Meditation Advice For Parents Of Young Kids

This session reviews all the key points from the course, combining all the instructions, guidance, techniques, and concepts covered in the course. By the end of the session, kids will have a solid grasp of the principles and techniques of mindfulness meditation and calm breathing, knowing when and how to use them in their day-to-day lives. This track is taken from my course, ‘Mindfulness Meditation & Calm Breathing For Kids’, available now via my profile.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the course Mindfulness Meditation and Calm Breathing for Kids.

This is another bonus session and it's one that's just for the parents.

Kids are welcome to listen but I'm going to be giving the parents a bit of context,

A bit of ideas and just sort of make sure that they can refocus and take the lessons learned in this course out into the rest of their lives to get them and their kids meditating daily.

I just wanted to reiterate that the most important factor of everything with kids,

In my experience,

Is engagement.

If they're not enjoying it,

If they're not having fun,

If they don't have buy-in,

It's very hard,

If not impossible,

To get them to do the thing.

You only have so much leadership capital.

You only have so much ability to push through the annoyance or boredom or displeasure or desire to do other things by force of will alone,

Saying,

Do this thing,

We'll only get you so far.

Beyond that,

Ideally,

You want meditation and calm breathing to be a thing of fun,

A thing of joy and a tool that they go to because they know that it works,

Because they've had the positive results,

Because they enjoy it,

Because they have fun,

Because it's something that they can do with you.

With that in mind,

I prefer to lean in towards approximating to the goal of mindfulness and calm breathing rather than,

Quote,

Doing it perfectly,

End quote.

So a lot of the stuff in this course wasn't pure mindfulness.

What I mean by that is,

If you were teaching adults that are motivated,

I.

E.

They've chosen to click on a course and do the course,

You can be far more stringent and sort of traditional with your instructions.

This is what you need to do.

This is why.

Let's do it.

But with kids,

That intrinsic motivation doesn't come from the activity always.

It's very rare that a kid will say,

Hey,

Mom,

Hey,

Dad,

I want to learn to meditate.

Some will,

But the majority of kids who are exposed to mindfulness meditation and calm breathing,

The exposure will come through their parents.

And thus,

The initial motivation will come from the parents saying,

Hey,

This is a great idea,

And the kids wanting to impress you or wanting to do it with you.

And then the only way that they'll keep doing it is if they're having fun,

If they're enjoying it,

If it's exciting,

And if they're doing it with you.

Does that sort of make sense?

The reason I'm saying all of this is that if you want your kid to continue with the habit,

As I do with my kids,

And I'm sure you do if you've been listening to this whole course and you're on the course and we're doing all of this together,

You want them to keep going with it.

I just want to sort of highlight the temptation to sort of make them do it right.

You might listen to another one of my courses or any of my talks,

Or read books on the topic,

Or find any number of other resources from instructionals,

From gurus,

From whoever,

And they will say the correct way to meditate.

And you'll look at what your kid's doing,

And you'll see that they're not really doing it right.

And I want to say,

Just let them do it.

Let them do it how they're doing it.

If they're sitting down and meditating every day,

That's a win.

Even if what they're doing is meditation,

Could only be loosely defined as meditation.

Engagement and connection to the practice comes first.

You can always slowly chip away and make it a little bit more ideal,

Or perfect,

Or following the theory a bit better over time.

Once they're invested,

Once they have the positive results,

Once they get into the habit.

But the first thing is engagement.

It's with this in mind that I want to give you one more activity that you could do with your kid.

It's called the eyeball challenge,

Or challenge mode.

So what you do is,

You sit down with your kid,

And get them to look at you in the eye.

And the way you win this game is by staying focused.

Whoever looks away first loses.

You can't talk,

You can't move,

You can't tap.

But you can blink and you can sort of adjust yourself to stay comfortable if you need to.

But you make this a challenge.

You make this a competition between you and your child.

Whoever looks away first,

Loses.

Whoever keeps their attention,

Wins.

That's one variation.

Another variation could be that you set a timer,

And you try and last the full 60 seconds together.

Or you say,

Hey,

How long do you think you can last for?

And they'll give you a time,

And you try and work through that together.

In a way,

You're sort of challenging each other to accomplish a goal.

Now,

If they're struggling to do this,

If they're sort of losing focus,

Lower down the time,

So that they can end on a win.

But also give them some tools,

And remind them of tools from this course.

You know,

Practice some calm breathing,

Focus on the breaths.

Look at my eyes,

But also do some mindful hearing,

That sort of stuff.

And the idea is that this game is teaching them to stay focused.

But what's the internal motivation here?

The motivation here is to win.

Now,

This is why I gave that discussion on engagement before proper practice.

Because from a mindfulness,

Purely mindfulness perspective,

The goal isn't to win.

The goal is to just observe reality as it is for what it is.

To,

You know,

Track the sensations of the breath in and out of the nose.

