Children's Grief Awareness Day - CGAD - a special day to remember and to honor.
Children's Grief Awareness Day seeks to provide an opportunity for all of us to raise awareness of the painful impact that the death of a loved one has in the life of a child.
Looking Back…
Children’s Grief Awareness Day 2019 in Stamford, CT
https://www.bridgeportdiocese.org/childrens-grief-awareness-day-at-trinity-catholic-high-school/
Looking forward…
Children’s Grief Awareness Day 2020 (Thursday November 19th) virtually!
Contact mary@gale-us.org to find out how your school or organization can participate in a virtual CGAD event this fall.
Children's Grief Awareness Day is observed every year on the third Thursday in November. This time of year is a particularly appropriate time to support grieving children because the holiday season is often an especially difficult time after a death.
Children's Grief Awareness Day seeks to bring attention to the fact that often support can make all the difference in the life of a grieving child. It provides an opportunity for all of us to raise awareness of the painful impact that the death of a loved one has in the life of a child, an opportunity to make sure that these children receive the support they need.
Grieving children often feel set apart, different from their peers, alone, and not understood. Every school and every community has children who have experienced some type of loss. Even if they keep their loss and experience to themselves, there are many children who are grieving among us. These children can be helped to not feel so alone. Children and adults together can show their support for grieving children and show their awareness of what grieving children might be going through by participating in Children's Grief Awareness Day.
Children's Grief Awareness Day began in Pennsylvania from a desire on the part of students to do more to bring attention to what their grieving classmates were coping with, for the most part, in silence. This initiative grew out of an ongoing partnership of the Highmark Caring Place with hundreds of schools across the state.
After learning more about the work of the Caring Place and learning about how alone and misunderstood their peers often feel after a death, Caring Place staff and these students worked together to inaugurate the first Children's Grief Awareness Day in 2008.
Since that time, thousands of individuals and organizations, along with local, state and national leaders from across the U.S., have worked to raise awareness of grieving children and to change the culture in order to make death and grief a topic that can be spoken of openly and compassionately.
Why raise awareness for grieving kids and teens?
Many people don’t realize that it takes most children much longer to deal with their grief than we expect and that the amount of inner turmoil, invisible to most, is much more intense than we have any idea of. We raise awareness so that people will realize that even if there is no outward sign of inner turmoil, those storms can still be raging inside a grieving child’s heart.
We raise awareness so that people will understand that a grieving child can't just "get over it"—not in any set time period, not by any act of their own will—and that there's no reason that they should just "get over it.”
We raise awareness in order to help people learn ways they might help a grieving child they happen to know, now or in the future.
https://www.childrensgriefawarenessday.org/cgad2/index.shtml