The practice of mindfulness is growing in popularity among adults. Usually the first time we consciously explore it is during times of extreme strife, like when we’re stressed or anxious, when we’re dealing with a difficult breakup, or when we’re suffering from a chronic illness.
We search Youtube to find a video of someone with a wispy voice taking us to the beach and helping us count our breaths. Many times, it truly does provide some relief.
But what if I told you that you don’t need the speaker with the wispy voice? Mindfulness isn’t just some new age practice that guides you through new dimensions and makes you float away to Never Never Land. It’s actually a real thing that you already probably do each day, even if you don’t recognize it. And it’s a critical skill that you can teach your kids!
But what IS mindfulness?
Mindfulness is actually quite simple – it’s the practice of paying attention only to what is happening around you, and within you, in the present moment, without judgement. Everything else is allowed to just float away for those few moments. Selecting a single point of focus, like your breath, a vision you like, or the sounds around you, can help you to focus your attention. If your mind wanders, you simply recognize it, and gently bring yourself back to the point of focus.
Sounds simple, right? It can be. And if you and your children condition yourselves to practice it in small ways every day, it can come with many important benefits!
What can mindfulness do for your kids?
In general, mindfulness gives you and your child a new level of control over your own thoughts, emotions, and responses. Science shows that you can influence how your body and your mind react to things that happen around (or to) you. By learning how to focus the mind, your child can function better in his/her surroundings and experience a more enjoyable life. Here are some science-backed benefits of mindfulness:
Benefit 1: Mindfulness rejuvenates the brain
Our kids’ lives are cluttered. Many times, they have to wake up for school way too early, they spend the day in school or daycare surrounded by other very active kids, learning, running, and being constantly stimulated. They get home and we stimulate them more with homework, TV, and conversation. Their brains are overworked!
Mindfulness is a way of making our brains take a pause, rest, and rejuvenate. If we can teach our kids to stop pushing and just sit still for a moment, just to breathe, we can help them develop this critical skill that will allow them to rest their brains.
The consistent practice of mindfulness actually improves the structure of the brain!
Benefit 2: Mindfulness can improve our ability to deal with challenges
When something shocking happens in your life, and you take a second, step back to reflect, breathe, hear your heart beating – that’s mindfulness. That moment where you are able to take yourself out of the strife and recenter yourself to get ready to deal with things, that’s an ability that you’ve developed during your life. Some people are really good at it, and suffer a bit less. Some people find it hard and suffer a bit more.
What if you have the ability to teach your kids how to suffer less? The truth of life is that everyone (everyone) goes through some pretty cruddy things. There will be pain and there will be challenges.
What determines your ability to be happy is really not how good you are at finding something that makes you happy. It’s the ability to feel happiness regardless of what’s in front of you.
If we teach our kids early on how to shift the focus of their minds to achieve that happiness, we help them to lead happier lives overall.
Benefit 3: Mindfulness reduces stress and anxiety
We put our kids under quite a bit of stress. In our school district, first graders take standardized tests, and their performance determines whether they will get to take part in a class doughnut party. By second grade, they already have so much homework that they don’t have time for anything else at night. Our kids are taught so young to fear failure, to measure themselves according to numbers, and that competition is more important than collaboration.
Our kids are stressed! And anxiety levels in our youth are rising.
There have now been many studies showing that mindful practices in schools, including meditation or yoga, significantly reduce anxiety levels in children. There is even a physical mechanism for this!
Scientist asked people to meditate and then observed their brain activity through an MRI. Meditation actually activated key brain regions that control the process of reappraisal. This is when we take a stressful thought and change the meaning of it in our own minds. By doing this, we decrease our own anxiety.
Benefit 4: Mindfulness enhances emotional stability and resilience
If we are honest with ourselves about our middle school days, many of us would remember quite a bit of social strife. Some days you’re part of the “in crowd” and sometimes you’re kicked so very far out of it, only to be accepted back in the next week. These situations are happening earlier and earlier these days and bullying is on the rise. The bottom line is, our children deal with emotional triggers every single day.
