Teaching Mindfulness to Anxious Children

If your child is having trouble in school, gets sick very often, or has started refusing to go to school, he may be suffering from anxiety. This is a very common phenomenon among children, affecting one in every eight kids at some point during their formative years. As a parent, it’s easy to react to your child’s anxiety in one of two ways: finding something (or someone) to blame, or ignoring it completely. But neither reaction will get to the root of the issue. As a parent, you can play an integral role in helping your child manage stress and deal with anxiety effectively. One of the most powerful ways to do so is by teaching your child mindfulness.

If you’ve ever heard of the concept of being in the “moment,” then you have some idea of what mindfulness is. This concept is at the heart of Buddhist meditation practice and has been adapted into clinical psychology since the 1970s. In this article, we’ll discuss how mindfulness can ease anxiety and how you can implement its practice into your child’s daily routine. But it helps to start by understanding how anxiety works in your child before we focus on how to cure it.

How Anxiety Works in Children

When your child gets anxious, he feels many of the same symptoms that you do when you are nervous. His respiration and heart rate increases, he begins to sweat, and he may tremble or shake. He may feel nauseous. Emotionally, he may have racing thoughts, fears that he will lose control, or fears that he will die. The crucial difference between a child’s anxiety and an adult’s is that a kid may not understand the physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety. He may, in a sense, begin developing a fear of the fear response. This can lead to a vicious cycle where his fears feed his physical symptoms, which feed his fear. That can be difficult, but not impossible, to break.

In addition, we are all equipped with neural pathways to the brain that develop as a kind of “short cut” to the fear response. This is a hang up from our caveman days, when learning fear quickly meant survival. What it means for kids now is that they learn the fear response and trigger a quicker reaction with each introduction of the fear stimulus. In other words, if your child is scared of riding the bus, over time even the thought of riding the bus can trigger the fight or flight response. The good news is, this learned response can be unlearned with the proper combination of stress reduction and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques.

What Is Mindfulness?

Now that we understand the fear response in kids, let’s turn our attention to mindfulness. What is it, and how can it help your child? The concept of mindfulness is part of Buddhist meditation practice and has been adapted by psychologists to help relieve the symptoms of anxiety. There are two key facets of mindfulness:

• Focusing your attention on the present;
• Accepting and acknowledging the thoughts that come to your mind as you meditate.

The idea is to focus your mind on your present circumstances, allowing your thoughts to wash over you as you meditate. Whether these thoughts are positive or negative, the goal is to accept them and move on. As a parent, you can help your child learn meditation and mindfulness to ease his anxiety.

Benefits of Mindful Meditation

According to Dr. Susan Kaiser Greenland, who recently published a book called The Mindful Child, mindfulness can bring about the following beneficial changes in children:

• Developing a longer and more stable attention span;
• Developing compassion;
• The ability to view life without an “emotional charge”;
• The ability to approach new situations with curiosity and open minds.

The physical benefits of meditation have long been touted by practitioners around the world: lower blood pressure, decreased sweat production, decreased cortisol levels (the stress hormone), increased immune function, and more efficient oxygen use in the body.

For the anxious child, mindfulness can calm the racing thoughts and catastrophic thought patterns that children often engage in. It can help ease the physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety in your child, breaking that vicious cycle of fear begetting fear. Consider it one of the tools in your kit for helping your child reduce the overall amount of stress in his life, and giving him the basis he needs to overcome stressful situations in the future.

Teaching Mindfulness to Kids

As Dr. Greenland states in her book, the best way to teach mindfulness to your child is to practice it yourself. If you are unsure how to begin, try purchasing an online self-help kit to get started in the right direction. One great way to get started is to start a family meditation time a few times a week. Little kids, who often have trouble sitting still, can still get in on the meditation by swaying slowly from side to side as they stand. Older kids can meditate while sitting or lying down on their backs.

Guide your family through brief, mindful meditation exercises a few times a week, and you may be surprised at the changes you see – not only in your anxious child, but in your own stress levels as well. Let your kid see you meditate and respond to moments of stress by using mindfulness. It’s a powerful lesson for a child to watch.

Using Self-Help to Reduce Stress

Your self-help regimen will also include other techniques that you can use to help your anxious child. In addition to practicing mindful meditation, you can adapt yoga into your child’s routine. You might try visualization as you meditate. You can also integrate diaphragmatic breathing into your meditative practice. All of these can be used to keep your child’s meditation routine fresh and relevant, while keeping him from becoming bored with it.

By practicing mindfulness and other self-help stress reduction techniques, you can help your anxiety-prone child to overcome his fears and live a fuller, happier life. It’s also a great way for you to deal with the stress in your own life as well.