Children's Grief Center of New Mexico

Clients at The Children’s Grief Center (CGC) are children ages 5 & up who have experienced the death of a caregiver or sibling. Support is also provided for the child’s current caregivers, who may be a surviving spouse, parents who’ve lost a child, or grandparents suddenly raising orphaned children. CGC is the only program dedicated to bereaved children in Central New Mexico. Families have come from as far away as Los Alamos and Encino, but most families live in Bernalillo, Sandoval, or Valencia Counties.

Support Groups are designed to give the child the opportunity to talk, draw, write, play or act out their experiences and to process these experiences with others who are going through the same thing. Group activities are appropriate to each age group, but may include an art project (drawing pictures about the funeral, the last memory, etc.), or a puppet show choreographed by the kids, reading children’s stories about different kinds of death, writing personal stories about the death, etc. Group guidelines let each child know they can always “pass” if an activity is something they are not ready for.