Susan Kaiser Greenland, the founder of the acclaimed Inner Kids program affiliated with the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, has become the nationally recognized leader in teaching mindful awareness to children and teens. And her work is very much needed.
We live in tense times, and many children already feel the stress in their minds and bodies. In addition, large numbers of parents pressure their kids at a very early age to be competitive with others. The result is overscheduled and exhausted boys and girls who are performing and socializing at adult levels and missing out on the freedom and playful dimensions of childhood. Greenland believes that mindfulness training can help children approach life with wonder and an open mind; it can help them calm down when angry or upset, concentrate and ignore distractions, see what's happening within and around them, and develop prosocial qualities such as patience, humility, happiness, generosity, diligence, and equanimity. In brief, she calls for the new ABCs of Attention, Balance, and Compassion. Best of all, they can be taught in the home through mindfulness exercises.
Parents would do well to honor and acknowledge the four insights of mindfulness:
1. Life has its ups and downs.
2. Delusion makes life harder than it needs to be.
3. Happiness is within reach.
4. Living mindfully is a process.
Greenland shares some age-appropriate exercises, games, and fables that she has developed over more than a decade of teaching mindful awareness to children. She also presents tools and techniques to enable parents to cope with their children's stress as well as deal with specific challenges such as overeating, ADHD, hyper-perfectionism, and chronic pain.
The core of this practical and down-to-earth paperback are the chapters filled with exercises on relaxing and calming, learning how to pay attention, friendly awareness, becoming aware of the physical world, releasing yourself from destructive thoughts and feelings, developing parent/child attunement, and living as part of a community. A few of our favorite mindfulness practices are "Clear Mind Game," "Rocking a Stuffed Animal to Sleep with Your Breathing," "Bubbles in Space," "Eating a Raisin," and "A String Around Your Finger." Here is an example of one practice in a chapter on "Emotional Freedom":
Setting the Ladybugs Free
"You can have your own little release ceremony with a cardboard box full of ladybugs from a garden store or crickets from the pet store. Gather the kids around and tell the little creatures you hope they'll live in freedom again. Opening the box, set them free and watch them crawl through the grass, going their different ways. You can send them friendly wishes hoping they'll be happy, healthy, safe, and live in peace. It doesn't matter if half ot them are eaten by birds within a few minutes. What matters is that you set them free."
