You might wonder, after reading the previous chapter, whether I’m suggesting that if we just focus on happy times and positive thoughts, life will be smooth sailing. But you and I know that while life includes scenic stretches of gentle waves that are fun to splash in, there are also storms that are no fun at all.
Savoring and gratitude help us and our children recognize the good times, intensify the juiciness of the moment, and do the strength building that happens when life is good. They’re useful in difficult times, too, since developing our “positive attention muscle” helps us intentionally target and sustain focus on nuggets of the positive in the midst of challenge.
In downtime, which I also discussed in Chapter 5, our attention is not targeted but wanders freely, without our conscious control. This inward attention helps our brains integrate our experiences so we can summon what we’ve learned for future use. More important for our kids, research shows that it’s the mental state in which we begin to process events and emotions, form memories, and develop our sense of who we are. You might say we’re building wisdom without realizing it.
But it turns out that in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, we need more than the attentional practices I’ve outlined in Chapter 5 to keep us on an even keel.
In this chapter, we explore another kind of inward attention called mindfulness.1 Unlike downtime, which is free-form and unfocused, mindfulness is an active, focused introspection that puts us in touch with our thoughts and feelings as they arise in response to life, allowing us to understand, work with, and direct them. As such, mindfulness holds tremendous power for strength-based parenting and living.
Mindfulness can conjure up images of a yogi sitting in the lotus position “om-ming,” but the way modern scientists and psychologists work with mindfulness is as a structured process of focusing the mind using three simple steps:
When you do this, you tune in to what’s happening in your mind in real time, in the flow of life. This gives you awareness of your thoughts and feelings as they happen.
Most people who try mindfulness, especially at first, find that their mind jumps from thought to thought, feeling to feeling. That’s OK. Thinking fast is what minds do. Mindfulness helps your mind slow down a bit. When this happens, you gain the mental space to actually get some control over your thoughts and feelings. It helps you become aware that your thoughts are separate from you. It allows you to gently grab a thought and turn it this way and that, select another to examine, and so on. With practice, you can actually choose which thoughts and feelings to pay attention to and act on—including choosing to have more strength-based thoughts.
When I teach mindfulness, I use the metaphor of a helium balloon on a string. When you’re mindful, the balloon is positioned directly above your head—fully present to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the moment. However, like your thoughts, the balloon slowly drifts away. When that happens, you’ll feel a tug on the string. This lets you know your thoughts have wandered from the present moment (maybe you were thinking about a work problem or what you’ll have for dinner). The tug reminds you to gently pull the balloon back over your head again, returning your awareness to the present moment.
When I started practicing mindfulness, I expressed frustration to my yoga teacher about how much my mind wandered. She gave me some wise and reassuring advice. She said that it doesn’t matter how often the balloon drifts away. What matters is how much better you get at pulling it back.
At the center of mindfulness is what yogis refer to as “bare attention”2—experiencing all thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations without interpretation or judgment. That last part is tricky. Believe me, I know.
While I was writing this book, Matt and I took the kids on a vacation. The first few days were great, but toward the end Emily and Nick got sick of each other. Arguments broke out. Things came to a head one night when we sat down to watch a family movie. Emily decided to lie full-length on the couch so no one else (i.e., Nick) could sit on it. So what did Nick do? He burped in her face—something he finds hilarious, being a teenage boy, and she finds disgusting.
And it worked! She jumped off the couch. He jumped on. She had a fit, screaming that he’s the meanest brother in the whole wide world. Meanwhile, he spread his body as wide as he could to occupy every inch of the couch.
I tried to tap into their positive personality traits, encouraging them both to use their perspective and see how much fun they’d been having together for most of the trip. No luck. Both were angry and neither wanted to admit that they do, generally, like each other’s company. Next I tried their forgiveness capacity. Again, I struck out.
At that moment, bare attention became my friend. As the kids got louder and louder, I became aware of my physical sensations. I noticed my chest tightening and my breathing becoming shallow. I felt the urge to cover my ears and shove a handful of popcorn in my mouth. I tuned in to my thoughts and heard my inner critic—that negatively biased part of me—whispering weakness-focused taunts: You’re writing a parenting book and you can’t even get your kids to stop fighting! I became aware that I was holding up this unpleasant scene against a dazzling mental picture I’d created of the idyllic family vacation families are “supposed” to have.
