Joy Fisher Williams remembers the welcoming atmosphere of her first peer support group meeting at The Children’s Room.
“I was invited to make myself a cup of tea,” she said. “We had a singing bowl that we rung right at the beginning to signal, ‘whatever was on your mind: your commute to the children’s room, your busy day, your whatever, leave that and come together now to get the support that you need.’”
In November 2017, Williams’ husband, Brent, died from an unexpected heart attack. She sought out grief support from the Room for herself and her two sons, Fisher and Ruben.
“I was with a lot of people who were a little bit more experienced in their loss than I was,” said Fisher, who’s now on the Arlington nonprofit’s board. “I just remember this feeling that I want to be the person who has experience and time behind me, like a distance from the event so that I can feel like I had my life together. That did eventually happen.”
Settled in a yellow Victorian house, The Children’s Room provides free grief support services to children and families in Massachusetts, along with programming in community centers and schools.
A group of caregivers started the organization in 1993 at Hospice West in Waltham as a space for children to openly grieve. The Children’s Room gained nonprofit status in April 1996.
Today The Children’s Room serves people from 80 communities. About 1 in 13 Massachusetts children experience the death of a parent or sibling by the age of 18, data from the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model shows.
Jon Gay, The Children’s Room’s executive director, reflected on the organization’s growth since its founding.
“We were in the basement of a church, and we had five or six families coming to us,” Gay said. “You fast forward to today, and we’re working with about 500 children and teens and about 350 parents and caregivers. That’s kind of the exponential impact that we’ve been able to have.”
A main component of its grief support services is the peer support model, which involves placing participants of similar ages and experiences into facilitated groups to address their grief. This approach makes people feel less isolated in their bereavement, Gay said.
“What we hear oftentimes from the kids and teenagers is that they don’t feel alone,” he said. “They feel connected to others and like they’re part of a community.”
Christine Lambright, the nonprofit’s director of school and community-based services, said the organization also emphasizes self-expression for children who are grieving.
“We also want to help them to be able to learn more about what grief is and how to express it,” Lambright said. “That could be learning words to match up to their emotions and learning ways to express their needs. It could also be through other means, like using art or using play or using movement or music.”
The Children’s Room uses grief-sensitive language in its approaches, such as avoiding the use of clinical terminology, Gay said.
“We try not to medicalize grief, and we don’t treat grief because it’s a normal reaction,” Gay said. “We try not to use language like ‘loved ones’ because all relationships are complicated and different. We really are trying to change the narrative.”
The center’s services extend into schools throughout the state. One of the focuses of in-school support is to teach students strategies to manage their expressions of grief, Gay said.
“If they’re having a rough day, they’re going to know how to develop coping skills like taking a deep breath or stepping away from the material so that they can come back to it,” he said.
Gay underscores the role of in-school grief support in mitigating negative effects, such as declines in attendance and test scores.
“The actual intervention of providing grief support is a great way to counteract those adverse outcomes by getting kids the support they need in a place where they can benefit from it,” he said.
One of these partner schools is Fenway High School. After attending a professional development presentation by The Children’s Room last February, school social worker Alejandra Castro worked with the organization to launch a peer support group this year.
Castro said the group demonstrates the expansiveness of grief.
“We had zoned in initially on students who would experience loss with parents and siblings, but what we’re seeing now is with friends and grandparents,” she said. “There were even kids talking about pets and neighbors.”
School social worker Allyssa Pontes said the peer support group has affected the school community in a positive manner.
“The impact for the Fenway community is just being able to give them that space, that students feel more comfortable, and there’s more awareness around getting help,” said Pontes.
Lambright refutes the idea that children don’t grieve as much as adults do.
“It’s interwoven into their story and who they are,” Lambright said. “It doesn’t define all of who they are, but it really helps shape how they see the world, especially as they grow up. Oftentimes in very empowering ways.”
This story, published March 13, 2026, is part of a partnership between Your Arlington and the Boston University Department of Journalism.