Mindfulness and Meditation for Kids

It’s all too easy to become overwhelmed by the to-do list of raising a busy family. Beyond getting the kids to school and to their activities and playdates, and dealing with work, there’s pressure to throw Pinterest-worthy birthday parties, make dinner à la Alice Waters, and still have time to keep up with book club.

So how can parents keep perspective? Laurie Cousins, certified mindfulness facilitator and mom of two, teaches classes just for kids and families at the L.A.-based studio Unplug Meditation. We asked her to share some tips and resources for New Dream families on how to be more mindful.

How can mindfulness and meditation help families? Why is it important for kids?

Many families are bombarded with pressures and expectations and not enough time. Quality of life suffers. Mindfulness gives us a way of slowing down and finding the inner space within, so we can have more choices.

I really wanted my kids to have a more connected, more valued, more loved life than I’ve had, but then I get caught up in being the perfect parent, the perfect businessperson. 

Meditation helps us get back to the present moment and get back to our bodies, which are always in the present moment. I seek the moments in which we can enjoy everything we’re working so hard for, especially as parents.

For better or for worse, kids look at what we’re doing. If they can see how we’re taking time to slow down, to pause and take in life and enjoy it, then that’s something they will value as well (check out this video on the benefits of meditation for children).

How did you become a mindfulness teacher? Can you talk a little about your work?

At about age 17, I started to seek different meditation practices. I had anxiety challenges, with difficult emotions managing stress. I sought help to soothe the stress within me, studying vedic meditation, Buddhism, and transcendental meditation. I appreciated all the different practices.

But, it wasn’t until I came to mindfulness in a secular way that I thought, this is it. There’s not one way that you have to do it—you can do what works for you. My misconception was that I had to be still, to have no thoughts and just bliss out. That wasn’t my experience, and so I felt like I was a bad student. But I wanted the release of it, so I kept coming back.

Six years ago, I dedicated myself to a mindfulness practice. And I realized that if it was working for me, it could work for my family and my kids.I found Susan Kaiser-Greenland, who is my mentor and the founder of the Inner Kids program. She inspired me to work with my own family and with kids and other adults. I feel that it’s my language, and it’s my passion and purpose.

I’m very passionate about the neuroscience, too, studying with Dan Siegel to understand the biology and psychology behind our emotions. It’s not our fault. It’s the nature of the mind to be nervous. I used to think my negative emotions were a personal flaw, but now I realize it’s just the human condition—it’s who we are. So, the question becomes: how do we work with who we are?

What are the ABCs of mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a way of looking at our life experience; to remember or check in. When we are checking in, as a way of looking at the world, we check in with Attention, Balance & Compassion. 

A)  Attention - We remember to stop, check in with ourselves, breathe, and practice choosing to place our attention on one thing. This helps to strengthen our brain and steady our mind. 

B)  Balance - What is the quality of my attention? What am I feeling? Quieting ourselves with our focus, feeling our breathing, helps us to see things more clearly, feel more balanced, and less reactive.

C)  Compassion - Is a way of caring and connecting with ourselves, others, and the world around us. Being able to see both sides with kindness. The more we understand people, the more we understand ourselves.

We bring this new language to children as well as adults. However, the language comes from practices that are over 2,500 years old. It’s really taking Jon Kabat-Zinn’s idea of how what we place our attention on grows. Or, as we say, “the neurons that fire together wire together.”

It’s important to notice what you’re holding your attention on. Is it the past? Is it the future? Is what I’m thinking about now what I want in my life? Am I on auto-pilot and doing things out of habit? It’s learning to become aware, asking, “where is my attention?” and “is this something I want to grow?” No? That’s where mindfulness gives us the ability to choose where to focus, rather than unconsciously just doing it.

Is this something that every family can do? Are all young kids really capable of meditation?

You can design a practice for your family. Say you have children that are younger, or that have ADHD, or that are really hyper. Having them sit for a long period of time is not useful for them. But there’s lots of options that might work. There’s mindful movement or walking meditation, or they can send friendly wishes or say mindful phrases.

A lot of families have a hard time getting ready in the morning and going to bed at night. so that’s where these practices are useful. At dinner, you can take a moment to feel your breathing, an action that helps to settle our systems. We become aware of what we’re doing: “We’re going to eat together, we’re a family.” You can have fun with these practices with mindful eating, investigating different tastes instead of thinking “this is just broccoli.”

You could start the morning with a mindful moment, feeling your breathing before you get out of bed. Just feeling one thing stabilizes your breathing and opens your awareness.