All of this took just a few seconds. But thanks to bare attention, a little bubble of mindful space formed that gave me a small but blessed pause in which to think, not just react. I could tune in to the negative story I was telling myself about what was happening and see how that was only adding pressure to the situation. Although I knew I hadn’t succeeded in getting my kids to use their strengths, in that mindful space I found the presence to summon my strengths:
The mindfulness bubble saved me. I stayed calm. I didn’t yell at the kids to shut them up so I could shut up the critic inside. I didn’t shove the popcorn into my mouth for self-soothing. I weathered it with them, working on de-escalating things until they could become mindful enough of their strengths to get themselves under control. I said things like, “I know it’s frustrating, but let’s just take a minute and think about this . . . We’ve all been in each other’s faces for too long. How about we go and do something else? . . . I know you’re fighting right now, but actually, the rest of the time you’ve had a pretty good time together. Emily, I know you’re telling Nick he’s the meanest brother in the world. But most of the time you’re pretty good friends, you know? Half an hour ago Nick was pushing you on the bike and the two of you were laughing your heads off.”
With mindfulness, I can:
These are tremendous powers for us as parents.
Imagine someone gave you an app to download on your phone that beeped at you at random times for a week. Whenever it beeped, you’d complete a short survey that asked what you were paying attention to at that moment. Were you focused on what you were doing, or was your mind wandering into the past or toward something in the future?
This simple but telling study was actually conducted. It turned out that participants’ minds were off-task 47 percent of the time. They might have been thinking about a conversation they had with someone, or about their plans for the weekend. This study found that our mood is best when we’re present in the moment,4 yet we’re mindful only slightly more than half of the time.
Mindfulness has proven beneficial for children and teenagers. In a large-scale meta-review of mindfulness that I conducted in schools across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Taiwan, mindfulness was shown to boost optimism, resilience, self-acceptance, calmness, and general well-being as well as decrease stress, anger, and anxiety.5 Students said things like, “If I meditate, I feel calm and feel like I don’t have to argue with anybody” and “You are a lot more relaxed afterward, you get to clear your mind and it calms you down.”
Teachers, too, reported feeling more settled and focused after mindfulness sessions.
Mindfulness also plays a role in raising positive emotions over time. Research by Richard Davidson, PhD, shows that people who undertake eight-week mindfulness courses have decreased activity in their right prefrontal cortex (the house of negative emotions) and increased activity in their left prefrontal cortex (the house of positive emotions).6
Can simply becoming aware of our thoughts be so powerful? Yes. Just thinking about an activity changes the brain. In one study, when people were asked to mentally rehearse playing a five-finger piano piece for one week, the brain area responsible for finger movement expanded—just from thinking about playing the piano.7
Your mindfulness spills over onto your children. In one of my studies, I tested parents for their degree of mindfulness and then tested their children for their levels of mindfulness and stress. The results were staggeringly clear: the more mindful the parent, the more mindful the child—and the more mindful the child, the less stressed the child.8 Parent mindfulness sets up a successful coping loop in kids. This is something they can take with them wherever they go.
As a mindful parent, you can pass three benefits to your children:
Mindful parents can help kids become less reactive. When the child is facing challenges or is caught up in negative emotions, parents can ask questions to identify the negative-bias thoughts the child may be having, such as, “What’s the story you’re telling yourself right now?” And, “How about we just take a pause? What are you thinking? Is that a helpful thought? Is it an accurate thought?”
Most mindfulness experts use mindfulness to help people detach from negative thoughts and anxiety. But what do you replace these thoughts with? How do you move into positive action?
I propose using mindfulness to replace negative thoughts with strength-based thinking and work toward good outcomes in negative situations. You can teach your kids to do the same, whether it’s dealing with a tough homework assignment, a tough teacher, a problem with a friend, or a transgression with consequences that must be faced.
Bringing strengths into my mindful moment on vacation gave me a path forward when Nick and Emily were fighting. I could stay calm and persist in appealing to their strengths of perspective, forgiveness, humor, and kindness to mend their rift.
