Schonert-Reichl – mindfulness research key messages

Some of the research out of mindfulness as well as the social and emotional learning for parents, I think there’s a couple of key messages I’d like to emphasize.  One is that you can teach these skills of children– that children can learn to manage their emotions, to become more emotionally capable.   They’re malleable.  We know now the brain is plastic, that you can teach these skills and I think that parents should know that even if they have a child with this kind of temperament, don’t look at it as written in stone, that you can actually provide the context for them to learn these skills.   

Which leads to my second key message – it’s all about the context.   The children all do better when they have less stress.  And so the one thing about the mindfulness program is by giving children the strategies to calm down, to learn about their brain, then they’re more ready to learn and actually acquire other skills related to compassion and kindness and being able to take others’ perspectives because when we’re stressed, we have tunnel vision, all of us.  You know, we look at one thing and we can’t see anyone around us because of that stress.   

And the last key message I really would like to emphasize is how our own well-being and our own social and emotional competence, our ability to manage stress is so critical first and foremost.  So if I had to think about parents who are going to promote mindfulness with their children, I would say start with yourselves or do it together with your child.  Practice it together.  Don’t look at it as something to do because as a parent I don’t know, and I’ll ask parents out there, have you ever been really stressed out and words came out of your mouth that you never thought would come out.  You know, where you just like, oh, I don’t have time for that, you know when we’re all stressed and we always feel bad when we do anything like that.  But we’re all human so we have to do that.   

Actually that’s another thing that is really critical – self-compassion.  It’s a whole emerging field in the mindfulness area is practicing self-compassion because I think sometimes we’re our own worst critics.  So anyway, so the idea that parents, that we have to give permission to take care of ourselves first.