Hi all,

As I am going through this text by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche : Beyond meditation...

...which I stumbled upon through this nice list of resources : Reddit resources...

...I found myself thinking again about the notion of teaching meditation to children. 

YMR seems to have learned how to read and meditate at the same time, from the Dzogchen text The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena. He was taught by his father who was a tibetan tulku. 

I find that wonderfully amazing.

Recently, reading Land of the spotted eagle, by Chief Luther Standing Bear, I picked up on this excerpt describing the customs of the Lakota people : 


How about the community here : have those who are parents taught their children how to meditate ? If yes, results ? If not, why not ?

Curious to hear others' opinion about this too. 

Cheers

I taught my daughter (now aged 10 years old)  how to meditate at around 5. 

Initialliy it was a game in which we would each in turn tell the other what thought came in the mind. E.g. I would go: I am thinking of a tree. Then she would go, I am thinking of a rabbit. Then I would go, I am thinking of a cake. And on and on for like a minute or two. A kind of rudimentary ping pong noting à la Kenneth Folk.

This began to develop the skill of watching one's own mind. 

Later, I showed her how to count her breath, and finally do metta meditation.

Results? It's hard to tell if some of those ''results'' are from meditation or a combo of her own personality and how we raise her. She is certainly very compassionate and has a good sense of ethics or morality. She is well-behaved, including at school, and studies well.

Meditation results per say: I once told her to observe  itches in meditation without scratching, just watch it closely. She did that and reported  with some awe that the itch eventually multiplied and bounced around like a basketball. I was thinking, A&P.

Other times, often actually, she has reported feeling joy during meditation. Once she reported dizyness and I said it's ok just watch it, don't worry about it. She was very ok with this. 

At 8 years old I sent her to a children one-day ''retreat'' at a Goenka center. They taught them mindfulness of breathing. She reported that while watching her breath at some point she felt her body disappeared, with only the tip of her nose remaining in awareness.

I have to say though, that I have not taught her meditation as a stand-alone thing, but within a wider context of teaching her Buddhism. A lot of her bedtime stories I told her were from animated Buddhist story books for children. I taught her age-appropriate (that she can understand) Buddhist teachings. She always showed much interest in all this. By the time she meditated for the first time she had heard a lot of these stories, which deal mostly with teaching virtues such as perseverance, non-harming, compassion, etc. So in her mind meditation is a thing you do within a wider context of ethical teachings. 

Another thing is I never make her do long meditation sessions, only a few minutes. Often I put the bell in front of her and let her decide when the session ends by striking the bell. Now that she is 10 the sessions are usually around 10 minutes. She doesn't meditate every day, just once in a while.

Interesting Ben, thanks for sharing. Let us know when she attains stream entry

Haha Cool.. Maybe she will attain it before I do!

;)

Only joking of course.

Cheers

That's a clever intro to meditation! 

I teach my kids (6 & 8) stuff like watching the breath and exhaling to relax, basic body awareness around emotions, also visualizing blue sky with small clouds to fall asleep. My daughter sees angels and bright lights. They think they're experts at meditating because they can get into full lotus whereas I meditate in an office chair! 

During my Sunday school teaching days, working with kindergarteners and first graders, I would introduce them to the "Hello God" prayer, with a little framing ritual. We would light a candle (we had a very strict protocol for who lit it, as everyone wanted to, and we had to take turns very precisely) and I would say, "What does it mean that the candle is lit?" The reply was, "God is here." Then, we would do the prayer. The "meditation instructions" were to close your eyes and say, internally, "Hello God," and then to listen for a response. I spent some time beforehand broadening the concept of "listening" to include body sense, heart stuff, etc. At that age, they could go about thirty seconds with this mantra-like prayer before somebody got too fidgety. To close it out, someone would blow out the candle (again, strict taking turns protocol observed) and I would say, "What does it mean that the candle is out?" And they would reply, "God is still here." (subtly introducing them to the snuffed candle of nirvana, maybe, lol)

I wasn't able to develop this, but I will say that they were very receptive and fascinated. I should obviously have brought Ben V in there!!

If only ben V had been there... 

Nice !

