- Overview
     - Where We Are

Namaste Child and Family Development Center was established in 1989 as a non-profit treatment organization serving children and their families. Our variety of treatment environments includes our Treatment Foster Care homes and Outpatient Therapy Services. Namaste is an attachment-based program that focuses on building relationships with children who have difficulty trusting others. Many things can occur in a child's life that may disrupt the development of normal attachment. A typical example is an illness or accident, requiring a child to be hospitalized, which may cause feelings of abandonment. Numerous familial circumstances can disrupt the normal parent-child relationship, such as unemployment, death, parental illness, divorce, substance abuse, and domestic violence.

A child who fails to develop an attachment will typically experience multiple problems at home, at school, and in the community. Behaviors we frequently address in treatment include physical and verbal aggression, running away, depression, lack of conscience and empathy for others, resistance to adult care, and inability to take responsibility for behavior.

Namaste works with behavior problems by addressing the attachment difficulties that drive those behaviors. Problem behaviors change when children form trusting relationships with adults, practice new behaviors, and experience success. This change becomes a repeating cycle where trusting relationships with adults are closely tied to successful experiences in daily living.

Treatment's most important task is to transfer this trust and these newly-learned life skills back to the child's own family and home environment. Namaste provides family therapy, training classes, and one-to-one coaching, in order to promote successful reintegration back into the family of the child in treatment. The goal of family involvement is to supply intervention skills and strategies that support the child and help the family successfully reunify.

Our child care workers and treatment foster parents are people who love children and are dedicated to healing children and their families. We work to help families throughout the state of New Mexico. Namaste has offices in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Los Lunas, Farmington, Roswell, Las Vegas, Taos and Gallup. Our goal is to treat children and families as close to their home communities as possible. We treat children of all ages, from birth through the age of 17. Our mission is to provide children and their families opportunities to heal through the development of trusting relationships. Our experience has shown this to be an effective and rewarding approach to the treatment of children.