I remember reading a mindfulness book in which the author likened our propensity for negative thinking to a radio tuned to a bad news channel 24/7. Why not use mindfulness to retune our frequency to the strengths channel—to ask, “What strengths can I draw on to handle this?” and help our children do the same? Remembering the mental-piano-playing study above, I wonder: What would happen if we asked our children to mentally rehearse their strengths every day?
Every time your child practices the three steps of mindfulness I shared at the beginning of this chapter, she learns how to take more deliberate control over aiming and sustaining her inner awareness and redirecting it when it wanders. Over time, she’ll improve at tuning out distractions and maintaining the sustained introspection that allows her to become aware of patterns in her thoughts and feelings.9
Mindfulness helps children understand the full range of their emotions, strengths, and weaknesses. This is highly useful in SBP because it prompts self-insight about unhelpful mental habits likely to block strengths development, such as procrastination, pessimism, and self-doubt. It gives your child a better chance of growing strengths through adversity.
Recently, Emily had a meltdown. When we talked afterward and I asked her how she was feeling, she said, “Mom, sometimes I get so angry that it feels like a bolt of lightning shoots through my body.” The next time she seemed angry, I asked, “Do you have lightning inside you?” She paused and then said, “No, I’m not angry, just frustrated.” In that mindful moment, she was able to label her feeling, differentiate between two types of negative emotions, and de-escalate herself from anger to frustration. Believe me when I say this was a happy ending for all of us!
Research shows that mindfulness, when practiced over time, fosters positive emotions,10 which makes it easier to tap into strengths. For example, Emily tells me that when she’s painting, she notices a “tingly feeling.” Nick says he can tell when he’s going to sink a shot in basketball because he gets tunnel vision. All distractions fade and the net seems bigger and wider. Mindfulness helps us to know how it feels when we’re using our strengths and return to them more easily next time. As Ryan Niemiec, PsyD, so eloquently states, “Mindfulness opens the door of awareness to who we are, and character strengths are what is the behind the door.”11
While mindfulness helps your children on their strength journey, it also helps you as a strength-based parent, getting you through those challenging moments when you’re trying to hang on to your composure—as it did me during our vacation. It also helps in more enduring ways by allowing you to be emotionally present with your children, to really get to know who they are and what they’re capable of. It helps you to open the door and see their strengths.
When you do, you’ll be more likely to notice your child’s strengths happening in the moment. You might detect a sudden shift in enthusiasm, a difference in your child’s tone of voice, or a slight improvement in a skill—perhaps that’s a growth strength to cultivate. You might see that your child is spending a lot of time on a certain interest—high use—a sign of a core strength.
Remember the mother from Chapter 2 who flipped the Strength Switch when she saw her daughter, who was “on the heavy side,” grabbing a can of Coke after returning from the gym in a bad mood? Mindfulness of her emotions kept this mom from getting on her daughter’s case by helping her notice her negativity bias (focusing on the can of Coke) and redirecting her attention to the fact that her daughter had gone to the gym three times that week. She describes how she used the positive attention tools we discussed in Chapter 5 to shift her attention to the positives. I would say she also used mindfulness to be aware of the negative story she was telling herself about her daughter and to create a new story about her daughter’s maturity—a wonderful boost to her own state of mind and to her relationships, including with her daughter:
This week I’ve been paying attention to my positive emotions. I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal and focusing on savoring. I make sure I hug my daughter every day because it gives me positive emotions. I’m aware that my spirits have lifted and it seems easier to see the good things around me. I’m seeing the strengths of my husband and business partner more. I feel like I’m finding my old positive self again.
When my daughter came home from the gym last night, I thought about how much commitment she has been showing toward her goal, and I felt a burst of pride. For the first time, I actually noticed that she’s lost weight and I saw that she’s really starting to grow up and take responsibility for things. I didn’t care about the Coke she was drinking, and I told her that I was proud of her. She gave me a hug and thanked me for supporting her. It was a complete turnaround.
Mindfulness helps you flick the Strength Switch. In Chapter 2, I told my story about Nick not putting his bike away for what seemed like the umpteenth time. When I sat in the car all those years ago and made the decision to turn on my Strength Switch, it was thanks to a moment of mindfulness. Just those few seconds:
Just as it doesn’t matter how often you tug the helium balloon back to your present-moment thoughts when practicing mindfulness, it doesn’t matter how many times you notice your Strength Switch is off. What matters is how much better you get at flicking it back on. And the better you get at mindfulness, the better you’ll get at the Strength Switch.