My mom used to make us say a pater noster before going to bed, at the time i was very keen on that. Wasn't meditati'g per se but i'm sure that played a role in my later interest and inclination. I was also a volunteer altar boy for a few years, loved it.

The idea of teachings my kids to read from the deepest texts is very appealing to me honestly !

Post A&P I was very gung-ho about teaching meditation to my kids, but I'm a bit more cautious now after having traversed more of the Dark Night stuff. If and when they are curious, I want to be able to have good resources to support them, but I want to wait until they are motivated by their own interest. Till then I'd rather focus on helping them build healthy psyches, so they are best prepared for the spiritual journey once they decide to take it on. A lot of that is trying to resolve my own stuff so I don't inadvertently pass it on.

Sounds very reasonable. I wish i had a parent with a clue about this when i was 12 :p 

My kids are older and can make the meditation y/n decision on their own. I'm not sure I'd get younger children into meditation in any serious way until they reach the age of consent, anyway. What's that you say? What is the age of consent? I'd say the age at which they can vote.

I teach my 4 year old boy to calm himself down (like a Ninja) by closing eyes and breathing in and out without fidgeting the body He now brings the two Seiza benches to us when he wants to meditate. "Dad let's meditate" Usually he sits for 10 seconds

Then I talk to him about how mind can fall into the Hell Realm when angry and by coming back to his breathing sensations he can come back to the Human realm of loving kindness. When I get angry with him or me and my parter might get into an argument he would say "Dad, go back to your breathing, you are in the Hell Realm"  

When we brush teeth before bed time I tell him about the light Kasina and we stare at the bulb in the toilet for a bit and then we tell each other what we see first time I only asked what he can see without me sharing any info; he told me about a green dot that has red around it, and how this green turned to a red dot , all this with lots of wonder and excited observation was really cool watching him and listening to this  

I would not be ok with someone else teaching my boy. I would need to really get to know that person/teacher! Like "eye to eye" getting to know him/her well before being ok with that. 

Must be fascinating.
Sounds about right ! 

What if your kid gets to the black dot and murk aspects though ? 

I wonder if the "dukkha ñanas" would be so hard to deal with for a kid with parents who know about this like you and can normalize the thing. Who knows how much of this dhukka actually comes from constructed identities which might be established later in life. Perhaps it would be easier for a kid.

Anyways, I can also see the wisdom in Chris' perspective of not wanting to experiment by actively provoking such things if they do not show up naturally... 

I'm kind of expecting someone to show up and tell us about how his 6 year old's DN went... lol

Not sure about my kid and DN, but I tend to think that passing seriously through nanas require some serious meditation. A few minutes here and there, not sure it can be too serious. 

As Chris I would certainly disagree in getting young children in any serious/heavy practice, or forcing them if they show they are not interested. That is not even a good thing to do with adults. The day ''retreat'' my daughter went was alternate periods of short meditations, periods of play/games, and periods of story telling, and she really liked it. To me as a parent it was experimenting and see my kid's response to it to see if it's beneficial or not. 

About consent: I assume most if not all parents just show and train their children whatever value system they believe is best (whether they are conscious of doing this or not), even though the children don't have the ability to consent to it. Just as they cannot consent to school teaching them math, physical education, history, and even the value system they teach them. I think it's more a matter of being mindful of the effects of what we do decide to teach them, and adjust along the way. IMHO anyways. I could always be wrong.

"Perhaps it would be easier for a kid."

I think so. Most of my DN bleed through was due to my fucked up PTSD condition spanning from early childhood and on into my life's happenings of all sorts etc ... 

Btw, I'm not forcing anything on my boy. These short meditations happen maybe every week or longer I'm only making sure he knows about it. I'm not to set him on his path. That's his decision to make or not. 

I've raised four children. All of them are now adults and out on their own. I've mentioned my daughter here at various times because she's the most tuned into spirituality and psychology, maybe because of her struggles in her mid to late teens. My second oldest is getting into it now because of some issues, in his case work-related stuff causing anxiety. I believe that most people who become serious meditators do so from some perceived need which then carries them through more than the merely curious, although I realize that's a huge generalization.