There is no winning,

There is no losing.

It's just an acceptance of the present moment,

Acceptance of reality,

Just a awareness of whatever's arising,

Right?

But if you play this game with your child,

And if they've got a bit of a competitive nature to them,

They will love it.

And then you can build up the time,

You can build up the focus time.

So you might start off with 10 seconds,

You might start off with a minute.

I did it with my son,

And the first couple of times he got to about 30-40 seconds,

Then he's like,

I reckon I could do it for 100 seconds.

So he challenged himself,

And he got through,

And he did it.

And when he did that 100 seconds of focused attention,

I made a big deal of it.

I celebrated,

I said yes,

Yes,

Yes.

It was amazing,

Because it was amazing,

But I let him know how proud I was.

And I said,

This is a bit more of an advanced meditation.

It's not really a kid's meditation anymore,

We're doing a eyeball challenge.

Made a big deal.

And he felt really proud of himself.

So whether or not you decide to play the eyeball focus game with them or not,

That's up to you.

But what I would suggest is that you keep the idea of engagement in mind,

Make it fun.

This game is a fun game.

It's a bit of a challenge.

And if you've got other people in the house,

See who can challenge each other.

You can have a competition with it to see who can focus the longest.

Because that's what we're really training here.

We're training our ability to stay focused,

Looking at the eyeballs,

Being mindful on the eyeballs.

Now they're learning that focused capacity,

Because as we all know as parents,

The ability for our kids to focus is extremely desirable.

And the other way you can use this eyeball focus game is if you notice their attention wavering.

So later on in the night,

My son was going a little bit crazy.

He was just sort of bouncing around the room,

Just losing it.

So I put him over and I'm like,

Hey,

Let's do 10 seconds.

Let's do just 10 seconds of the eyeball focus game.

So I got a timer,

And we did just 10 seconds.

And that was enough to sort of just check him back into reality,

To sort of pull him out of the sort of nighttime mania and put him back onto focus.

It was enough,

Just 10 seconds.

But because he already knew the game,

And because it was a bit of a challenge,

Because he wanted to win,

We were able to finish our nighttime routine with success.

It was amazing.

So consider playing the game,

But more importantly,

Make sure that you focus on engagements.

If they're doing a guided meditation and they're moving around,

That's fine.

If they're being sassy back at the instructor,

That's fine.

If they are engaging with it,

That's what we're after.

And over time,

We can chip away at making their technique a little bit better.

And if you listen to a guided meditation by me or by anyone that seems engaging enough for them,

Even if it's geared at adults,

Do it with them.

If you have another way that you could gamify meditation,

Try it.

I didn't talk about this in the course,

But there are things called mala beads or meditation beads or prayer beads.

Every religion and most spirituality practices have them.

You could gamify it and say,

Hey,

Try and focus on each bead.

You take a breath,

You move a bead.

You take a breath,

You move a bead.

Try and get to the end of the set.

It's a bit of a challenge.

It's hard for adults to do that challenge.

See if they can do it.

See if you can do it.

See if you can do it together.

Do you see what I mean here?

If you're talking about mindful hearing,

Well,

How many different things can I hear?

Get a pen and a paper and list it down.

And you make a list,

They make a list,

See who gets the biggest list.

Or do a minute,

See what you can hear.

And do another minute and see if you can beat that score.

There's many,

Many,

Many ways to gamify meditation.

But like I said,

The idea of gamifying mindfulness meditation or calm breathing isn't necessarily congruent with perfect practice of mindfulness meditation or calm breathing.

But our goal is to get our kids meditating daily,

To instill the habit,

To give them a tool that over the long term will benefit them in tremendous and varied ways.

So just consider that and try it.

Like I say at the end of every session,

If you have any questions or ideas,

Let me know in the classroom.

And if you have a specific issue with your child,

A specific question that your child has addressed,

Please ask.

Because if I address it,

It will help other kids and other parents because they are probably dealing with the same thing as well.

Okay,

So ask and I can address it.

And the final thing I want to mention is I will copy the audio of the guided sections of all of the meditations from this course.

And I'll put them up on my InsightTimer profile as separate meditations for the kids.

So for example,

If you like the mindful hearing meditation part of the course,

You can play it from the course,

But eventually it will be up on my profile.

So you'll just have to take a little look for it.

And I'm also going to do a guided eyeball focus challenge meditation as well.

And that'll be up on my InsightTimer profile too.

So just check those out.

If you like this course,

Please rate and review it.

It really does help more people to discover it.

Anyway,

I'll be in the classroom.

Ask away.

It's been lovely having you and your kids with me.

I hope to see you again next time.

Have a great day.

Hey there,

I just wanted to let you know that this track was from my course,

Mindfulness Meditation and Calm Breathing for Kids.

It's out now and you can check it out at my profile.

Enjoy.