We all have things we’re not good at. Mindfulness can help our kids deal with what comes hard for them. Suppose your child has problems with math. How would a mindful approach help? Here’s how it might unfold:
Talk about strengths the child has that he could bring to the situation and that would change his self-talk. For example: “Math isn’t my ability, but I know I’m persistent. I can be goal focused. I’m organized. I can stick to the task. I’m curious and I can learn new things. I can ask for help or tutoring. I know I’ll feel good when I master this. There are lots of other things I am good at, like English class, baseball, making videos, taking cars apart.”
The next night, take things a step further and try this:
Try other experiments keyed to the child’s strengths:
Initially, you’ll need to walk your children through each step to help them name their feelings and suggest ideas for reframing their thinking and choosing actions from a strength perspective. You may have to stay close at first, sitting with the child as a comforting presence or checking in to see how things are going as your child’s helium balloon keeps needing to be tugged back from wandering to the “old” ways of negativity. You’ll need to ask, “What strength do you have that can help you here?” But as children get clearer about their strengths and learn how to tug on that balloon string themselves, they’ll gradually internalize the mindfulness process, and you’ll need to coach them only if they feel stuck.
I’m often asked whether being strength based means we can never have negative emotions or feel down when bad things are happening. Of course not. Being strength based doesn’t mean we ignore bad times or falsely keep things positive for our children. We need to be real. And mindfulness is a great way to help your child build resilience.12
Highly resilient people experience negative feelings but still hold on to positive feelings. Resilience is strongest when, during great adversity, we can hold negative and positive emotions in tandem and make subtle distinctions between each emotion—something psychologists call emotional complexity.13
No matter how good a parent you are, your kids will face problems, have weaknesses, and be confronted with challenges. Your child can build resilience in the face of challenge only if she doesn’t shrink away from it. Mindfulness wedded to strengths helps your child meet challenges because she knows she can sit with all of her feelings in the present moment, including discomfort, and call on her strengths to bounce back.
We can set this example for our children and assist them in finding these resources in themselves. John Gottman, PhD, calls this emotional coaching.14 Children growing up with parents who are emotional coaches15 learn that all emotions are acceptable. Psychologists and neuroscientists have found that these children have a calmer central nervous system, a lower resting heart rate, and a healthier emotional brain circuitry.16 These are the kids who stay cool under pressure! They’ve learned how to capitalize on their positive emotions and feel negative emotions without letting them get the better of them.
I have a friend whose son is a gifted athlete specializing in the high jump. When he was seventeen, he landed a jump awkwardly and suffered a severe back injury. It took a full year for him to recover. Initially, he became depressed. A major part of his identity had been taken away. My friend knew her son had strengths such as persistence, motivation, focus, and sociability. Some of those were what had made him an excellent high jumper. She set about finding an outlet for those strengths.
Part of the physical therapy involved swimming, so my friend started swimming with her son every day. She used the commuting time to and from the pool and doctor visits to see and point out strengths in her son. She saw him apply his persistence, motivation, and focus to his rehab exercises. She also saw a level of patience and compassion emerge in her son that she hadn’t seen before.
They entered an ocean swim event together that was to take place in nine months’ time, and the boy decided to use his sociability, persistence, and newfound compassion to raise money for a charity supporting people with depression. He used the next nine months to prepare for the swim, recover from his injury, and develop new strengths. His depression lifted. He was motivated and energized by his quest, and he raised quite a lot of money. What could have been a very traumatic time turned into a mother-son bonding experience.
Through being mindful of her son’s existing and emerging strengths, and helping him see them as well, my friend helped her teenager move through a challenge and arrive at a good place. Three years later, they still enter this annual ocean swim together.
