The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate »

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.

The techniques of mindful awareness have helped millions of adults reduce stress in their lives. Now, children—who are under more pressure than ever before—can learn to protect themselves with these well-established methods adapted for their ages. Based on a program affiliated with UCLA, The Mindful Child is a groundbreaking book, the first to show parents how to teach these transformative practices to their children.

Mindful awareness works by enabling you to pay closer attention to what is happening within you—your thoughts, feelings, and emotions—so you can better understand what is happening to you. The Mindful Child extends the vast benefits of mindfulness training to children from four to eighteen years old with age-appropriate exercises, songs, games, and fables that Susan Kaiser Greenland has developed over more than a decade of teaching mindful awareness to kids. These fun and friendly techniques build kids’ inner and outer awareness and attention, which positively affects their academic performance as well as their social and emotional skills, such as making friends, being compassionate and kind to others, and playing sports, while also providing tools to manage stress and to overcome specific challenges like insomnia, overeating, ADHD, hyper-perfectionism, anxiety, and chronic pain. When children take a few moments before responding to stressful situations, they allow their own healthy inner compasses to click in and guide them to become more thoughtful, resilient, and empathetic. The step-by-step process of mental training presented in The Mindful Child provides tools from which all children—and all families—will benefit.

Introduction: The New ABCs: Attention, Balance, and Compassion 1

Chapter 1 An Opportunity: Using the Science of Mindful Awareness 21

Chapter 2 Getting Started: Understand and Fuel Your Motivation 37

Chapter 3 As Simple as Breathing: Get Started with Relaxation and Calming 61

Chapter 4 Refined Awareness: Learn How to Pay Attention 87

Chapter 5 Friendly Awareness: Meditate, Speak, Relate, and Act Mindfully and Compassionately 107

Chapter 6 Sensory Awareness: Become Aware of the Physical World 125

Chapter 7 Emotional Freedom: Release Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Feelings 153

Chapter 8 Tuning In to Other People: Develop Parent/Child Attunement 173

Chapter 9 Pluribus Unum—Out of Many Become One: Live as Part of a Community 189

Epilogue Beyond This Place There Be Dragons 205

Acknowledgments 207

Notes 209

Index 215