One of the biggest benefits of mindfulness is an improved ability to regulate emotion. In kids that were given mindfulness training, emotional outburst and negative feelings decreased.
Studies show that mindfulness practices actually calm the emotional center of your brain, the amygdala. This decreases the height of the emotional responses that you experience. This would make it more likely that your child would shrug off an episode of bullying than engage in it.
Adolescents who are mindful are also more socially adept, experiencing better popularity and more friendships.
Benefit 5: Mindfulness helps to deal with physical pain
What if it were possible to make your child’s skinned knee hurt a bit less? Or perhaps even a major injury should an unfortunate thing like that occur? Mindfulness can do that! Several studies have shown that practicing mindfulness can give you power over your pain. The ability to non-judgementally accept moment-to-moment experiences and sensations actually decreases the intensity of pain, and increases pain tolerance in adults, adolescents, and children!
Benefit 6: Mindfulness increases academic performance
The ability to focus the mind has incredible power when it comes to intellectual performance. Study after study supports the idea that practicing mindfulness helps kids to pay attention in class, think in more innovative ways, improves focus, improves memory, and helps with problem solving.
Ok, so how do we teach our kids to be mindful?
I could tell you that you should sign your kids up for yoga, Tai Chi, or mindfulness workshops, and sure, if you have the time and the resources to do those things, it would likely be beneficial. Most of the research done on mindfulness in children used training programs that were organized in schools.
But, if you’re anything like me, fitting something like that into your already busy schedules will likely cause more stress than you’re alleviating through the practice! After all, I’m suggesting here that we teach our kids to stop and smell the roses more often, not add yet another activity into their complicated little agendas.
So I want to focus here on things that you can do inside of your already busy schedules to practice mindfulness with your kids. These activities are based on the ones used in scientific studies, but are modified for use in a regular daily schedule. The most important part here is to practice these on a regular basis, so they become part of the routine. This will help to train your child’s brain to become instinctively mindful:
Option 1: Use mealtimes to explore the senses:
The classic version of this used in many scientific studies involves a raisin. If your child is like me and raisins make her want to gag, then you can use whatever food is on your plates. Like a tomato, for example.
The idea is to eat mindfully. If you’ve ever seen the movie, Ratatouille, you’re basically reconstructing the scene where Ratatouille tried to get his brother to appreciate food. You can ask your child some of these questions:
- Before eating the food, describe it visually. What color is it? Is it wrinkly or smooth?
- Smell the food. What does it smell like?
- Put the food in your mouth. What does it feel like? Is it soft? Crunchy? Does the texture change as it sits in your mouth?
- What does the food taste like? Does the flavor change as you chew it?
Encourage the use of descriptive terms (red, wet, crunchy) rather than judgemental terms (yucky, smelly, etc.). This practice not only trains your child to focus, but mindful eating also helps prevent and/or mitigate obesity!
Option 2: Record the day
When sending your child off to school, tell her that she is a camera or a reporter that snaps memories or jots down the happenings of the day.
Tell her to try to notice everything that’s going on, from the color of the teacher’s shirt to the crazy thing that her friend Sarah did in class. Then, over dinner, you can ask her to tell you all the stories of what happened that day. The first day may only consist of vague happenings (we went to lunch, we went to recess, etc.). As she gets better at being mindful, the reports will become more detailed.
This exercise contributes to your mindfulness as well. You are focusing solely on the stories your child is telling you, and in that way, you are demonstrating mindfulness and focus for your child as well.
Option 3: Be mindful about emotions:
While your child is explaining his day, ask him how he felt about certain events. Ask him to describe how he imagines his body reacts to those feelings. For example, when he’s angry, you can ask “Does that make you feel like steam is coming out of your ears?”. These associations can help him to better describe his feelings to you, and the process also prevents you from dismissing the feelings as “no big deal”. Encourage him to notice the feelings and feel them without judging them.