In my experience, children learn a lot more from observing how their parents behave than from what we tell them and deliberately attempt to teach them. So if they see us meditating and/or otherwise doing what my friends in the developmental/leadership area call "self-care", they will naturally have some curiosity around that and be more likely to be drawn to it when, and if, they encounter their own problems.

So I'm in a sort of "let nature take its course" camp on this issue.

Thanks for sharing your experience and observations with this. 

During the second semester, I led 10-minute guided meditations for a group of 11-year-old kids once a month, with other parents facilitating sessions on the remaining weeks. Each parent brought their unique style to the practice. My approach focused on body awareness through breathing exercises and introducing simple, black-and-white labels to help the kids connect physical sensations with emotions and mental states (e.g., anxious or relaxed, bored or curious, alert or sleepy, remembering the past or imagining the future, etc).

The kids' engagement with my sessions was OKish (the teachers did seem to enjoy them). However, by the end of the year, their feedback revealed a clear preference for sessions involving Sanskrit mantras, visualizing lights, yoga mudras or practicing QiGong movements, which other parents had introduced. They seemed especially drawn to elements that evoked a sense of magic or wonder. While the kids feedback was discouraging, the parents' prefered practices were more discouraging. (*)

Though I have been considering stepping away from the group next year, I have also explored alternative practices that might align better with the kids' preferences while offering some more grounded practice. One idea is to introduce a "playful" concentration exercise, such as progressive breath counting.  For instance, starting with counting the breath cycle—1-2-3 for the inhale, 1-2-3 for the exhale, with no pauses—then gradually increasing the count to 1-2-3-4, and so on. Once the group reaches, say, a count of six, we could stop counting and instead rest attention on the sensations of the breath at the nose, chest, and belly, and explore the silence in the mind that usually follows.

What are your thoughts?

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​(*) I know I’m being judgmental—mantras and similar practices likely have their place in a well-rounded curricula/tradition. Still, I’m just trying to stay honest about how I feel.

Some thoughts, Pepe:

Do you have kids? I'm sure when I was 11 or thereabouts, the more exciting meditation stuff for me would have been visualizing things, QiGong movements, etc. Evoking a sense of wonder? Magic? Sign me up!

Don't be discouraged - in my experience with my own, kids aren't likely to relate to or want to do vipassana or concentration practices. Once they're older, say, mid-teens and above, then yeah. Until then, probably not so much. So, with that in mind, I think you're on the right track by making a game out of this in some way. But I'd probably leave it at the game stage with some relatable lessons on what the games are meant to lead them to. Will it help them in class? Will it help them learn? With homework? Who are some famous people who meditate? Why do they do it, and how has meditation helped them with similar things or life skills? Finally, I'd include some kind of visualization exercise to help them with the process - imagining they're in a favored peaceful place, or maybe a quiet room, or a hidden place away from everything. 

I think the app Headspace has some meditation suggestions for kids of various ages. It might be worth looking into.

Anyway, I say meet 'em where they are!

Interesting topic, missed it a few years ago.

Yesterday my daughter was squezzing her eyes and describing colours and shapes that she was seeing. I spent hours in my childhood doing the same, before falling asleep. Colours have mostly dissapeard for me now, bother!

I wonder how many kids discover this type of kasina?

Yeah, I did that as kid too!

Yes, my kid is 11, and he gave me good feedback after the practice, though he’s probably not representative of the middle of the bell curve. As you say, postponing Vipassana or concentration practices until the mid-teens seems like a wise choice.Thanks for the questions! I usually include a 1-minute intro to explain the practice, but these direct questions might work better. As for visualization, I’ve considered asking them to recall a happy moment and, if possible, try smiling. I’ll also explore Headspace—haven’t use it before. Thanks for all the ideas, Chris!

I still do it sometimes. It works especially well after retreats when the attention is naturally sustained. I re-discovered it after decades when I sat on the toilet in a retreat, resting head against the hands as I was quite tired (pressing on the eyesballs) — and it started happening

Not having children, but just to say that there is stuff going on there, including research; mindfulnessinschools.org (which had a UK-wide pilot study involving 100s of schools, IIRC) is an example. Eline Snel wrote a few books on the subject. Nshorna Davis (daughter of Christopher Titmuss) gives teacher-trainings for mindfulness for kids/teens (I attended that one).

