Home Schooling Strategies-Mindful Parenting: Part 1 Embracing the Moment: Being with your child

3/8/2020

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Alexis Chirban, MA
CCS-Psychology Intern
Doctoral Candidate-
William James College

"I have often been asked: How can being mindful with a child be beneficial" -Alexis Chirban

Home Schooling Strategies

Mindful Parenting: Part 1
Embracing the Moment
Being with your child

Parents,

Please apply the words that our Copernican Intern, Alexis Chirban, MA, wrote on the topic of mindfulness to being home and schooling your child. We were planning on posting this information before the current health crisis but more than ever feel that it is appropriate to help you support your child's transition to learning at home. Please check back in with us for additional posts by Alexis on how to apply these techniques over the next few weeks.
Be healthy and be strong,
Dr. Perna

Mindfullness Research:
I have often been asked, “How can being mindful with a child be beneficial?”

Research has shown mindfulness to be associated with:

Significant effects on improving parent-youth relationships by parents engaging with their youths in a more attuned, accepting and compassionate way (Coatsworth et al., 2015).
Lower levels of anxiety, worry, depression, rumination, mind-wandering and negative affect (Deng et al, 2019 & Geronimi et al., 2019).
Improving executive functions of inhibition, working memory and shifting.
- Inhibition (inhibitory control) is the ability one has in managing behavior, attention, emotions and thoughts in response to both internal and external distractions at a given moment.
- Working memory is understood as the ability to store and manipulate information.
- Shifting is the ability to adapt to change and consider and appreciate a different viewpoint (Geronimi et al., 2019).

Mindfulness has received a large amount of press recently. If you gaze at magazine covers in your supermarket’s check-out isle you will notice articles that target mindful breathing, mindful coloring, and mindful eating. These writers seldom talk about what mindfulness actually means and how you can apply a mindful approach to your relationships with your children. Let’s give it whirl and see where we end up!

"Become aware of the moment"

"Children typically
are not judgmental"

Mindfulness Defined:
Simply put, mindfulness is about noticing and becoming aware of the present moment, in a non-judgmental way. The hardest part of this process is avoiding the judgement. We have built up so many layers of judgement in so many things that we do, we no longer notice that we are judging. Children typically do not judge; they experience life as it comes at them.

Challenge:
Let’s try it. Right now... Take a moment to sit back. Notice what’s around you. What do you see? Hear? Smell? Touch? Taste? How do your surroundings feel to you? If you are saying, “Well I think…” Try to drop the “think” and simply finish the statement, “I feel….” whatever?

Kids are great at this first challenge. If you place food on their plate that they do not like, they will get a disgusted look on their face and comment, “Yuck, I hate it, take it off my plate.” Our tendency as parents is to become frustrated with them. Adults will attempt to discuss all of the thoughtful reasons why they should eat the food that is on their plate, such as:

“It is healthy for you”
“You need energy for school”
“You have to watch your weight”

And as is typically the case, the foods that kids reject are commonly vegetables or whole grains. We judge their eating, based upon our thoughts of what is a “healthy diet.” They are simply enjoying the moment.

"Reconnect
to your childhood sensory experiences"

"Mindful moments can spur on a dialogue with your child"

Use your Senses:
This is what your child is doing. One of the easiest ways to remind yourself what it is like to be a mindful child is to take a step back and become aware of all of your sensory input. From our earliest moments on earth, we have processed environmental experiences through our senses. To this day, we constantly scan our world, analyze it, and respond to it without our conscious awareness… even as you read the words in this article right now you are engaged in this process of sensory awareness.

Reconnecting to our sensory experiences can help us reconnect to our environment. As a result, we can make these habitual and automatic ways of responding more available to our conscious level of being. When our automatic ways of responding become consciously known, we can then offer ourselves a chance to engage in a substantively different experience of being in the world, including our choice to be with our children in a qualitatively different way.

Example:
For example, maybe after you noticed your child’s rejection of a vegetable, you thought back to your own childhood. What did that vegetable taste like to you when you first tried it? Was it bitter? Was it fibrous? Did it smell funny? A momentary check-in offers an opportunity for you to consciously take in information about your own past sensory experiences and provides you with a new choice in how to respond to your child’s experience.

Rather than becoming frustrated with your child, you might comment to your child, “Oh I was just like you, I hated spinach when I was a kid. It tasted funny to me and I had a hard time chewing it. I can understand why you don’t like it.” This mindful moment might spur on a dialogue, perhaps a question like, “Then why do you want me to eat it?”

The power of mindfulness is in the choice it gives you to either respond to your environment, including your child, unconsciously from habit, or engage with them and the world around you in a different way-a mindful way. These are exactly the techniques that will allow you to help your child focus away from many of the stressful thoughts that are barraging them during this current health crisis.

Keep an eye out for future posts on specific applications of mindfulness activities for during the current health crisis. Be healthy and be strong.

References:
Coatsworth, J. D., Duncan, L. G., Nix, R. L., Greenberg, M. T., Gayles, J. G., Bamberger, K. T., … Demi, M. A. (2015). Integrating mindfulness with parent training: Effects of the mindfulness-enhanced strengthening families program. Developmental Psychology, 51(1), 26–35. doi: 10.1037/a0038212

Deng, Y., Zhang, B., Zheng, X., Liu, Y., Wang, X., & Zhou, C. (2019). The role of mindfulness and self-control in the relationship between mind-wandering and metacognition. Personality and Individual Differences, 141, 51–56. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2018.12.020

Geronimi, E. M. C., Arellano, B., & Woodruff-Borden, J. (2019). Relating mindfulness and executive function in children. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 135910451983373. doi: 10.1177/1359104519833737