The nation’s children and teens are in the midst of a mental health crisis. The national statistics are sobering — rates of anxiety and depression in kids aged 3 to 17 increased 27% and 29% between 2016 and 2020 — but young people in Utah are clearly struggling as well.
The 2021 Utah Adolescent Health Report found nearly one-in-five students seriously considered suicide. More than 18% reported self-harm, and 35% said they felt sad or helpless. The same assessment found indicators of poor mental health have spiked in recent years, and there’s no reason to suspect they’ve improved significantly since the data was collected.
Yet, despite the size and scope of this crisis, we’re leaving one of the best tools for improving children’s mental health — mindfulness — on the table due to misguided fears about what the practice is.
While there are dozens of definitions of “mindfulness,” scientists define it as a mental state that can be achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations. Activities promoting mindfulness include focusing on the breath — feeling the rise and fall of the belly or the sensation of air in your nostrils — yoga or even taking a walk. These are free options, available to all, to improve their mental health. The goal is to slow down racing minds and reduce stress to improve quality of life.
Research indicates taking this practice into the classroom can help students and teachers alike. One study focused on sixth graders in a Boston charter school found mindfulness education helped to reduce stress and boosted students’ ability to focus. Another study found that fourth and fifth graders who practiced mindfulness scored higher in math, had more social behaviors and were less aggressive. Likewise, a systematic review found that mindfulness in schools increased considerate behavior, resilience, executive function, attention and mindfulness, while decreasing anxiety, attention problems and disruptive behaviors.
My own research conducted in Utah schools backs this up. I trained teachers in the Cache County school district on how to implement mindfulness practices with themselves and with their students. The mindful practice seemed to decrease teacher stress and improved coping abilities for half the teachers. At the same time, mindfulness practice had desirable effects on students’ academic engagement, respectful behavior and disruptive behavior in the classroom.
Critics of mindfulness ignore this data and instead spout partisan talking points that claim it’s part of a “woke” agenda designed to indoctrinate students. At least 25 states have considered banning social-emotional learning, another term for educating students about ways to manage their feelings. Florida even banned textbooks for including these topics.
Rick Hess, the director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told NPR that social-emotional learning “is a case of big, deep-pocketed, liberal, coastal foundations coming in led by people who went to elite colleges who aren’t from their communities pushing ideological agendas that they find problematic.”
But mindfulness doesn’t teach anything beyond how students can better acknowledge and manage their emotions. It’s a skill people of all partisan stripes can benefit from.
I hear these same arguments when neighbors and community members learn I research mindfulness in schools. But I also hear from school psychologists who lament the loss of social-emotional teaching, knowing it could be beneficial to their students and teachers.
During a crisis like the one our children are facing, we need to put all tools to work to improve their mental health. Mindfulness is particularly important because, unlike most mental health treatments, it’s free. Kids’ mental health is far too important to become a victim of ill-advised culture wars.
(Mary L. Phan)
Mary Phan is a school psychology PhD student at Utah State University. Her research is focused on implementing mindfulness-interventions in public schools.