The Other Story: Giving Voice to The Siblings of Chronically Ill Children Using Dance/Movement Therapy

The relationships between siblings are some of the strongest and long-lasting relationships in a person’s life, often exceeding that of the parent/child relationship. Despite the inherent strengths of the sibling unit, life circumstances have a way of bringing challenges into any family system. The diagnosis and treatment of a childhood chronic illness is an example of a life event that can have a significant impact on one member of the sibling unit and reverberates throughout the entire family. The effects of pediatric chronic illness on both the identified patient and their caregivers have been studied and documented at length. However, research on the siblings of chronically ill children is considerably less prevalent in the literature and an overall hole exists in what is known about the experiences of these children and what successful interventions are available to support these children through such experiences. Dance/movement therapy, in conjunction with play therapy tenets and approaches, stands poised as a possible in-road for children in these circumstances to express their lived experiences using the natural mechanism by which children learn about the world: movement. With support from a dance/movement therapist, siblings of chronically ill children can explore and express their lived experiences and develop coping skills to assist them throughout childhood and beyond.