Mindfulness at Play: Parenting healthy, happy children with old wisdom and new science

Introduction

Stephen McKenzie

Young people are just like young everything else — shiny, new, wonderful and full of potential. We have a short and special opportunity to help our children reach their full life potential. We can do this by giving them what is natural for the nurturers and supporters of any living thing to give — our full attention. This goes and grows with acceptance, and these both go and grow with love.

Mindfulness at Play begins, like mindfulness, like play, and like life, in wonder. It reveals, describes and demonstrates how mindfulness is really so simple that even a young person can achieve it and greatly benefit from it, naturally. Mindfulness simply involves being present and engaged in each moment of our lives. This book will help parents and their children clearly understand and practise what mindfulness is or can be.

We believe the strategies, practices and activities offered here can help mindfulness become a natural part of the way that parents parent, and that the benefits of this are substantial and farreaching. When young people can clearly focus on their internal world in the present moment, they are better able to:

•know and communicate their experiences and needs — a critical component of emotional intelligence

•discover that they can be curious rather than overwhelmed by emotions, leading to greater emotion regulation and resilience

•increase self-acceptance and decrease shame, resulting in greater wellbeing, more effective healing from trauma, and an increase in pro-social behaviours towards others.

All we can really give anybody is our best responses to their actions, based on love and not its distortions: anxiety, impatience, anger and despair. When we are fully aware, and fully accepting of our awareness, we naturally experience our full potential. Consequently, we naturally help others experience their maximum potential.

Mindfulness at Play will help you and the children you care for experience real mindfulness and, therefore, real-life purpose, peace, happiness and love.

PART 1

Understanding mindfulness

CHAPTER 1

What mindfulness really is

Stephen McKenzie

Mindfulness can be described as a technique that is thousands of years old which has become an overnight sensation. The modern success of this ancient wellness practice is particularly apt given that it connects our minds with our bodily sensations, which naturally grounds us in our here and now reality. When we mindfully accept life’s gift of the present moment, we are truly free; free of the stress that can overwhelm us when we continually want more from life than what we’re currently experiencing.

Mindfulness can help parents and their children be their best, as well as do their best. When we are mindful, we stop being too busy thinking about life to really enjoy it, and we can start living naturally and well. Mindfulness is a state of simply being fully focused on whatever we are doing, including parenting, right now. It allows us to reveal and be who we really are, and to help other people, including our children, reveal who they really are.

What mindfulness really is

A lot has been written and discussed about mindfulness; however, it all just boils down to the practices of paying attention, being able to direct our attention, and accepting what we pay attention to. By removing our everyday distractions, mindfulness makes us fully alive. Mindfulness is actually a way into reality rather than out of it — a way of seeing things as they really are, no matter what they are.

The theory of mindfulness

Mindfulness produces benefits that can be measured scientifically. However, as with anything that has become as popular as the practice of mindfulness, there is a potential danger of some people either taking their belief too far, in that they don’t require scientific evidence of any kind or, on the other end of the spectrum, disliking it so much they disregard all and any scientific evidence that it works.

We need to keep an open mind and heart about what mindfulness can do for us and our children. We therefore describe benefits of mindfulness and mindfulness practices that are supported by scientific evidence. We balance this scientific support with constant reminders of the human essence of mindfulness. An example of this is reconnecting mindfulness with the humanistic wisdom traditions, including Buddhism, which is where the concept originally emerged from. We also balance theory with practice by including descriptions of why mindfulness works and how it works, demonstrated by real-life examples.

Scientifically supported benefits of mindfulness include vital elements related to life management such as:

•better parenting

•facilitation of healthy lifestyle change

•better sleep

•pain management

•coping with major illnesses, such as cancer

•reduced allostatic load (long-term stress response).

as well as elements that are related to mental health, including:

•depression-relapse prevention

•reduced anxiety, panic disorder and stress

•management of addiction

•better emotional regulation

•greater emotional intelligence. ¹

Mindfulness can prevent people of all ages from developing mental, social or physical health problems. It can also help restore people to health if they have developed any of these problems by freeing them of their thoughts, including ones that can make them feel nervous or miserable, such as ‘I should do this!’, ‘I should do that!’, ‘people expect me to do it!’ or ‘I have to do it soon!’. Mindfulness therefore empowers people and reduces dependence on long-term psychotherapy or drug therapy. It also has the important advantage of being non-harmful, noninvasive, non-threatening and non-stigma producing.

The medical and psychiatric model for helping younger people generally makes an often artificial distinction between being ‘well’ and ‘unwell’. This is done on the basis of whether a young person has a diagnosed psychopathology or developmental disorder — such as social anxiety or dyslexia — which might be classified as being ‘unwell’, or whether they don’t — which would be classified as being ‘well’. Apart from being simplistic and often untrue, or at least less than fully true, this model can have unfortunate real-life consequences. Diagnosing a young person or anyone else with an official mental or physical condition can result in their not being offered opportunities to maximize their life. This is because official diagnoses can limit the perceptions of what a young person’s real-life opportunities could involve.

The practice of mindfulness

The proof of the mindfulness pudding is the experience of mindfulness itself. All applications of mindfulness, including for parenting, are best built on our own practice of it. To understand and practise mindfulness well enough to use it to help other people, including our children, we need to understand and practise it well enough to help ourselves. This is equivalent to the instruction in pre-flight safety demonstrations for us to help ourselves to the oxygen if it’s needed before helping our children to it.

It’s important that we don’t just move from being mindfulness pagans, who don’t know about it, to being mindfulness pagans who know about it but don’t practise it! We need to move from being mindfulness knowers to mindfulness livers, and this means knowing what mindfulness actually is and what its benefits really are, rather than just thinking we know what it means or what other people think it means.