I think (this is a non-expert hypothesis) that insight practices properly speaking, where one pillar getting attentional stability through neutralization of nascent reactivity to stimuli, are impossible until adolescence (late teens). Someone told me that telling teenagers in puberty to focus when there are distractions around does not work, as the emotional-regulatory circuits are not in place yet: they just need a distraction-free environment.

That said, a lot of ground work for later insight practices can be laid earlier (such as basic psychological sanity; who of us can say we got it as kids?). It seems to me that there are adjustments in two directions.

First is the subject. Dry insight is too abstract, or impossible, not captivating. So all those programs for kids/teens include big portions of kindness & interconnection practices (which includes learning to read one's own and guessing other's feelings), awareness of the body, relaxation, concentration practices, the ability to recognize and verbalize emotions and processes like fear and anger, and see them come and go. (I wish I could learn this as a kid.)

Secondly, it needs to be delivered in a way which is imaginative, expressing/externalizing what can be later perhaps worked with as metal states. One guy would have (pre-school) kids put teddy bears on their tummy when reclining and watch their teddy rise and fall (attention supported by affection for the teddy). One practice I remember from Nshorna is "kindness ninja": tell the kids to do one kind thing (such as cleaning the table) every day without telling anyone they did it (kindness supported by thrill of secrecy). Or "mindfulness glitter jar" (google it up) where the children learn to watch glitters sinking in a jar after being shaken up; they see that the same happens to their thoughts, feelings and body after getting agitated, in which case they can grab the jar in the classroom, shake it up, put it on the desk in front of them, and see how it settles (attention supported by visual interest put on the process, instead of ruminating about the story). Eline Snel guides relaxation/bodyscan by saying that the body is like spaghetti which are not completely cooked at places (tense spots), and we are cooking them with kindness and warmth (and attention). Or "draw a picture which expresses your mood today".

Nice!

While we're on that topic, Daniel P. Brown has co-authored a very interesting book that I really think should be more widely known and applied in education contexts: 

Amazon.com: The Elephant Path: Attention Development and Training in Children and Adolescents: 9781732157996: Bissanti, Michelle, Brown, Daniel P, Pasari, Jae: Bücher

"The book presents a detailed discussion of the research in the development of a variety of attention skills in infants, children, adolescents, and adults; the alerting system, the orienting attention system, and the executive attention system. The second chapter reviews the varieties of dysfunctional attention in the modern Western world, with emphasis on the vulnerability of children to: mindlessness, distracted concentration, the problem of apportion attention across tasks, mind-wandering, reactivity, lack of coherence of mind, lack of sufficient working memory, and poor metacognitive skills. Emphasis is given to how multimedia, video-gaming, web browsing, and mobile devices affect attention in children. The third chapter reviews a wide range of intervention studies on training mindfulness, concentration, training to reduce mind-wandering, the effects of multitasking, and reactivity, and training to increase metacognitive skills, working memory, and executive functions. The argument is made for the importance of training sustained concentration and distraction resistance over other attention skills. The remainder of the book gives detailed instructions for training concentration skills in children, adapted to developmental age: early preoperational children (ages 4-6), late preoperational children (ages 7-9), concrete operational children (ages 8-12), and adolescents (age 13 plus). These instructions have been adapted from standard Buddhist concentration training, from Asanga’s Nine Stages of Staying [Concentrated], modified and adapted for Western children according to developmental age and context. The book also includes field research on how concentration and working memory training is traditionally taught to children in Tibet and Nepal."


To repeat:
"The argument is made for the importance of training sustained concentration and distraction resistance over other attention skills."

I found that rather interesting, see the quote from the book below. And this is Daniel P. Brown making that argument. As far as I am aware, he is/was the only advanced Western practitioner/teacher who put in a lot of work to lay a solid foundation for introducing the fruits of thousands of years of experience cultivating attention skills to Western schools. Kabat-Zinn and the Kornfields and Goldsteins of the world seem to be too busy cultivating mushrooms.

