What You Need to Know About Your Child’s School Care Programs
More and more schools are adding mindfulness to student days, often as a short break for meditation. They seem to help some children relieve stress, but the scientific evidence on whether they work is mixed.
Vox says the benefit may only be to give kids a break from their busy schedules, but even if that’s the case, you can also give kids a break. However, there are a few students for whom mindfulness can do more harm than help: namely, those with schizophrenia or recent trauma.
According to Vox, if your child’s school or class is considering pursuing a mindfulness program, here are some of the questions you might want to ask:
- Does instruction in mindfulness replace another, potentially more valuable activity or resource? For example, we know that physical fitness is critical to mental and physical well-being. Mindfulness programs are taking up time from fitness? Or a math instruction? Or reading? There is so much time in the school day.
- How much does the program cost? Where does the budget come from?
- Are trainers using evidence-based mindfulness practices such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)?
- Is it used to control behavior or to reduce anxiety?
To learn about other issues and the state of science of meditation in the classroom, click the link to read the full report on the Vox .