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It's
cool to be calm; Meditation can help kids focus, but does
it have health benefits?
Elena Conis. Los
Angeles Times.,Sep 5, 2005.
TEN-YEAR-OLD Trae Smith knows how to deal with the stresses
of school, an acting and modeling career and, of course, the
typical family squabbles. He closes his eyes, counts to 100
and lets it all go.
Trae, who learned to meditate last year with his fourth-grade
class at Toluca Lake Elementary School, said that tests and
auditions used to make him nervous. But since he's learned
how to meditate, Trae says, "everything is like a piece
of cake."
As meditation goes mainstream among American adults, it's
slowly making its way into schools and programs for children
across the country. Anecdotal reports of its success have
become common, with parents and teachers contending that it
can calm kids down, level out their moods and help them focus.
Some proponents say it can even manage serious conditions,
such as anxiety and attention deficit disorder.
Now the practice is getting a closer look. Researchers are
beginning to study groups of meditating children to determine
how the practice might affect a developing brain. Although
the findings have been encouraging, some child-health experts
are cautioning that, until more is known, meditation shouldn't
be touted as a cure- all for stressed-out, hyperactive or
underperforming kids.
Most of these in-school programs draw on parents' and teachers'
personal experience, rather than scientific research, points
out a new report from the Garrison Institute, a nonprofit
think tank that studies meditation and other contemplative
practices. Dozens of such programs exist in schools across
the country, the report said, with many more programs for
children offered in after-school clubs, religious and meditation
centers, and through independent organizations.
Research focuses on adults
A growing body of meditation research conducted in university
and hospital settings has supported a range of health benefits,
including reduced blood pressure and stress, improved immune
function and better mood. But the research, says the report,
has focused almost exclusively on adults.
Many meditation enthusiasts nevertheless have concluded the
practice could have similar effects in children.
"Not a day goes by that I don't get a request from somebody"
wanting to teach meditation to children or study its effects,
said Susan Kaiser Greenland, founder and executive director
of the nonprofit Inner Kids Foundation in Los Angeles. The
organization, which teaches mindfulness meditation in schools
and supports research on the topic, has cooperated with UCLA
researchers studying the effects of meditation on pain, mood
and attention in children.
Two major types of meditation are being scrutinized for the
benefits they may offer in school settings: those that clear
the mind, like transcendental meditation, and those that increase
awareness of the moment, like so-called mindfulness meditation
and other Buddhist-inspired practices.
Both are designed to help kids slow down in a world of busy,
activity-packed days. And both must be altered for use in
children. In many programs for young meditators, silent, seated
meditation is either brief or nonexistent, and games and activities
replace books or lectures to teach mindful awareness, or mindfulness,
which Greenland describes as "noticing experiences without
labeling them good or bad."
"This world we're in now, everything moves so fast,"
she said. "No one is taking the time to talk to these
kids about slowing down or about what they're missing."
Students like it, want it
Meditation lessons at Toluca Lake Elementary School consist
of breathing exercises and quiet nature walks. They began
when teacher Steve Reidman turned to Greenland, a friend,
to help him manage a particularly unruly class three years
ago. "It was like night and day by the end of the [first]
year," said Reidman.
The meditation techniques helped his students calm down "well
before they got to the point of lashing out at each other,"
he said. Inspired by what he saw in Reidman's class, Toluca
Lake teacher Dan Murphy's second-grade class started meditating
too.
Students who've learned to meditate in school say they've
learned to control their emotions before tests and big sporting
events, even during fights with parents and siblings, by simply
pausing and slowing their breathing. Fourth-grader Vanessa
Macademia says the technique relaxes and refreshes her, "especially
when I'm sad or really mad or just want to destroy some other
person."
At the small, private Odyssey Middle School in San Mateo,
each day starts with physical activity followed by meditation
-- building up to a class trip to Japan in eighth grade, where
the students meditate alongside monks in a Buddhist temple.
Head of school Steve Smuin says he sees students reaching
for the technique before exams.
"Rather than saying, 'Let's cram,' they say, 'Let's
take time to clear our minds,'" Smuin said.
As word spreads about how useful meditation can be, more students
want to learn the technique.
At Conte West Hills, a magnet school for inner-city kids in
New Haven, Conn., guidance counselor Linda Baker says attendance
has skyrocketed in her after-school relaxation program, which
guides kids through meditation, yoga and related activities.