Everyday issues like problems at school and with peers can create a lot of emotional pain for children, but these can be addressed productively through emotional coaching based on mindfulness and strengths. Here’s how a fourth grader’s mindful expression of emotion to a sensitive teacher led to a strength-based breakthrough at school:
During a conversation with Lauren, she shared her sadness about being excluded from her friendship group. I asked her to describe a time when she was doing what she loved and feeling her best. It soon became apparent to me that kindness might be a strength for her. I asked her what her kindness strength looked like. When she described her acts of kindness, I wondered how her friends might perceive them. With her permission, we met with a group of her friends and explored lots of the students’ strengths. This is common practice at our school, so it was seen as just part of everyday learning. Her friends explained Lauren’s kindness intruded at times on others’ space and conversations. They enjoyed her company but respectfully explained that it could be a bit much! We chatted about how our strength can be overused. Later I asked Lauren how she thought the conversation with her friends had gone. She said how much she valued their honesty and kindness, so we decided to focus on being honest and kind. Before long, Lauren was being included in the group again. Knowledge of strengths and an associated shared language enabled this very authentic appreciation of others and of their differences.
We can also use mindfulness and strengths to take better care of ourselves as parents:
Reflecting on ten years as a step-parent, I find I used many strengths to nurture our sons and to maintain my personal well-being. It wasn’t always an easy journey, particularly at the beginning. Observing, listening, questioning, using intuition, and managing emotions and perceptions have all been vital skills. I also learned to use my social intelligence to be more detached yet loving and light-hearted.
Five years ago, I started volunteering at a local hospital, as I wanted to help people and recognized that I needed a creative outlet. I remember my husband saying that I go to the hospital and talk to strangers when I could spend more energy interacting with our sons. At that time I found our sons preferred to interact with their father. It enhanced my well-being to interact with the patients and hospital staff who looked me in the eye, who engaged with me and talked to me. It also put me in touch with my gratitude that my family and I enjoyed good health. Happily, having my “bucket filled” gave me the emotional reserves I needed to interact more effectively at home. It is thrilling to see two flourishing young men and to enjoy our friendly and loving relationships today.
If you’ve grown up believing emotions should be suppressed and avoided (and if you did, it’s not your fault; we generally learn how to handle emotions from our parents),17 now’s your chance to change that belief while helping your kids.
Emotional coaching is a skill you can learn quickly.18 Sophie Havighurst, PhD, a colleague of mine at the University of Melbourne, has found that moms and dads of toddlers, preschoolers, children, and teens have done just that. After attending the “Tuning into Kids” program developed by Dr. Gottman—in which parents attended six weekly two-hour sessions at a local community center, with sessions involving group discussion and brainstorming, small group exercises, video examples, group leader demonstrations, and small group role-plays—parents in her studies were more encouraging of their children’s emotional expression, increased their use of emotion labels, and were more skilled at discussing causes and consequences of emotions with their children. This had positive effects for both the parents and children.
One simple strategy is to get into the habit of regularly asking your child how he feels, using the strength-based mindfulness techniques we explored earlier. It’s a great way to get feelings on the table and to help your child decide what to do about them by calling on his strengths. You’re helping your child in the moment and helping him develop the emotional complexity he needs to grow his strengths in good times and bad. You can start tuning very young children in to feelings with games like guessing emotions in print ads or books, or with the TV on mute.
You may be surprised by how receptive your kids are to mindfulness. It means you’re tuning in to them—and that makes them feel good!
In our house we try to practice mindfulness throughout the day using our breath to pay attention to our surroundings and calm our bodies. My hope is that the language and experience will become part of our family culture. We decided this summer to make a list of things that make us happy. Every night as we say good night, we see if we can add one or two new things to our list that may have happened during the day.
Last night, as my daughter Gracie (who is almost five) and I were snuggling and talking about the happy moments in our day, she said, “You know what makes me the most happy, Mommy? When we just lie on the grass together and stare at the clouds and practice listening for the birds. That’s mindfulness, right, Mommy? That’s my most happy thing.”
Mindful moments can happen in even the unlikeliest of circumstances. A school once asked me to introduce mindfulness to a group of rowdy eighth-grade boys. The school had specifically targeted the need for these boys, who were in a remedial group, to be able to pay more attention to their schoolwork, and although they’d tried mindfulness before, it hadn’t proved successful.
I was nervous since I was being asked to perform a task that had already failed once, but I went in with my strengths antenna up. What I saw was a room full of strengths. Vigor, humor, zest, energy, team spirit, playfulness, physical coordination, and athleticism were there in abundance. The group dynamic was all about competition and playfulness. Every second sentence was something to do with sports or genitals . . . but that latter part isn’t relevant to my story.