At night, one of the parents can lie down with the kids and feel your body breathing—breathing on purpose, which is just bringing all your attention to your breath. When your mind gets busy thinking about the day, you just gently bring it back to feeling your body breathe. You can imagine a butterfly touching each body part as a night-time meditation, which is a great stress reliever. If your child is say five years old, they can just do it for a minute or so. Children don’t need as much time as adults—they are more available in the moment in general.

A big time for me is when I’m dealing with carpool, which is a stressful time for me. Instead of burying ourselves in screens and focusing on just getting it over with, we take a moment of silence, we notice the trees, what’s different that day. I remember one time I was on the 101 freeway. I was feeling stressed about constantly being in traffic. Then I thought, no, let’s take a moment. So I said to the kids, let’s look at the trees. and all of a sudden we saw this beautiful hawk that was spreading its wings. And it became a beautiful moment that we shared as a family.

We are the role models. My children watch my husband and me meditate and we invite them in a way that is developmentally appropriate to them. My son is five, so he does it for a minute and we don’t make him close his eyes. My daughter is a little older, so she does a little more. But they sit with us and talk about what they’re grateful for—their toys, their school, their friends.

With mindfulness, there’s an informal practice and a formal practice. An informal practice is most suitable for families—it’s just stopping and having many moments of mindfulness; looking at your feet on the ground and using your senses. A formal practice is sitting, and it’s different for each family, how long they can do it. Don’t make your children do it. Have it be a playful experience and see how long they can do it.

The trap is feeling like they’ve got to get this, this is going to help them, so the longer they sit the better it will be. That’s not the case. The more fun it is for them and the more they discover it for themselves, the more effective it will be. It’s about being together, and making it playful and fun.

It’s a process—it doesn’t happen overnight.

How old do kids have to be to start learning about meditation? Is there a best age to start?

There isn’t really any research to support this, so I can just speak from my own experience. Young children are already in the moment, so they can be our meditation teachers. They’re taking everything in with curiosity and openness, they’re seeing things for the first time. It’s more for us to slow down, to take in what they’re able to do—that’s the practice.

I remember afternoons pushing my daughter on the swing when she was a toddler and feeling like, how long do i have to do this? I felt pressure to be a businessperson and a mother and all of those other things. But then I caught myself. No, wait a minute, all too soon, this is going to be gone and she’s going to be in high school. I need to stop and enjoy how much she loved the swings. Then when I’d notice that I’m thinking about all the things I have to do later—the dishes, the laundry, the groceries—I’d think to myself, come back and be here a little longer with my child and let her teach me how to play.

I would say maybe at age four, children can feel their belly breathe. One of the practices that Susan uses that is sweet is rocking the toy to sleep. You put a stuffed animal on the child’s belly, then let it rise and fall and say, “you’re rocking the baby to sleep, watch it rise and fall.” That gets them in touch with their breath.

Kids only stop breathing from their belly around kindergarten. Then when they get older, that natural ability to breathe from the belly starts to change. It creates anxiety when we breathe from our chest. Getting back into the belly helps.

My mom didn’t play with me, and my father wasn’t in the picture at the time. I didn’t know how to play—I had to learn. So I let my kids help me, and I read a lot of parenting books. It’s something you can’t be too smart for. If you can find a way to share it with your child, there’s nothing more precious.

What resources do you recommend for parents who want to introduce their kids to a mindfulness practice but don’t have access to a class like yours?

There are so many resources. I highly recommend the Mindful Research Center at UCLA. They have a weekly podcast from Diana Winston that’s free—guided meditation that’s free. You can go to susankaisergreenland.com; she has some demonstrations online for families. Thich Nhat Han at Plum Village has great videos online, as well as his book, Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children. There’s also InsightLA with Trudy Goodman, which offers guided meditations and classes online.

My goal is to provide practices and demonstrations to help people incorporate mindfulness with family. At www.healingwithmindfulness.com, we’re focusing on providing free mindful mediation and eventually some other resources as well. Some good apps are Headspace, Insight Timer, Calm, and the Mindfulness App.

A final wonderful resource is the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley, which focuses on the science of a meaningful life. They have great articles for families and adults that I’d highly recommend.

Any last words of advice for New Dream families?

I would say that what helped me as a parent and as a family is to slow down—to really slow down and smell the roses. It’s so cliche, but it means taking time to stop, to get into our senses, to look at what we have, as opposed to what we’re trying to get, to find that child-like quality inside of us, to let our children be children.

We always want to be able to know what’s going to happen. I’d look at something that my child would do at age five, for example, and fear what would happen—would that make him drop out of high school? But we need to savor what is now.One thing that has helped me is, instead of going to the pattern of “what if”—what if it doesn’t work, what if i did it wrong—go to “what is.” What is: my daughter is healthy, she’s smiling, I have a job that I enjoy, and a beautiful home. That’s mindfulness. And we have to practice remembering those positives, because otherwise we forget.