"In the beginning we had five kids, now we have waiting
lists," said Baker, who started the program five years
ago.
In an attempt to quantify the effects of such techniques
in children, Randye Semple, now a research scientist at the
New York State Psychiatric Institute, taught breathing and
mindfulness exercises to a group of 25 9- to 12-year-olds
with reading difficulties, including several with anxiety
and attention deficit disorders.
By learning to see the negative spaces formed by a cluster
of blocks or to describe how a piece of music made them feel,
the students became more adept at using all of their senses.
As a result, they began to explore new sights and sounds before
labeling them good or bad, fun or boring.
"We got amazing results," Semple said. Over the
course of 12 weeks, the mindfulness practices helped the children
to stop making snap judgments. They were also less anxious
and depressed and more able to focus -- results that ultimately
helped improve their reading skills too, Semple said.
Better moods, less anxiety
With research on meditation in children yielding largely positive
results, some schools are using meditation techniques to treat
-- or prevent -- common emotional and psychological disorders
that can be barriers to learning, such as anxiety and attention
deficit disorders.
Research on students at the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse in
Detroit, where students and teachers do 10 minutes of transcendental
meditation at the start and end of each school day, showed
that meditating students had better moods and less anxiety
than a group of non-meditating students used for comparison.
The study was published in Focus on Complementary and Alternative
Therapies in 2003.
A study of inner-city students with hypertension in Augusta,
Ga., showed that transcendental meditation could have physiological
benefits too. In a report on the study published in the American
Journal of Hypertension last year, Dr. Vernon Barnes, professor
of physiology at the Medical College of Georgia, showed that
students who stuck to a program of 15 minutes of meditation
twice a day lowered their blood pressure by more than three
millimeters on average and kept it low for up to four months.
Preliminary evidence on meditation's ability to reduce anxiety
and its symptoms in children is promising, said Susan Smalley,
a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA.
This fall, she'll begin a pilot study examining the effects
of mindfulness meditation on fifth-graders with attention
deficit disorder.
She's particularly encouraged by findings that suggest mindfulness
practices can "rewire" the brain. Studies in adults
have shown that the brain's prefrontal cortex (a region at
the front of the brain) plays a big role in focusing attention.
People with attention disorders display less activity in this
region than people without the disorder.
Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist at UCLA, said willfully
directing attention increased activity in the prefrontal cortex.
And mindfulness meditation, with its emphasis on paying attention,
appears to strengthen the prefrontal cortex, said Schwartz,
whose own research has examined how mindfulness techniques
can be used to overcome obsessive compulsive disorder.
"That's what's so exciting for so many people about doing
this [meditation] with kids," said Inner Kids' Greenland.
"If you can start early on to help them train their ability
to pay attention, the brain will become a stronger muscle."
But because the prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions
of the brain to develop (usually not until the 20s), some
psychiatric experts caution against applying such evidence
to children.
Teaching children a technique their brains are not ready for
could potentially frustrate them, creating or aggravating
anxiety instead of allaying it, said Amishi Jha, an assistant
professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
who served as a scientific advisor for the Garrison Institute
report. Her own research focuses on the brain patterns related
to memory and attention.
Furthermore, said Jha, it's possible that meditation techniques
could help one type of attention at the expense of others.
Meditation strengthens selective or focused attention, which
is crucial for, say, reading a book. But improving only selective
attention might hurt the development of flexible or open attention,
she said, which people use to monitor their environment as
a whole. Both types are critical for learning. Children need
selective attention to stay focused, but if their flexible
attention is weak, they'll have trouble taking in more than
one piece of information at a time.
Studying the effects
Researchers agree that we are at the very beginning of understanding
whether meditation can affect a child's brain and body --
and, if so, then how. Still, many parents and teachers are
convinced of its benefits. They say that with meditation,
"some kids will suddenly go from Ds to Bs and A's --
and that's great," said Dr. Donald Greydanus, a professor
of pediatrics and human development at Michigan State University
at Kalamazoo and the author of several books on adolescent
health and behavior.
"Folks like me are always eager to look at new data,"
Greydanus added, "but at this point the research just
isn't there."
Trae Smith is convinced of meditation's usefulness, however.
Asked whether he'll meditate now that he's in fifth grade
-- where the math is full of fractions and the language arts
get tougher -- he said: "I think I'll be doing it a lot
this year."
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