Option 4: Create a mindful way to deal with pain:
Let’s face it – kids are accident-prone. Skinned knees, broken bones…they happen. But if you teach your child an effective way to deal with the pain, that method will help not only with the skinned knees, but with the bigger stuff (including emotional pain) down the line.
Try this: If your child hurts herself, tell her to close her eyes and breathe slow, deep, breaths (recognizing that these might not be very slow if she is upset). Tell her to use her brain to scan her body for discomfort from her head down to her toes, like a giant laser scanner. When the laser scanner finds the discomfort, tell her to focus on the area, acknowledge that the pain is there, and imagine the laser blasting the pain. Tell her to imagine the pain floating up and away. Alternatively, she can also imagine a pain tunnel with a light at the end, and she’s traveling towards the light area where the pain will stop.
This method will not eliminate the pain, but allowing the mind to acknowledge it, accept it, and realize that it’s not permanent, can help to alleviate the pain somewhat.
Option 5: Try a few simple yoga poses together each night
To be honest, I didn’t know that kid yoga was a thing until my 4 year old pre-K-er came home and did an adorable tree pose one day.
Her teacher chose to start a daily yoga practice for the kids to get them all to calm down and focus, and she said that it worked wonders! Yoga is an excellent way to encourage focus on the present, but you don’t need to go out and take an expensive yoga class to practice it at home with your child.
Below is a great website with one way to practice yoga with your child:
Option 6: Spend 5 minutes outside to explore the environment:
When you all get home, take a few moments to sit down together outside. This can be done in pretty much any environment, from a grassy backyard to a curbside on a city street. Tell your child to close his eyes and describe everything he hears around her. Then tell him to open her eyes, and you can take turns pointing out everything you see. Again, avoid judgemental words. Just experience what is there.
Option 7: Go on a weekend hike
In my opinion, there is no better way to be mindful than to immerse yourself in nature. There’s just something about looking up at the tree canopy, hearing a trickling stream flowing by, or catching a glimpse of an animal or two, to help you to stop worrying about the daily minutia and focus on something simpler.
A recent study showed that regular exposure to nature increased feelings of well being, made children feel more confident, and even had benefits for them in the classroom!
Option 8: Establish a mindful bedtime routine:
The focus of this should be to help your child relax, and to help to release the worries of the day. Here are some things you can do during the bedtime routine:
- Make a worry jar. Each night, before going to bed, ask your child to write down a current worry and place it in the jar. A good visual to go with this are the scenes from Harry Potter where Dumbledore pulls from his brain into the Pensieve with his wand. Your child can tease the worries out of her brain.
- Have your child lie down in a comfortable position, breathing slowly. Ask him/her to imagine bubbles floating up towards the sky. In each bubble is a worry from the day, floating up and away. You can even do this using real bubbles!
(Don’t have bubbles? Here’s how to quickly make them!)
- Have your child go each night to a “happy place”. Have your child close his/her eyes, imagine a blank slate, and then fill it in with a scene that makes him/her feel happy, safe, and warm.
Or, you can simply do a guided meditation (yes, that wispy voice!), counting breathing, or focusing on the relaxation of each body part in turn. For a great free guided meditation for kids, check out this one on YouTube!
And since it’s important to practice what we preach to our kids, below is a quick guided mindfulness exercise that I love to do at night, or when I’m feeling stressed during the day.
What’s the take-home?
Our kids spend so much of their time running from thing to thing, worrying about the tests they’re about to take, and dealing with social pressures and drama, that they hardly ever take the time to just stand still. It is often impossible to control the world around us, but it is possible to control the way we respond to the world. We are doing our kids a disservice if we don’t teach them this.
While you may not have time to do all of these suggested practices, selecting just a couple of them to do on a relatively routine basis can improve your child’s ability to cope with life, and find happiness in the current moment.
