Mindful Kids
How does mindfulness affect children?
Mindfulness has been proven to have a positive impact on the overall mental health of children. It helps children to be more mindful of their emotions, thoughts and behaviour, enabling them to develop healthier coping strategies. Mindfulness also helps children to become more socially aware and better able to deal with stress and anxiety. Mindfulness also helps children to develop a greater sense of self-acceptance, allowing them to feel more comfortable in their own skin. By intentionally teaching children mindfulness tools, we are creating an awareness of mindfulness as effective tool in self regulation.
Let's consider what exactly self-regulation is, so we can understand how mindfulness plays into self-regulation. Stuart Shanker (Mehrit Centre) defines self-regulation as: the ability to manage your own energy states, emotions, behaviours and attention in ways that are socially acceptable, and helps achieve positive goals, such as learning and maintaining good relationships.
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Now let's think about mindfulness, Susan Greenland (Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA) states that mindfulness enables children to pay closer attention to what is happening within themselves - their thoughts, feelings, and emotions - so they can better understand what is happening to them.
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Clearly, mindfulness and self-regulation go hand in hand. They have the same end goals for our children. Mindfulness gives us clearly defined tools and strategies to help give our children tangible, fun, memorable and effective ways to learn self-regulation.
Why is mindfulness important for children?
A child's life is full of stress. From home to classroom, peer relationships and siblings the stressors just add up!
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From a classroom perspective we see some common stressors such as:
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fear of being wrong
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anxiety of tests and speaking
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navigating peer relationships
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understanding adult relationships and expectations
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lack of stimulation
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inability to comprehend challenging material
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When kids are under this much stress, and carrying this worry, how can they possibly focus on what they're actually supposed to be paying attention to?
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Mindfulness helps to improve the ability to focus and pay attention, it builds self-esteem, allows children to better recognize thought and feelings and experience life without the same worry and judgement that influences their stressors.
The Science!
Let's take a look at what science tells us about the developing brain, and how this influences the need for mindfulness in our children.
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The brain can be broken into three parts: the reptilian brain (automatic responses eg. breathing,) the limbic brain (guard dog of the brain,) and the cortical brain (pre-frontal cortex, the thinker.)
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Our reptilian brain keeps us alive automatically. It does its job well and usually efficiently.
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The limbic brain houses the amygdala, and this amygdala is our guard dog to our stress responses. The amygdala filters incoming stimulus and decides if it represents a threat. Once the amygdala confirms a threat, it produces our stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) and glucose to our muscles in preparation for action. This creates a huge build up of energy in the body. However, if the amygdala feels safe, and doesn't perceive a threat it will open up the gates for information to move into the pre-frontal cortex.
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This pre-frontal cortex is what we rely on for memory, executive functioning, attention, awareness, thought etc. The pre-frontal cortex essentially controls intelligence as we define it.
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What we know is a stressed brain can't learn, our thinking brain is inaccessible when we are blocked by the amygdala. The more often this happens, the harder it becomes to come back to a state of balance. We want children to practice being calm, alert and able to learn.
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Mindfulness turns on the parasympathetic nervous system. When we kick in the parasympathetic nervous system it switches off the Autonomic Nervous System - which gets turned on when the amygdala perceives a threat.
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By kicking on the parasympathetic nervous system, we are able to allow ourselves a chance to stop, reset and regain awareness of our brain. We have the ability to stop our own stress response, we can interrupt the process and achieve a state of regulation.
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Mindfulness practice helps us to forge new neurological pathways, so that when we find our amygdala beginning to perceive a threat we are able to pull ourselves back into a state of focused awareness.
Regularly practicing mindfulness teaches us how to intentionally slow down our breathing, bringing in increased oxygen, decreasing blood pressure, reducing heart rate -- telling your friend the amygdala that you are safe, and there is no need to send in the troops!
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