I saw immediately that sitting still wouldn’t work, so I decided to introduce mindfulness through their strengths by getting them to play mindful Frisbee.
The boys paired up and we went into the schoolyard. The only rule I set was that the boys had to do this exercise in silence. I started by getting them to pay attention to their hands and focus on the different ways the Frisbee felt in their hand when they threw it compared to when they caught it.
Next, I asked the boys to pay attention to the differences in the sounds made by the Frisbee depending on how fast, hard, and high it had been thrown. Our senses play a key role in the development of mindfulness because sensory input happens in the here and now. You cannot feel and hear after the fact.
After a few sessions of mindful Frisbee, the boys had experienced mindfulness: They could aim their attention at the sensations of the sound and feel of the Frisbee and block out distractions. Then we worked on developing awareness of the thoughts that ran through their heads when they made a good throw or catch versus a bad throw or catch. We talked about the harmful thoughts that occur when they missed a catch (I’m hopeless; I’m a loser; I failed; I’m worthless; How embarrassing) and how these thoughts also occur when they’re learning new things in class. We made a list of strength-based thoughts and actions they could use to replace their negative thinking.
We were able to make the list because the boys had done their character strengths survey with me in class a few weeks earlier. After identifying his strengths and discussing them in class, each boy then did an assignment on how he had used his strengths to succeed at something in his life. Interestingly, most of the stories came from outside of school. I had to find a way to show these boys that their strengths could also help them with their academic learning. In class, we turned one wall into a Strengths Wall, where we listed all twenty-four VIA character strengths. Each student cut out a small photo of his head and stuck it onto a three-inch outline of his body that he made (you should have seen the bulging muscles and tattoos!). Whenever a classmate spotted a student using a strength, he had permission to leave his seat and go to the wall to place the mini-figure of that student on the character strength he was using. Soon the boys began to internalize their strengths.
Over the course of the program, I increased the physical stillness aspect of mindfulness, but we never let go of the movement aspects. We always stayed connected to their physical strengths. By the eighth session, the boys could sit in stillness, doing diaphragmatic breathing with their hands on their stomachs for fifteen minutes.
Their teacher was incredulous. She reported that the boys were more focused on their classwork and that when they got distracted, she simply stopped the class and did a two-minute breathing exercise. Through mindfulness they developed sharper focus and got better at tuning out distractions. Their strength-based thinking, born of their mindful awareness, helped them become a lot more optimistic about school and their academic future.
We ended our time together by sitting in a large circle out in the schoolyard with the Frisbee. I asked the boys to throw the Frisbee to someone in the circle and call out the name of a strength they saw in that person as the Frisbee flew toward him. This was how the game went until every boy had been thrown the Frisbee. It was an incredibly moving ending to my time with these boys, who all stood taller and prouder at the end of our eight weeks together.
As a psychologist who works a lot with young people, I’ve developed an interest in the effects that mindful parenting can have on children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). These young people face unique challenges, and their issues result in their frequently feeling intensely frustrated, which leads to anxiety, anger, aggression, and other challenging behaviors (e.g., kicking, biting, and hitting).19 I often see these dynamics play out in the classroom when I’m consulting to schools, and whenever I see these students struggling, it stirs immense compassion in me.
Mindfulness has proven a much-needed balm for these children and their parents. In a study of the effects of mindful parenting for families of adolescents with ADHD, ODD, and ASD20 over the course of eight sessions of mindfulness training for adolescents and eight sessions of mindfulness training for their parents, teenagers showed improvements in attention and reductions in aggressive behavior.
In a paper I published on this topic with my colleagues Rebekah Keenan-Mount and Nikki Albrecht, we found that mindfulness-based interventions helped not only children with spectrum disorders but also their parents.21 When parents are shown how to pay attention to their child and their parenting intentionally—in the here and now, without judgment—it stops them from overreacting in automatic, negative ways to their child’s behavior. The majority of parents in the research studies reported positive effects in their overall health and well-being, including feeling happier in their parenting role. By doing daily meditation practice, parents learned how to take care of themselves and bring calm into their family.
