her doctorate program, a position opened up at Harding University that she could not let go. She was pursuing her doctorate degree, working at ACH and consulting with Arkansas State University, yet she jumped at the opportunity when the position at Harding opened between the fall and spring semesters.
“It had been a goal of mine to come back,” she said. “The faculty member who retired left a position that was the perfect fit for my skills and my credentials. The tricky thing was, I was writing and defending my dissertation, and I was still under contract with the other two programs. I worked every single day for six straight months. I might go to church, but then it was back to the office. It was a sacrifice, but we made it work.”
That was six years ago, and Whittington has worked diligently with Harding students to get them ready for careers in child life and child development fields.
“Most of my child life students want to work in a pediatric hospital, and we provide coping skills for kids, preparing them for procedures, educating the families, sometimes end-of-life care,” she said.
Whittington said there are a lot of similarities between her students and social work students, but her students have a more specialized focus. Right now, the school offers a bachelor’s degree in child life but is looking at potentially adding a master’s degree because more and more hospitals are requiring a master’s degree in child life to fill their positions.
Whittington also teaches students who are studying child development. These students usually want to own a child-development center, or they want to work with programs that serve children with a history of trauma or abuse.
“One of our majors opened a toddler-development program for children who were currently in foster care so that she could hire more specialized and trained staff to be able to deal with some of those behaviors and struggles those kids have,” she said. “It provides continuity for those kids. They’re doing some really amazing things.”
Students in Whittington’s programs often volunteer and participate in practicums that give them real-world experience. They may go to the hospital and sit with children while they wait in the emergency room. There is an unused room at Unity Health where students set up a playroom and work in four-hour shifts to keep children entertained.
This semester, Whittington’s students have also taken on a project that can be therapeutic for participants and beneficial for a local organization. They are putting together a violence-awareness quilt by gathering quilt squares — decorated by friends, family, community members and themselves — that share encouraging messages and raise awareness about violence.
“I wanted to open it up,” she said. “It can be what you hope for. It can be your
experience. It can be whatever comes to heart.”
When the quilt is completed later this year, Whittington will donate it to the Child Safety Center in Searcy, which can use the quilt however the staff wants, whether that’s putting it on display or auctioning it off to help pay for the center’s new location.
Anyone interested in making a quilt square can contact Whittington at cwhittington@harding.edu.
Aside from her normal duties, Whittington is also working toward bringing animal-assisted therapy to campus.
“We’re in the process of getting our first dog approved,” she said. “I’m going through the process to become a volunteer handler, and there’s another faculty member in the communication sciences and disorders department who is also going to be approved as a handler. … With my students, we’re going to spend some time in libraries; we’re going to visit some retirement homes and nursing facilities and, if we can get approval, maybe even classrooms on campus. Our goal is that that’s going to continue to grow. There’s a lot of research behind the benefits of animal-assisted therapy.”
There is no denying that Whittington is a busy woman.
With her time divided among her school projects, her husband and their three children, she has a lot on her plate. Still, her passion for helping others — and helping others learn how to help others — shines through as bold as the colorful decorations in Olen Hendrix’s Room 111 at Harding.
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.