Mindfulness for Children: Simple activities for parents and children to create greater focus, resilience, and joy

By Sarah Rudell Beach

Simple and fun mindfulness activities to do with children up to age 11 to build beneficial lifelong skills that promote resilience, joy, focus and calm, and improve overall wellbeing.
Helping children to be more mindful is a powerful gift. By being mindful they will learn to recognise and manage their emotions, be more able to calm down when they are upset, become better at focusing on important tasks, and be more able to interact with others with empathy and generosity. These are fundamental skills that children will need throughout their life, but that they often aren't taught explicitly. Think of how often we demand that children "pay attention" or "calm down", without ever having shown them how to do so. Now parents can, with help from mindfulness expert Sarah Rudell Beach. Parents first learn how to be more mindful themselves before teaching their children basic mindfulness skills. With easy-to-follow activities, chapter by chapter children learn to Soothe, Focus, Feel, Pause, Appreciate and Connect. Each activity includes variations for different age groups, along with "emergency" how-tos for particularly stressful moments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CICO Books
• Release date: Aug 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781782499206

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

What is mindfulness and why do we and our children need it?

When I first started writing online about mindfulness for children, one of the searches that brought someone to my blog was how to teach mindfulness to an infant.

I smiled the moment I saw it.

For it really could be said that it is infants who teach us to be mindful. Our children come to us with no preconceptions, and an amazing capacity to be awed by the world around them. They are fully present, attuned to their surroundings, and insatiably curious about everything they encounter.

As we get bigger and busier, we tend to lose this natural presence in a flurry of activities and assignments and chores and grocery lists. We complain about our stressful and overscheduled days. We lament our inability to focus on our work, let alone on the things that really matter. We see how distracted our children are, with social media and video games and sports and friends all competing for their attention. Many people are turning to the practice of mindfulness because they feel so stressed out by the demands of 21st-century life—they are trying to find some deeply needed moments of focus and stillness and quiet.

Mindfulness is our inherent ability to pay attention, with genuine curiosity and an attitude of allowing the present moment to be just as it is. We can pay attention to our internal experience (thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations) as well as our external surroundings: the sights and sounds in our environment and the tasks in which we engage. When we are present in this way, we can meet challenges with greater clarity and flexibility. We can experience joy as we savor the goodness around us, and we can cultivate resilience as we learn to be patient with unpleasant emotions or difficult experiences that may arise. Mindfulness helps us focus our scattered attention and soothe our frazzled nervous systems.

You might find it reassuring to know that the practice of mindfulness dates back over 2,500 years! Having a human brain and a human body means having a wandering brain and a vulnerable body. Life has always been hard… and philosophers and religious leaders have spent the last few millennia developing mind-body practices that can help humans find a bit of peace and stability in a chaotic world. Fortunately, 21st-century science is beginning to validate what these philosophers and gurus have told us for 2,000 years: we can find peace and stability in the present moment. And we can help our children learn these valuable life skills as we prepare them for their joyful adult lives.

A GIFT TO OUR CHILDREN

There’s a good reason why so many schools across the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom have begun adopting mindfulness programs.

Teaching mindfulness to our children is a powerful gift. We can teach them how to recognize and manage their emotions, how to calm down when they are upset, how to focus on important tasks, and how to interact with others with empathy and generosity. These are fundamental skills that our children will need throughout their life, but we often don’t teach them explicitly. We sometimes assume that they already know how to do these things. In fact, think of how often we demand that children pay attention! or calm down!, without ever having taught them how to do so.

As parents, we can nourish and expand upon our young children’s capacity for presence and engagement, and we can help our older children slow down and take a break from the daily stimulation of school and screens and sports and socializing that can lead to significant stress. We can teach them tools for enhancing their focus and concentration, for turning toward their difficulties without being overwhelmed by them, and for responding to challenges with skillful choices, instead of their habitual reactions.

MINDFULNESS IN ACTION

Imagine two siblings arguing about tidying their toys. It is loud and tense as they begin shouting over each other. The seven-year-old threatens to tell all about the five-year-old’s transgressions, but as his frustration intensifies, he begins to notice his body is tense. He realizes how fast his heart is beating, and he discovers that his hands are tightly balled into fists. His forehead and jaw have become small and clenched. He notices the thought, I’m always the one picking up the toys. Since he’s been learning mindfulness in school, he remembers that these physical sensations and thoughts are signs that he is really angry, and he takes a moment to say to himself, This is anger. I’m feeling really mad right now.