A common pattern in the studies we reviewed indicated that the parents’ increased mindfulness also helped reduce their child’s problem behaviors, particularly when mindfulness was combined with an education program providing parents with techniques for responding more empathetically to their child’s frustrations (you might say strength-based programs). Bottom line: Mindfulness improves human relationships, making them more open and less reactive. This is a win for any family, but it is an especially poignant one for families whose children face these kinds of challenges:
Our ten-year-old son Jude was diagnosed with mild to moderate autism at age four. The first thing I noticed when entering this “autism world” was that it was full of stress and anxiety. Parents were worried about their children. Many were desperately looking for miracle cures or therapies.
I was anxious, too. I didn’t know anything about autism at the time and was not at all familiar with the therapies. So I started to learn and to look into education options for Jude.
I attended one class where I felt the children with autism were being conditioned to answer or behave a certain way; another where kids’ every move was recorded as if they were lab rats. I didn’t want those situations for my child.
I took Jude out of school. I wanted to spend time being alone with him without the noise, the stress, the anxiety. Just the two of us. To breathe.
Later I found a place for him at a peaceful, accepting school—a good base to start from, for him and for us as his parents. I would then slowly learn about autism, and specifically about Jude’s autism.
When I was a teenager, I read a book about Mahatma Gandhi and India’s independence. I was impressed not just by the concept of nonviolence but by the notion that one could consciously make such choices about one’s thoughts and actions. Years later, I became interested in Buddhism and then discovered mindfulness.
I find being a parent overwhelming at times. Paying mindful attention to my thoughts, accepting change and uncertainty, choosing to act rather than react—these are precious tools for my role as a mother and for my own personal development.
Jude, like any other child, changes, learns, and grows. And like any other child, he does it at his own pace. When I feel worried about him and his future, I take a deep breath, hold him, kiss him, and tell him that I love him. He then tells me he loves me, too, with his big, big smile. The little knot in my stomach then goes away, and I am ready to go on!
Some of the exercises below focus on mindfulness in general; others focus on becoming mindful of strengths. Most important, don’t turn these into chores for yourself or your kids. Susan Kaiser Greenland, an expert on child mindfulness, rightly states that compulsory mindfulness is an oxymoron.22 The trick to incorporating mindfulness into strength-based parenting is to keep it fun and playful.
Breathing is one of the most reliable pathways to relaxing into mindfulness. Why not use this activity we do more than twenty thousand times each day to bring ourselves and our children respite?
Slow breathing reduces our heart rate, lowers our blood pressure, and tells our brain to stop the release of cortisol, the stress hormone. All lead to a relaxation response in the body.23 Research shows that a relaxation response is triggered in our bodies after twelve slow, deep breaths. Since most people take approximately six breaths per minute, this means it will take about two minutes for us to get the relaxation response from deep breathing. Most people report that after two minutes of mindful breathing, they do indeed feel calmer and clearer. However, people who regularly practice deep breathing techniques are able to trigger the body’s relaxation response in just six breaths.
Breath is always available. It’s free. You don’t need to purchase any fancy equipment and you don’t even need much time. Just two minutes.
You can help your child take long, deep breaths anywhere and anytime—in the car, in the supermarket, or if you notice your child getting agitated. This is known as “in-the-moment mindfulness.” You can also introduce structured mindfulness breathing exercises to your children at home such as the Traveling Breath, Breath Circuit, Abdominal Breathing, and Equal Breathing. You can find information about these and other breathing techniques by doing a quick Google search and in the mindfulness parenting books I’ve listed in the Appendix.
How conscious are you of the beautiful and complex contact of your feet on the ground? Like breathing, we take walking for granted, yet just remember how long and hard your child worked to learn how to walk and you’ll understand what an achievement it is. When we slow down those movements that we now hardly even think about, we can use them to become aware of the present moment.
When I find myself rushing from one meeting to another across the university campus, I remind myself to become mindful. I clear my thoughts of the last and next meeting and I concentrate on what my feet feel like as they take me to my next destination.
I love doing a mindful walking exercise with school kids. Here’s one I learned from one of my yoga teachers called the “Silent Ninja.”
Once your child is more conversant with applying mindfulness to himself, talk about how he can use mindfulness to be a better friend—someone others love to be with. Some tips kids can use for getting started: