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> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being. Have you ever met a child IRL?

mapcars 8y ago
In my experience kids, until a certain age, run around, scream, shout, full of excitement, happiness, and life. But once they start looking at adults - all they see only dark, gloomy, lifeless serious faces and so they start becoming the same. If adults want to do something about it - we should teach happiness ourselves first. Kids will follow automagically.
- dTal 8y ago
  Are you suggesting we shouldn't teach mindfulness to children? That it's not a useful skill? That the time would be wasted? >“It’s not just to make them feel better in the short-term,” Dr. Deighton said, “but to better equip them for later in life.”
  - mapcars 8y ago
    I think if needed it can be learned later, I don't see any problem with that. I started being interested in meditation around 23 when I was on the very bottom of my emotional state. But I see that most people around me never experienced this and for them, meditation and yoga is an exotic exercise. One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add one more boring official class.
    - mercer 8y ago
      > One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add one more boring official class. Being perpetually 'busy' and treating life as a collection of planned activities, like homework, classes, courses, workshops, appointments, etc. is something that runs deep in our entire (Western?) society, whether school-going or working age. Mindfulness as yet another one of those activities feels uncomfortably like a band-aid solution that is dangerous precisely because it works. It's a bit like taking aspirin to deal with headaches when really you should just stop drinking so much coffee and working so much. I do think mindfulness can be more than that. I've experienced how beneficial it can be to make it part of life rather than just (or only) another planned activity, especially when it's a part or underpinning of a larger 'framework' (in my case I lean towards Zen Buddhism).
  - michaelt 8y ago
    Mindfulness is branded wrong. Sceptics see it as (a) Some yoga-style mystic silliness reasonable people have been ignoring for decades, and (b) A 2014 self-help book, a fad-prone genre with relatively little credibility. If the common sense ideas underlying mindfulness were given a different coat of paint, they might be more readily accepted.
- fiala__ 8y ago
  If you've never seen a depressed child then I beg you to pay attention. Children have incredibly complex, fascinating and perceptive minds, they aren't just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty. It's exactly this kind of reductionism which leads parents to ignore their children's psychological needs, which leads to schools having to take action.
  - mapcars 8y ago
    >just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty I did not say that. As I don't think that imposing complexity of mental bullshit from adult's minds on children makes things any better.
- arethuza 8y ago
  "But once they start looking at adults" I suspect one of the biggest sources of misery for a lot of kids are other kids.
  - zimpenfish 8y ago
    Certainly for me it was, compounded by adults not taking this seriously (and a certain amount of screwy brain chemistry.) If your parent is a teacher at the same school, your school life is going to be A+ miserable.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      I don't think its just adults not taking it seriously in some quarters its surprisingly common for adults to use the "man up" or "stiff upper lip" approaches for physical or mental pain.
yoz-y 8y ago
I don't think that children who have problems with happiness or well-being will be helped by teaching them mindfulness. I was a lucky kid, but those around me who had problems had them because they were excluded from groups, got parents divorced, were bullied or were simply spoiled by their parents and were unhappy if anything didn't go their way. Telling them to be mindful is straight out of Voltaire's Candide.
- icebraining 8y ago
  News articles don't stop at the title. The classes involve more than just "telling them to be mindful".
- fiala__ 8y ago
  I'm no mental health expert but isn't mindfulness a proven method for improving one's mental health? Schools can't fix dysfunctional families. All they can do is give kids some tools to cope with such challenges. Even if it doesn't help a particular child, why would it be wrong to at least try?
- rsynnott 8y ago
  The major application of mindfulness for which there is actually evidence is stress/anxiety reduction. This would obviously be useful for kids who are bullied and/or have bad home environments.

In my experience kids, until a certain age, run around, scream, shout, full of excitement, happiness, and life. But once they start looking at adults - all they see only dark, gloomy, lifeless serious faces and so they start becoming the same. If adults want to do something about it - we should teach happiness ourselves first. Kids will follow automagically.

dTal 8y ago
Are you suggesting we shouldn't teach mindfulness to children? That it's not a useful skill? That the time would be wasted? >“It’s not just to make them feel better in the short-term,” Dr. Deighton said, “but to better equip them for later in life.”
- mapcars 8y ago
  I think if needed it can be learned later, I don't see any problem with that. I started being interested in meditation around 23 when I was on the very bottom of my emotional state. But I see that most people around me never experienced this and for them, meditation and yoga is an exotic exercise. One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add one more boring official class.
  - mercer 8y ago
    > One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add one more boring official class. Being perpetually 'busy' and treating life as a collection of planned activities, like homework, classes, courses, workshops, appointments, etc. is something that runs deep in our entire (Western?) society, whether school-going or working age. Mindfulness as yet another one of those activities feels uncomfortably like a band-aid solution that is dangerous precisely because it works. It's a bit like taking aspirin to deal with headaches when really you should just stop drinking so much coffee and working so much. I do think mindfulness can be more than that. I've experienced how beneficial it can be to make it part of life rather than just (or only) another planned activity, especially when it's a part or underpinning of a larger 'framework' (in my case I lean towards Zen Buddhism).
- michaelt 8y ago
  Mindfulness is branded wrong. Sceptics see it as (a) Some yoga-style mystic silliness reasonable people have been ignoring for decades, and (b) A 2014 self-help book, a fad-prone genre with relatively little credibility. If the common sense ideas underlying mindfulness were given a different coat of paint, they might be more readily accepted.
fiala__ 8y ago
If you've never seen a depressed child then I beg you to pay attention. Children have incredibly complex, fascinating and perceptive minds, they aren't just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty. It's exactly this kind of reductionism which leads parents to ignore their children's psychological needs, which leads to schools having to take action.
- mapcars 8y ago
  >just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty I did not say that. As I don't think that imposing complexity of mental bullshit from adult's minds on children makes things any better.
arethuza 8y ago
"But once they start looking at adults" I suspect one of the biggest sources of misery for a lot of kids are other kids.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  Certainly for me it was, compounded by adults not taking this seriously (and a certain amount of screwy brain chemistry.) If your parent is a teacher at the same school, your school life is going to be A+ miserable.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    I don't think its just adults not taking it seriously in some quarters its surprisingly common for adults to use the "man up" or "stiff upper lip" approaches for physical or mental pain.

yoz-y 8y ago

I don't think that children who have problems with happiness or well-being will be helped by teaching them mindfulness. I was a lucky kid, but those around me who had problems had them because they were excluded from groups, got parents divorced, were bullied or were simply spoiled by their parents and were unhappy if anything didn't go their way. Telling them to be mindful is straight out of Voltaire's Candide.

icebraining 8y ago
News articles don't stop at the title. The classes involve more than just "telling them to be mindful".
fiala__ 8y ago
I'm no mental health expert but isn't mindfulness a proven method for improving one's mental health? Schools can't fix dysfunctional families. All they can do is give kids some tools to cope with such challenges. Even if it doesn't help a particular child, why would it be wrong to at least try?
rsynnott 8y ago
The major application of mindfulness for which there is actually evidence is stress/anxiety reduction. This would obviously be useful for kids who are bullied and/or have bad home environments.