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Family Mindfulness: helping anxious children

May 20, 2024April 28, 2025 by mrogan

Though we may like to think of childhood as a carefree time, all children experience worries and anxieties about the circumstances they live in, and about thoughts of the future. Pressures from school, from peers, from within the family, and also awareness of trouble in the larger world, can all add up to a chronic anxious experience for a child. Like adults, children can be overwhelmed by these anxieties, and not know how to deal with them. An important part of a child’s development is getting help to learn how to deal, inside themselves, with challenges such as these, without unnecessary anxiety and stress.

Family Mindfulness is a way to empower adult family members to help children develop and support a mindfulness experience in the home, an experience that the child can then bring with them into the world.

Mindfulness is a natural experience that we all have had at some point – moments of direct experience of life that have a simple satisfying quality, uncomplicated by preoccupations with the past and the future, and free from burdensome attitudes about one’s self and others. We may find that the accumulation of stress can make this simple experience of mindfulness quite elusive and infrequent.

Mindfulness practice is a set of simple techniques we can use to cultivate our natural mindfulness, so we can be more free from worries and fears, and more present in a warm connected way. Mindfulness practice is very simple and is accessible to people of all ages. For children, I have found it is best for them to have the support of knowledgeable and experienced adults in the home, who also participate in this practice and understand the benefits and the methods. It may also be true that the child may not be the only anxious member of the family- bringing adults along into this cultivation of mindfulness is an important way to benefit the whole family. Mindfulness practice leads to greater freedom from anxious responses, and an ability to address life issues with a lighter heart, greater clarity of mind and warm connectedness.

Family Mindfulness proceeds as follows:

I meet with adult family members and work with them to understand and develop their own mindfulness practice. By developing their own mindfulness practice, adults learn how to help their children to do the same. My way of supporting this practice with the adults models how adults will do the same with the children.
I have a session with the parents or caregivers and the children present, to introduce children to mindfulness practice. Additional sessions with the whole family may be used for fine-tuning. In-home sessions can be arranged.
Adult family members keep track of what happens in-between sessions, with the help of a provided review sheet.
I meet with adult family members periodically to fine-tune the process, and help them with issues that may arise.

The Language of Mindfulness

July 4, 2015May 11, 2025 by mrogan

Using words to point to an experience without words

“Feel the sensations of the breath. If you notice that you’re not feeling the breath, feel the breath, right away. The breath is always happening, right now.”

The clinician’s use of language in describing the technique of mindfulness is very important, as it ends up being internalized and used by the client. I have found it helpful to simplify the language of instruction, to work more effectively with a broad range of clients with different sensitivities, conditions, characteristics and levels of function.

In particular, I have found it helpful to keep to language that minimizes any call to exertion, imagery, or abstract conceptualization – it is easy for these to become “hooks” for obsessiveness and anxiety.

For example, a commonly heard instruction is “return (or come back) to the breath.” This paints a picture of the client having gone somewhere and needing to travel back – an image that I believe tends to unhelpfully and inaccurately solidify the realness of thoughts. This may seem a fine point, but in my view it is an entirely unnecessary complication that can interact negatively with neurotic vulnerabilities.
Words like “concentrate on” or “focus on” the breath are evocative of special effort (and thus opportunities for failure), and are best avoided: I find that clients are all too ready to turn mindfulness practice into a strenuous and exhausting activity. Even talk about “placing attention,” which is useful in didactic explanation, is too abstract and conceptual for use at the point of instruction, and is best avoided when leading practice in session.
Another unnecessary piece of imagery is “let go of the thought.” Why introduce this idea of physicality? In fact one need not engage in the operation of letting go of anything – one need only feel the breath.

Instead of all these possibilities, I simply and consistently say “feel the breath.”

The Problem with Mindfulness

February 2, 2015May 11, 2025 by mrogan

Mindfulness training can lead to significant, persistent, and very welcome changes in how people experience their mental life – bringing about more accurate perceptions and responses, access to greater warmth and connectedness, as well as more effective action.

As with any intervention, it can misfire.

Mindfulness training must be used carefully in a clinical context. Contrary to popular misconceptions, mindfulness is not a tranquilizer: in its traditional form, mindfulness practice is intended to be disruptive and destabilizing of the status quo – the status quo being, generally, the domination of experience by a tangle of thoughts about past and future. There are two main classes of problems that can occur as people take on a mindfulness practice: those that occur when the instructions are not used accurately, and those that occur when instructions are used accurately.

“Feel the sensations of the breath. If you notice that you’re not feeling the breath, feel the breath, right away. The breath is always happening, right now.”

When the instructions are not followed
It is typical for people to hear the simple instructions for mindfulness, and rather than follow them, engage instead in their own particular variety of neurotic exertion, which may include excessive strain, self-criticism, performance anxiety, feeling incompetent or overwhelmed. At the beginning, this tendency should be expected and addressed in careful communication and assessment, so that people can be protected from ‘mindfulness practice’ that is really a session of intensified and sometimes painful neuroticism. When this tendency is pronounced, a variety of methods may be used. For example, short practice periods during therapy sessions are recommended, giving opportunity for communication and reinforcement of the precision of technique, before sending people off to practice alone at home.

When the instructions are followed
It is important to remember that mindfulness has the intended effect of disrupting habitual patterns of mind, and this may include patterns of coping and self-soothing. Most people who appear for clinical treatment have a hard-won repertoire of coping and soothing strategies, which may operate with or without awareness. These may not be well designed, but they generally do contribute to stability and a sense of control. I have found it remarkable that many people, including those who experience great distress in their daily lives, have naturally discovered elements of mindfulness practice and make use of them in their coping and self-regulation. However, most people have other coping and soothing methods based on mental routines that are quite vulnerable to disruption by mindfulness training. It is important to monitor people in session while they begin to practice, particularly those suffering from severe anxiety, obsessiveness, or trauma. When mindfulness instructions are followed with precision, unexpected troubles may come to awareness as layer upon layer of distraction dissolve