Acknowledging his anger, the seven-year-old takes a deep breath, feeling the air come in his nose and fill his lungs. As he breathes out, he tries to relax his body. He realizes he feels better when he does this, so he takes another deep breath. As he starts to relax, he notices the angry and scared look on his sister’s face. His sister, who hasn’t learned mindfulness yet, continues to yell. Her body is getting tighter, her voice louder, and her rage swells. She is angry and frustrated, but she isn’t really aware of those feelings. There’s just a lot of energy and movement in her body, and her arm begins to wind up as she prepares to strike her brother.

In my work teaching mindfulness to children, one of the most common stories I hear is how mindfulness changes how kids interact with their siblings. How they’ve noticed how angry they’ve gotten, and instead of lashing out or hitting, they take a moment and go to their room and breathe.

In the scenario above, the seven-year-old demonstrates many mindfulness skills: the capacity to pause and notice what’s happening, an awareness of bodily sensations and thoughts, the ability to identify an emotion, the skill of breathing in a way that allows him to calm himself down, and the attention necessary to cultivate empathy and consider how his sister might be feeling at that moment.

His sister, meanwhile, knows she’s not supposed to hit and yell and fight, but the feelings and sensations of anger and frustration overwhelm her little body. As the argument proceeds, fear mixes in with her other emotions, and, without prior practice in attending to her body and feelings and deliberately trying to calm herself down, she prepares to react with her fight-or-flight system engaged.

THE BENEFITS OF MINDFULNESS

A growing body of research indicates many benefits of mindfulness for kids, including:

• Improved focus and concentration

• Decreased stress and anxiety

• Improved ability to regulate impulses and handle difficult emotions

• Improvement in executive functioning skills (planning, decision-making, reasoning)

• Increased empathy and self-compassion

• A greater sense of calm

BECOMING JOYFUL AND RESILIENT

Mindfulness doesn’t only help your children with everyday challenges as they are growing up. Being mindful becomes a way of being that benefits them their whole life, by making them joyful and resilient.

• When they are happy, they will be fully present with their joy, instead of clinging to it and hoping that things will never change.

• They will embrace the totality of their life experiences with curiosity, compassion, and wonder.

• They will discover what their challenges can teach them, and rejoice in their successes.

• They may not be happy all the time, but when they do encounter difficulties or setbacks, they will have the tools to handle them.

• They can be sad or angry or jealous or afraid or embarrassed or disappointed, without being overwhelmed by their experience.

• They will learn to turn toward their unpleasant emotions and determine what they need to do to take care of themselves.

• They will meet adversity with strength.

Joy is different from happiness. Happiness is fleeting and intense. It’s a wonderful feeling, but not one that we can sustain indefinitely. We certainly can’t be happy all the time; in fact, if we made our children’s happiness our sole aim in parenting, we’d be setting up ourselves—and our children—for a lot of disappointment. Joy is deep and enduring. In Jennifer Senior’s book about parenting, All Joy and No Fun, she boils down the difference between happiness and joy succinctly: Joy is about being warm, not hot.

Happiness is often dependent on circumstances being a particular way, while joy can be the warmheartedness with which we meet all of our experiences.

As the happiness researchers tell us, the happiness we should be pursuing is not a perpetual smiley face, but what the Greeks called Eudaimonia. In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert translates this as good spirit… human flourishing… [and] life well lived.

YES! That’s what we want for our children. We want them to flourish, to live a good life in good spirits.

And our children can engage in their lives in this way if they are resilient. Resilience is the ability to handle a challenge without being overwhelmed by it. It’s the ability to get back up when they’ve been knocked down. It doesn’t mean that the difficulties aren’t devastating or even traumatic. It means our children have the tools they need to recover. It means they know that they already possess all the skills they need to thrive.

REGULATING A BODY AND BUILDING A MIND

So now that we’ve got that out of the way… how do we actually DO that? How do we raise joyful, loving, and resilient children?

Let me first reassure you that you are doing a lot of it already! Every time you offer loving attention and encouragement to your children, you are strengthening their joy and resilience muscles. Any time you talk to your children about their feelings, offer a warm and soothing hug, listen to their jokes, kiss a skinned knee, or simply chat about their day at school, you are helping to wire their brain and regulate their nervous system in ways that promote flourishing.

There are lots of important things we need to do to care for our children. If we want to make things really simple, though, the two most crucial ways we support our children are by teaching them how to regulate their nervous system, and by assisting them in developing the cognitive and attentional skills necessary for successfully navigating the world. The beauty of mindfulness is that it provides a set of skills that support an embodied sense of calm and safety, and techniques for improving focus and working with a distracted mind.