Mindfulness Practices for Little Kids

In mindfulness practice, our ANCHOR is what keeps our mind from drifting too far into the past or the future with all of our thoughts. Usually, our anchor is our breath… because we can only breathe in the present! We can’t pay attention to the breath from five minutes ago, or the breath five minutes from now, right?

You can encourage kids to see where in their body they notice their breath: can they feel the air coming in and out of their nose? Can they feel air coming out over their lips? Can they feel their chest going up and down? Can they notice their belly expanding and softening as they breathe?

Having an anchor, a specific place to put one’s attention, makes the instruction to breathe a lot more concrete for young children. When a child needs to take a deep breath in order to calm down, you can tell her, “Find your anchor and place your hand there. Feel three whole breaths in your anchor spot.”

This article has other suggestions for teaching mindful breathing to kids.

Have you ever noticed your mind is like a puppy? You’re paying attention to something and then– SQUIRREL!! Your mind has run off chasing the latest moving object to come across its field of vision.

Young kids can really grasp this concept of the puppy mind. I recommend reading Andrew Jordan Nance’s lovely book Puppy Mind to introduce it to them. Explain to kids that their mind is just like a little puppy: it is curious and wants to explore, and it doesn’t always follow the directions we give it — like when we tell it to “stay!”

So when we’re in class and we realize our puppy mind has run out to recess, or back home, or wherever it likes to go, we don’t get mad at our puppy mind. That would scare him! And it’s not really his fault — he hasn’t been trained yet, and wandering is just what puppies do.

Wandering is just what our minds do, too. But we can notice when our puppy mind has snuck away from where we wanted it to be. We can kindly call to our puppy mind and bring our attention back to the task at hand.

We often speak to ourselves in ways that are not very kind. We might call ourselves “stupid” when we can’t figure out a math problem, or we might think no one likes us. When we talk to ourselves like that, it feels really crummy. So we can practice sending kind thoughts to ourselves.

We can wish for ourselves to be happy. We can wish for ourselves to be peaceful, safe, and healthy. We can wish for ourselves to be loved (click here to learn more about teaching this practice to kids).

We can also send kind thoughts to other people, even if they’re not here right now. We can take a moment to wish for our mom to have a good day, and just pause and think about her smiling and doing something she likes. And then we can notice how that makes us feel.

We can also pause for a moment and notice the things we are thankful for. Our minds like to point out all the things that may be going wrong in our day, but even on a bad day, there are things we can be thankful for. We can appreciate our loving family, or we can simply be grateful that we’re wearing comfortable socks today. What is it that YOU are thankful is in your life and in your world today?

Mindfulness helps children become more aware of their emotions and expand their emotional vocabulary.

You can help kids become more aware of their emotions by asking them to notice where in their body they feel a particular feeling. For example, they may notice their smile when they are happy, a knot in their belly when they’re worried, or a tightness in their body when they’re angry.

You can also encourage children to pause and name their emotion. Once they identify what they are feeling, they can simply say, “Sad. Sad. This is what feeling sad is like.”

After that powerful pause — naming an emotion and feeling it in the body — we (kids and grownups alike) are often much better prepared to handle that emotion in a way that is healthy for ourselves and others.

While the goal of mindfulness is not to be entirely motionless, it IS important that we cultivate the ability to sit still and attend to our surroundings and our current task.

When I begin teaching mindfulness to young kids, we start with trying to sit in our mindful body (quiet and still) for just 30 seconds. Then each week we increase our time by about five seconds. Slowly and steadily, children discover what it feels like to let their body, mind, and nervous system take a break.

You can encourage kids to remain still and focused by giving them something specific to pay attention to while they are sitting. They can look around the room and identify five new things that they haven’t seen before, or that have changed. They can listen for five sounds that they can hear in the room. They can be still as they look, listen, and learn! (Click here for more on teaching mindful listening).