Schonert-Reichl – mindfulness research

So mindfulness is one area of research that has been gaining increasing attention.  Mindfulness defined typically refers to being in the present moment without judgment and paying attention on purpose.  For the past decade I’ve been studying mindfulness in school age children particularly around a program called MindUP developed by the Hawn Foundation.  

The MindUP program is for school age children that integrates mindfulness and social and emotional learning.  So the children that receive the program which could be pre-K to grade 2, 3 to grade 5, 6 to grade 8, actually three times a day practice mindfulness.  They call them “brain breaks” actually, where the children take a moment, take breaths, pay attention to their breath.  But they also do things like mindful movement, mindful tasting – a favourite among many children, as well as mindful listening.  

 And for the past decade I’ve been doing research on this MindUP program to see does it really benefit children in terms of their social and emotional well-being, in terms of their ability to self-regulate, decrease stress.  A lot of those factors that we’ve seen in the adult research on mindfulness that shows these positive benefits but we haven’t known until now.  And my research on MindUP with grade 4 to 7 children and another study on grade 4 to 5 finds in fact, that this mindfulness program or social and emotional program with mindfulness components actually does promote positive well-being in children, decreased stress as well as make them more positive in their lives with friends and with their teachers.  

One of the things I just want to say, it’s interesting in this study that we looked at peer relationships and we asked kids to actually nominate their peers on how much they’re kind, how much they help others, how much they cooperate.  And the children who received the MindUP program increased on all of those compared to children who did not receive the program, which we call a control group.  Those children actually got worse throughout the school year. In our research on the MindUP program, we not only found improved social and emotional skills as well as increased capacity for empathy and caring for others, we actually found that those children who received the MindUP program had math test scores that were 15% higher than the children who did not get the program.