Anyway, a pretty unique book that I wish would spawn a lot of other works, long term studies, etc. that go a lot further in that direction. It still seems to be surprising news for school teachers that attention skills can be developed in a targeted way, that there are very old traditions with detailed tech to that effect around and that this tech has already been adapted to be applied in Western schools by a skilled meditation teacher (and lineage holder) who also happened to be a Harvard psychologist. And that "mindfulness" might actually not be the most beneficial thing to teach to children:


"As we have seen, although mindfulness training is very popular, it claims to do too much and it‘s skill-set doesn‘t readily map onto the priorities for training attention in children. In this generation of children, the priorities are to train the executive attentional system and the executive function system, and reduce mind-wandering. The executive attentional system specifically means training selective attention and enhancing resistance to distraction, extending the capacity to sustain attention while minimizing episodes of engagement/ disengagement/ re-engagement during a period of sustained attention; and training meta-cognitive monitoring. Furthermore, the main models for understanding peak performance or flow take heightened attentiveness, as mediated by ACC activation, as the foundation for states of excellence (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; Orlick, 1980). For these reasons training the executive attentional systems should be a main target for training. Therefore, we have selected and adapted the main method for concentration training of children and adults in the Indo-Tibetan meditation tradition because this approach offers very detailed instructions on detecting and resisting distraction, cutting off mind-wandering; sustaining the duration of concentration; reducing dividing attention; and maintaining optimal alertness."

Also nice!

Pixelcloud, thanks! The concentration game I’m working on feels aligned with the ideas in the book. I found a 2022 edition that’s more affordable, so I’ll order it.

Thanks, Eudoxos! I’m tempted to test a made-up game with 11-12-year-olds to see how it works. The idea is to pair them up, seated across from each other, and give each a card with an emotion or mental state. One acts it out silently while the other guesses. Then they switch roles. Later, with eyes closed, they’d recreate the facial expression of their partner and try to identify the associated body sensations.
​​​​​​​

Pepe, 

just a heads up regarding that partner game: Modern research into emotions is clear that facial expressions do not reliably correlate to emotion states at all, you'd be wrong over 60% of the time. Newer research also couldn't find basic patterns of body sensations correlated to specific emotion states (those that you'd be wrong about more than half the time), and neither are there any basic emotions shared by all humans. So all you'd do with such a game is to further entrain the adoption of overly simplistic cultural stereotypes of emotion, emoticon style,  and the highly erroneous notion that you can tell what is going on in another person by inferring an emotion from facial expression. You can't. You just teach people to be overly confident in their guesses and not look for further cues (like actually asking what's going on with the other person). You're also substracting shades of grey regarding emotions, not adding nuance, since you're just entraining a handful of our cultural sterotypes. So while I can see that games of this sort are maybe motivated by the idea of training empathic behaviour, you'd really not be doing anything of the kind. That seemingly is better done by letting kids play in self organized settings, teaching them roughhousing games, etc. (see Piaget's work, for example, or Rafe Kelley's musings and observations on this topic expressed in many of his podcast interviews).

Great point, Pixelcloud—you’ve won me over! I get it now, trying that game would be pointless. Thanks for the advice!

This is me mindfully playing and caring for the young one!  
BTW he is 8 yo now and he meditates on his own at times. Following the breath. He even built his own Buddha altar and he wished me to buy him a Tibetan bowl as a gong for meditating on sound. 

I recall I heard of similar practice used (showing a piacture of someone's face; say what could be the emotion and why that person feels that way), but with a different objective. It was done individually for a child on the autistic spectrum (I don't remember the specifics) so that (s)he would learn to actually give attention to the fact that others may have emotions, and that they often arise due to causes. The framing was imaginative, so the child was encouraged to come up with different versions of the possible story. Just to react to what pixelcloud nicely said; that the awareness of the ambiguity and uncertainty (and thus communication) is important.

My eldest wants to meditate on the sound. He hits the bowl and listens to the end until he can "touch the moment the sound is no more" 


​​​​​​​

Your kid’s a champ! That’s an interesting approach—I’ll run it by some other school parents and see if it might work for bigger groups (~90 kids).