The Lighthouse For Grieving Childen

The Lighthouse for Grieving Children provides peer support for grieving children, youth, and their families in Halton, Peel and beyond. We offer open-ended, on-going grief support groups to help children and their families re-adjust after the death of a parent or sibling. We provide a forum for friendship and self-help with others who have experienced a similar loss and develop coping skills after a life-altering death.

The experience of a “life-altering death” changes the entire family and will affect a child’s life from then onwards. Our families find and create a community of understanding, stability, and support. Bereaved children and teens can often feel powerless, angry, and isolated at school and with peers. At the Lighthouse, they meet others like them, no longer feeling “abnormal”; children feel permitted to grieve and ask questions, find resources in themselves and through new friendships, to adjust to their “new normal” and recover, living life post-death to their full potential.

Lighthouse groups are intended to support and stabilize families following the often-traumatic death of a young parent, child, or teen. Our focus is on improved mental health, breaking social and emotional isolation, and prevention of longer-term complications of unsupported childhood bereavement.