About Us

Our Mission
The mission of The Children's Room is to provide a safe and caring place where grieving children, teens, and families can receive peer support and the guidance of trained volunteers. The Children's Room enables these families to express their grief and to adapt to the many changes that accompany the death. In addition, The Children's Room strives to educate the community that grieving is an important part of life and is essential to an individual's ongoing growth and development.

Our Format

We provide bereavement support for children, teens and their families.  We serve children from ages three to eighteen.  Children meet with other children their age (such as teen to teen) with similar losses.  Children meet in small groups to encourage sharing and strong connections.  We have a low ratio of volunteer adults to children.  All of our volunteers have undergone extensive and on-going training. While the children are playing, talking and doing crafts together, the adults are meeting on their own with other parents/guardians who have experienced a loss. 

Services are provided free of charge, although we invite families to make a voluntary donation. 

How to Apply

Call us at (781) 641-4741 and we will tell you more about our program, and we will invite you to the next new family orientation.  At the orientation you can tour our space and get a sense of what coming to a group would be like.  If you decide to come, we have an application to fill out and we will review the available spaces in our groups. Our groups meet every other week, and we ask that if you decide to come, you make coming to the group a priority.

Vision Statement
We imagine a world where death is recognized as an organic part of life. There are no societal obstacles in the natural expression of grief. Children and their families who have suffered the death of a family member are embraced by a safe and caring community that they can rely upon to help them cope with the grieving process. These children are seen as models and teachers to others in reaffirming the fullness of life.

The Children's Room is dedicated to realizing this vision. The Children's Room's goal is to support families. Children will feel empowered as they hear other children share their grieving experiences. They will know they have a safe place to talk about death and grief, and will become comfortable dealing with death and loss. Caregivers will gain an understanding of the grieving process and how children grieve. They will feel supported as they cope with the loss and can restructure the family unit to go on with life.

Our History
We have an ongoing commitment to the health of the community, especially its children. The Children's Room began in February 1993 when a group of healthcare professionals was trained by the nationally recognized Dougy Center for Grieving Children, located in Portland, Oregon. The Dougy Center has been in operation for 20 years and currently serves 275 children. It was spotlighted on ABC's "20/20" television news program, and has served as a model for 85 programs emerging throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, England, and Japan. The Children's Room originally operated for two and a half years as part of Hospice West in Waltham, Massachusetts. In November 1995, work began on making The Children's Room an independent, incorporated 501(C)(3) center.

In April 1999, The Children's Room, Center for Grieving Children and Teenagers, Inc. opened as an independent, non-profit center in Arlington, Massachusetts with nine children, seven families, and eight experienced volunteers. Children ranging in age from 6 to 12 had lost parents to sudden heart attack, colon cancer, leukemia, and myeloma. In the first 14 months of operation as an independent center, The Children's Room quadrupled its participant base.

Today, our current participants include children ages 3 to 18 and their families. Some of these children witnessed the sudden death of their loved one, other children lost parents or siblings to lengthy illnesses.

The Children's Room evaluates its ongoing services through surveys and volunteer processing sessions. These evaluations tell us how well we are doing our job and how we can improve. We have been featured in local and regional newspapers. Our program director has given presentations at church groups, clubs, organizations, hospitals, funeral director's associations, schools, and colleges. Children are referred to the program by teachers, mental health counselors, pediatricians, hospice workers, funeral directors, social workers, and families who are or have been in the program.