To fully understand mindfulness, not only do we need to understand mindfulness practices, but we need to do them. A mindfulness practice can either be formal, which means participating in sessions such as mindful breathing or a body scan exercise, or informal, which means being mindful of — and connected to — whatever happens in our daily lives. Our informal practice of mindfulness is supported by our formal practice, and is simply:

•being fully aware of whatever is taking place in this moment

•directing our awareness to whatever is real, rather than having it distracted by what imagined realities of what might be, or was, or otherwise isn’t

•accepting whatever is real.

Informal mindfulness practices

Informal mindfulness in daily living practices include:

Mindful listening — really listen to the sound of the voice of anyone who is talking to you, rather than listening to your own internal voice. Be aware of your assumptions and judgements about whoever is talking to you, as well as your expectations about what they are going to say.

Mindful communication — work towards achieving the best outcome with whoever you are communicating with, by practising active listening, and asking questions, rather than by trying to persuade them to agree with your solution. This is an ancient and effective communication practice that is known as the dialectic, or the Platonic/Socratic dialogue.

Mindful walking — really connect with all or any sense while you are moving — the feel of your feet touching the ground, the aroma in the air or the noise around you.

Mindful eating — concentrate on just the taste or texture of the food you are eating by removing any distractions around you while you eat such as watching TV, reading or moving around. Try an experiment: eat or drink anything you like with total awareness and then try eating or drinking the same thing while you are doing something else. Which experimental condition made the food taste better?

The key to unlocking any mindfulness practice and its life benefits is persistence — if you keep being still, you will stay still, naturally.

Formal mindfulness practices

This is a basic mindfulness technique which is best done for just a few minutes, at least, once a day, to gain the most benefit.

Be still.

Be aware of your natural breath — don’t try to change it, don’t judge it.

Just let it flow.

Be aware of your in-breath (inhalation), and your out-breath (exhalation), and the space between your in-breath and out-breath.

Every time that you are aware that you are thinking about anything, gently bring your awareness back to focusing on your breath.

CHAPTER 2

Mindfulness for young people

Stephen McKenzie

‘Mindfulness is a skill that can easily be, and should be, taught … right from the beginning. It helps to foster creativity, improves academic and sporting performance and is vital for developing mental health and emotional intelligence in children.’

Mindfulness for Life, Dr Stephen McKenzie and Dr Crag Hassed¹

The context for mindfulness for young people

There is a rapidly increasing range of mindfulness approaches, programs and apps for young people which are being offered in many countries, including in schools, pre-schools and homes. It can seem that there is so much choice in our mindfulness supermarkets that it’s hard to know what’s best. To be of real value, these approaches need to be scientifically supported and also fit in with the practicalities of family life. It’s vital for parents to understand mindfulness for young people and children of different age groups and special needs to know how it can best be applied. This chapter will assist parents, teachers and carers to help their children to transform life-changing mindfulness possibilities into life-changing mindfulness practices.

Mindfulness for infants

‘The best way to make children good is to make them happy.’

Oscar Wilde

The best approach for parents of very young children, or infants, is simply to get out of the way of their natural mindfulness. This means recognizing their natural mindfulness and allowing and encouraging it. For example, if a very young child is deeply connected with an activity, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, encourage this! My daughter once sat down on the nature strip and started playing with gumnuts, while I wanted to go somewhere that I thought was much more important. Thankfully, I let go of that idea and played gumnuts. There are great opportunities for parents of children of any age, and especially of very young children, to learn mindfulness from them, as well as guide and teach them. It can be valuable for us to see mindfulness as something that we can help children to retain rather than something that we help them attain.

Very young children are inherently curious and interested in everything that they see. When we are mindful, we see things as they really are — new and exciting and interesting. This is how young children, especially very young ones, naturally experience their world. It seems new because it is new.

One of the best ways parents can help their children be mindful is by being a living example of it (i.e. role modelling it). Children, especially infants, watch us and what we do, and this means they can’t be fooled. If we tell our children to be mindful and we don’t live this way ourselves we are actually helping them to lose their natural mindfulness. Infants are mindfulness experts. They haven’t developed the thoughts — theirs or those of other people, such as ‘I should …!’ — that get in the way of mindfulness, Infants are free of real-life distortions, such as thoughts like ‘I should be a better infant’ or, thankfully, ‘my parents should be better parents!’ Infants naturally give their total attention to whatever they are doing. They don’t judge or otherwise filter reality into something other than what it actually is.

Mindful parenting, especially of very young children, is really about rewards rather than responsibilities. The smile that your baby gives you when they see you for the first time in a week, an hour or a minute, doesn’t depend on what you last said or did. This is the smile of pure love, of pure delight in being alive, and in being loved and being able to love. We can respond to this non-mindfully by trying to analyse it, or we can respond by smiling back, by living in love naturally, together. Mindful parenting can be its own reward.

We can miss out on parenting treasures if we aren’t really paying attention or we only focus when we think that something is going wrong, such as when our baby is crying. A great life lesson that many parents learn is that the parenting process is rapid; it can seem like suddenly our baby has grown up. The experience of parenting mindfully can help us learn great life truths, such as life isn’t a stagnant pool, it’s a flowing river. Mindfulness is not about avoiding mistakes — large and small — it is about realizing great life opportunities.

Mindfulness, especially with very young children, can be as easy as going with its natural flow, or as hard as always trying to work out if what we are doing is best and wondering if we should be doing something else.

Keys to mindful parenting of very young children include:

•Listening to and recognizing the needs of the child, while