Mindfulness for Families
Mindfulness for families allows children and parents learn together. In today’s technological world we all face a constant barrage of images and sounds. This constant overload can challenge children’s thinking capacity, make learning difficult and increase anxiety and stress. During the six week course Family Mindfulness, children and parents can learn skills together to combat stress and anxiety.
These stressors can increase risk for a variety of negative outcomes in children and youth “including social-emotional difficulties, behaviour problems, and poor academic performance. (Mendelson et al., 2010, p. 985).
Research
Research has shown that mindfulness interventions with children can reduce their stress and anxiety, improve sleep, self-esteem and well-being in children as well as contributing to cognitive development.
Part of the reason why mindfulness is so effective for children can be explained by the way the brain develops. While our brains are constantly developing throughout our lives, connections in the prefrontal circuits are created at their fastest rate during childhood. Mindfulness, which promotes skills that are controlled in the prefrontal cortex, like focus and cognitive control, can therefore have a particular impact on the development of skills including self-regulation, judgement and patience during childhood.
Parenthood
Parenthood is an incredibly stressful experience in its own right. Practising mindfulness – ideally mindfulness meditation for a few minutes a day — can be profoundly beneficial, allowing caregivers to not only share the skills of happiness and acceptance with a new generation, but also take better care of themselves at the same time.
In today’s rush, we all think too much—seek too much—want too much—and forget about the joy of just being. – Eckhart Tolle
Six week Family Mindfulness Course for Children and Parents
Our 6 week Family Mindfulness course is for Children and Parents and is designed so that you can learn mindfulness tools and techniques together with your child. It includes lots of fun activities as well as discussions on how it works. You will be encouraged to share with each other how you are applying the mindfulness tools and the experience when they were used. For parents and caregivers, the best way to teach a child to be mindful is to embody the practice oneself.
Over the six weeks you will be shown tools and techniques that can be applied when feeling anxious or stressed or when you perceive a situation to be stressful. We also include how and why mindfulness works – the effects on the Brain. All this is achieved with lots of fun activities.
Homework
There is homework for both parent and child – we recommend that you commit to daily home practice of 10 a day – as this gives you the best chance of learning the skills and helps to build mindfulness into your daily life.
One of the activities we ask the children to complete is to make calming jars- sometimes called glitter jars.
The calming jars help to teach children how strong emotions can take hold, and how to find peace when these strong emotions feel overwhelming and how our thoughts can cloud our minds. They are also good at helping you drift of to sleep!
When the jar is unshaken, the glitter is settled at the bottom of the jar and you can see clearly through it. When the child is feeling angry or upset they shake the jar. The glitter represents thoughts that are are swirling around and as they watch it for a for a couple of minutes the glitter settles again – just as thoughts do. So when the glitter returns to the bottom of the jar, they will feel more calm and able to think more clearly.
This short clip shows you how to make a calming jar.
Depending on the glue I tend to put in 1/3 glue and 2/3 hot water – if you want it to go slower then add more glue.