School-based mindfulness programs can improve children’s mental health

Teaching schoolchildren to practice mindfulness can improve their mental health and perhaps even improve their grades.

That’s the conclusion of a new review of more than three dozen studies of mindfulness interventions in schools, such as seated or slow-walking meditation.

In short, these programs teach children to pay attention to the present and not to judge it.

“As mindfulness interventions become more widely used and studied, they hold promise for promoting college students’ well-being and reducing the development of mental health disorders over time,” said Tina Marshall and her colleagues at the research organization Westat in Maryland. wrote in the diary Psychiatry online.

Her team studied 41 studies published between 2008 and 2022 on mindfulness interventions in schools.

All had at least two mindfulness components, for example a combination of breath awareness and body awareness. Of the 24 interventions that researchers identified, three had strong evidence of effectiveness:

All three include components such as awareness of breathing, bodily sensations, mental states, and regulating one’s own emotions. Participants in these studies were middle school and high school students.

Three other interventions – Gaia Program, MindUP and a program that combined MBSR with mindfulness cognitive therapy – were also found to be somewhat helpful for the primary school children studied. These interventions generally promoted kindness, empathy, compassion or gratitude.

Overall, mindfulness training was associated with a number of positive outcomes, including clearer thinking, greater resilience and reduced stress. The programs led to significant gains in emotional awareness and clarity and decreases in self-hostility, depressive symptoms, avoidance and rumination, the study found.

According to the researchers, these positive effects suggest that more schools should make mindfulness interventions a permanent part of their health programs.

However, they also noted that few of the studies they reviewed looked at how children from disadvantaged populations fared.

“More research is needed to support policymakers in selecting cost-effective interventions and meeting the needs of students from disadvantaged populations,” they wrote.

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