Meditation is a mind-body practice that brings in moments of calm, brings about self-awareness, and allows people to stay connected with themselves, according to Sarah Roffe, LCSW, CCLS, a co-founder and psychotherapist at Kind Minds Therapy.
Research has confirm that for children, mindfulness can:
- Mitigate the effects of bullying (Zhou, Liu, Niu, Sun, & Fan, 2016);
- Enhance focus in children with ADHD (Zhang et al., 2016);
- Reduces attention deficit issues (Crescentini, Capurso, Furlan, & Fabbro, 2016);
- Improve mental health and wellbeing;
- Improve social skills when well taught and practiced with children and adolescents.
People can get nervous hearing the word meditation. Quieting the mind is a very challenging task. Us, as people are more desensitized to the feeling of chaos and business. We have lost the art of listening and being still. Teaching kids mindfulness and meditation is not and never was one size fits all, as perceived. This is also true for adults. There are so many ways that mindfulness and meditation can be approached. There is the “passive meditation” i.e sitting and meditating ; chanting, the dzikir in the Islamic tradition or the quiet prayer approach that all traditions have . There is active meditation like yoga, even singing, dancing or walking, even writing, journaling. Anything that pulls you into “the moment”, “the present'', and clearing out the surrounding noises, can be considered meditation. This is the updated view of creating mindfulness and meditation.
Caregivers and educators can provide age-appropriate mindfulness, meditation practices. It only needs the basics and and the characteristic as follows :
- quiet location
- comfortable body position such as sitting, lying down, or walking
- focus of attention
- open attitude
Fostering mindfulness in preschoolers using tools such as pictures, objects, food, simple movements, and music, can help them develop an ability to better focus their attention and stay present. That is just the beginning of their development emotionally and mentally. When parents and children are focused , family relationships and life is nourished.
This Friday join CreaTee on our vlog series Candidly CreaTee where we will be talking with Barbi Bagos, a long time yoga practitioner, about meditation , demystifying it and its benefit focusing on adults how it has a positive impact on parenting skills.
Do you have a particular mindfulness and meditation practice for yourself and your child/children? Please share in the comment section below. If you have any comments or questions for CreaTee or Barbi, please do write them below. We would do our best to answer them. As always, we do love to hear from you.