The point being pushing things (good, bad or ugly) in schools often doesn't work out as hoped. Schooling is not a solved problem but it is a very crude tool used badly and often brutally by people of all kinds who wish to improve society by giving kids the tools to... You've heard it all before.
You can't preach what you don't practice.
(Hopefully I don't sound like I'm criticizing Western decadence too much. I'm actually a big fan of decadence!)
For lifestyle/moral decisions kids will do what they see their parents do. Not what they are told by parents or anyone else.
Based on her observations of her friends.
Is this unique to Western society? Are there societies that do a great job teaching this stuff to kids? I always assumed that teaching teenagers stuff was pretty universally difficult.
What are the odds that repetition of a basic curriculum by a lightly trained teacher has less impact over time?
Finally I would look at late life outcomes as well. A lot of the lessons of vipassana and other mindfulness lessons are difficult for the very young. Handing someone a life time tool and expecting it to yield apples before the tree is even planted or tended is absurd.
When I start working the mindfulness and meditations practices helped me tremendously and I would felt like I can go back to my focus and productive mode easily and regained my performance.
You can definitely make kids believe in religion. There's a reason entire societies in the past held the same religious views.
And then when they do really believe in it, more often than not rather than “I’ve thought deeply about all the doubts and I can give thoughtful responses to them”, their attitude is more “asking tough questions is a sin”
Of course, even the best possible religious education isn’t going to convince everybody. But when parents ask me if they should worry that sending their kids to Catholic school is going to indoctrinate them in Catholicism, I always reply—based on my personal experience of having spent the majority of my K-12 education at them—that the average Catholic school is more likely to turn your child into an atheist than into a convinced Catholic. And many religious schools of other persuasions do no better
Our neurosis is a byproduct of our success and of the highly complex and competitive nature of our social interactions.
Touching grass, spending time with animals, learning to accept and appreciate our animal roots, is what can balance the stress.
In today's environment, technical, design and financial tools scale up ambitious peoples mindlessness. It doesn't matter what you teach a kid, if the kid has to then go and work for such a person.
Do we? (From "Has the science of mindfulness lost its mind?" (2016))
"A recent comprehensive meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials showed that mindfulness interventions only led to moderate improvements in depression, anxiety and pain, and very small improvements in stress reduction and quality of life. There was no evidence that mindfulness had an effect on other variables, such as positive mood, attention, sleep or substance use. Further, when mindfulness was compared with other interventions, such as physical exercise or relaxation, it was not more effective."
Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. It’s like trying to teach peaceful and quite a 6 months old dog - you can’t. You need to let them burn all that energy.
For hourly production workers that have to clock in/out and may only get a fixed 30 lunch break then it is more difficult.
This study focuses on 14 year olds (on average). This is way past the age of “needing to burn energy like a dog”. Sure, they have more energy than adults, but you’re still likely describing much younger humans.
> Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around.
The masters of the original mindfulness techniques would agree.
I believe studies on this are discussed in Sam Harris’s book “Waking Up”.
A typical day for me as a teenager would be to wake up, have breakfast (or maybe not), walk to school, strictly pen and paper work only, hang out with my friends at lunch. We might play Gameboy after school, the same game for weeks on end. If I wanted something to do I had to go outside and play, at home we maybe had books, it's a self limiting form of entertainment.
Now it feels like everything is just so much more complicated. The me of today would wake up and stare at his phone for half an hour before even getting to school. It's just massive overstimulation all of the time.
Mindfulness, even in adults, I find is a hack to avoid actually doing the things which lead to stress reduction.
Staying focused is more important than ever. Not enough people know how or care to fight all these nasty attempts to move their locus of control outside themselves. Once you know what you want out of life it's much easier to keep things in control.
As the old Simpson's episode said: "just don't look".
In the US as far as I can tell the right wing has a "traditional" leader that has sex with prostitutes, and the left wing gets upset if you call a man a man.
It's basically random as to whether a completely reasonable opinion will be seen as verboten, or a completely bonkers opinion will be seen as okay, so I mean, who knows?
The way I learned mindfulness meditation, you should not expect it to accomplish anything specific. I listened to a course and found the ideas new and helpful, it was so life changing that I went further and studied some Buddhist philosophy, but further studied brought some anxiety and so I stopped. My current attitude is that I got what I could from it, but won't study it further.
I don't think mindfulness should be viewed as any better than other life strategies.
The one you pointed to is $130 a year.
You also definitely want to accomplish something specific in your practice, namely to move past suffering. The first step of any formal meditation session is to bring up your motivation for sitting in the first place.
Similar to how people who have never studied cognitive bias assume they are unbiased.
After being a skeptic and avoiding it for years, I decided to do a mindfulness/meditation experiment, and indeed, one of the first things I started to realize was just how much my brain would go down rabbit holes of discursive thought.
Becoming more mindful absolutely made me feel like I was less mindful, simply because I was actually noticing.
I need to dig deeper into the study to see if/how they accounted for this, but it seems like it'd be a major factor in a self-reporting situation.
How do we make all these conclusions so quickly
Also people already have answers in their head, so anything that comes up from a study (even a poor one) can spark conversations.
Good job in pointing out, I hadn't noticed those important details.
One other reference I've seen from a Tristan Harris interview is that mindfulness teaching effects (presumably for younger kids) can get negated by social media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3034&v=3CdxIATnH_w&feature=y...
Mindfulness only works when you put the effort in to seek the equanimity it provides.
I think it's hard for kids to make being calm and composed a virtue. You kind of have to get there as a consequence of experiencing a lot of chaos.
I think 2 hours of sport before all school would do more for most kids. Even if it was just a 2 hour walk outdoors.
I can’t tell at a glance if the science is bs, but I can certainly tell that writing for a general audience before peer review is a shit thing to do and should certainly discount this article.
If you want kids to be mindful, be mindful yourself.
Have heroes. Don’t allow yourself to whine. Aim for victory. In the process you’ll discover you’re much happier.
