What Is a Mindful Child? Mindfulness for Kids Beyond “Take a Breath”

The word mindfulness has developed an aesthetic of its own.

Beautiful retreats. Yoga clothes. Slow movements. Serene faces. Lots and lots of stillness.

As a mother and dance teacher, let me be the first to tell you: mindfulness in children does not look like that.

Nor do I think it should.

A mindful child can still be loud. She can be wiggly. He can lose it in the grocery store because you bought the wrong apple juice. A mindful child can get angry, embarrassed, jealous, overwhelmed, distracted and wildly excited.

Mindfulness isn’t the absence of any of those things.

At its simplest, mindfulness is generally described as paying attention, intentionally, without immediately judging what we find.

Which sounds lovely until you actually try it.

In a well-known 2014 study published in Science, researchers asked participants to spend time alone in a room with nothing to do but think. In one experiment, participants could even choose to give themselves a mild electric shock—one they had previously indicated they would pay to avoid.

Twelve of the eighteen men and six of the twenty-four women shocked themselves at least once.

The study was small, and the researchers considered several possible explanations for the results. But I still find the basic picture remarkable:

Fifteen minutes alone with ourselves can be hard.

And yet when a four-year-old is coming apart in aisle seven because the apple juice is wrong, what do we hear?

“Take a breath.”

As though we have just offered a screaming toddler a piece of ancient, wholesome wisdom—and not a completely unreasonable assignment in the middle of a full-body protest.

If you have ever attempted yoga—or spent meaningful time with a child who has been exposed to a screen—you know how often this tactic is given to children.

Consider the word attention itself.

Its roots trace back to the Latin attendere: ad, “toward,” and tendere, “to stretch.”

To stretch toward.

I love that.

Imagine attention as a rubber band.

All day long, it stretches.

Toward the cereal bowl.

Toward the television.

Toward the teacher.

Toward the child who just whispered something about you across the classroom.

Toward the notification.

Toward the unfinished email.

Toward the expression on someone else’s face.

Toward the thought that showed up while you were supposed to be listening.

We stretch toward one thing, then another, then another.

Children do too.

So when a child is overwhelmed and we tell him to focus on his breath, we are asking him to deliberately stretch his attention toward one particular experience.

There is nothing wrong with that. The breath can be an incredibly useful place to put attention.

I just don’t think that’s the whole lesson.

Because a rubber band doesn’t only know how to stretch.

It also knows how to return.

What if mindfulness isn’t about making a child calm?

Give a child a slingshot and he understands something fairly quickly: pulling harder isn’t always better.

Eventually, something snaps.

Yet we spend an enormous amount of our lives practicing the stretch.

Pay attention.

Try harder.

Focus.

Listen.

Look at me.

Finish this.

Don’t get distracted.

And then, when a child is overwhelmed by everything his attention has stretched toward, we give him one more assignment:

Focus on your breathing.

Maybe that’s why mindfulness can start to feel like another thing to be good at.

I am much more interested in teaching children about the other state of the rubber band.

The unstretched one.

Not because children should stay there.

They shouldn’t.

Life is meant to be lived. Attention will stretch toward birthday candles and skinned knees and spelling tests and someone saying something mean at recess. It will stretch toward excitement and fear and thoughts and sensations and people we love.

The question isn’t whether we can stop that from happening.

The question is whether a child begins to recognize that every experience doesn’t have to carry her away with it.

So what does a mindful child actually look like?

Sometimes, exactly like every other child.

A mindful child isn’t the five-year-old sitting cross-legged in perfect silence while the rest of kindergarten falls apart around him.

It’s the child beginning to recognize:

There is a tight feeling in my chest.

That thought just showed up.

I’m really angry.

I keep thinking they’re laughing at me.

I want to run away.

And eventually, underneath all of those experiences, something even more important:

I can notice what is happening without making every experience a definition of who I am.

Giving children a vocabulary for their inner world

Before we can ask children to understand their inner world, it helps to give them language for what they’re experiencing.

Attention.

Sensations.

Thoughts.

Emotions.

Beliefs.

These aren’t problems children need to eliminate. They’re experiences children can learn to recognize.

Because a thought can feel completely true without being the whole truth about you.

An emotion can be enormous without being permanent.

A sensation can be uncomfortable without needing to become a story.

Attention can stretch toward something—and it can return.

I don’t want children to become exceptionally good at staring at their breath while everything inside them is screaming.

I want them to become familiar with themselves.

To know what it feels like when attention stretches.

To recognize some of the experiences it stretches toward.

And, little by little, to discover what remains when they don’t have to chase every one of them.

I want children to learn that life is interpreted through the body. It is not defined by it.

If you enjoyed this article, explore My Little Mindfulness Series by Nicole Langi