Childhood
is the world of miracle and wonder...as if creation rose, bathed in the light,
out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. -- Eugene Ionesco
How to
Awaken Joy in Kids
--by James Baraz, Michele Lilyanna, syndicated from Greater Good, Oct 22, 2016
Can joy be cultivated? And, if so, can
we teach our kids how to be more joyful in their lives?
In our experience, the answer to both
of these questions is yes. But it takes knowing what kinds of practices bring
true happiness—and not just momentary pleasure—to your life. Once you’ve
mastered that, it’s not too hard to introduce those practices to kids in a way
that they can understand and appreciate.
This essay is
adapted from Awakening Joy for Kids by James Baraz and Michele
Lilyanna ©2016. Reprinted with permission of Parallax Press.
Our new
book, Awakening Joy for Kids, is a resource for parents,
teachers, and caregivers who want to give their kids the gift of authentic
happiness. Filled with practices you can integrate into your day at home or at
school, our book is designed to be a guide to helping your children increase
their well-being and enable them to meet the stresses of the world with presence,
self-compassion, and openness. We offer practices for adults as well as kids,
since your own well-being is the best prescription to passing it along to
younger people.
Many of our
practices are rooted in science. For example, we suggest helping kids to set
intentions for happiness because paying attention to the good things that
happen in life rather than focusing only on the bad can help rewire their brains for
happiness. We teach mindfulness meditation because mindfulness has
been shown to decrease stress and increase happiness.
And we teach the practice of compassion because caring for others is
key to better relationships, health, and emotional well-being.
These practices and the others
outlined in our book come from our experiences as meditation practitioners and
as teachers of adults and children. The two described below—cultivating
gratitude and building resilience in difficult times—are some of the most
powerful.
1. Gratitude
Why practice
gratitude? Because gratitude has been found to increase happiness and social supportin kids, both crucial for long-term well-being.
It also seems to benefit adults.
Paying
attention to what you’re grateful for can switch the channel of your negative
thinking and help you appreciate what is here in your life right now. To deepen
the effect, though, it’s important to let yourself fully experience gratitude
when it’s here and take time to savor the moment, particularly in the body.
Even just a few seconds of registering the positive feelings of gratitudewhen they arise help to strengthen their
impacts.
Here are a couple of ways we encourage
the practice of gratitude, first in adults, then in kids:
Gratitude meditation for adults
To experience a taste of gratitude,
try sitting quietly in a relaxed posture and focusing on your heart center. As
you inhale, visualize breathing in kindness; as you exhale, allow negativity to
be released. Then reflect on some blessing in your life—any person or thing
that you are grateful for. It could be as simple as having eyes to see, food to
eat, and air to breathe; or it could be thankfulness for having love in your
life or a good job or kind friends. Whatever it is, take time to say a quiet
“thank you” and then to mindfully experience the good feelings in your body.
Other
gratitude practices we’ve found helpful are writing a gratitude letter, listing three good thingsin a journal before going to bed at night, or
just sharing your appreciation for others when you encounter them in your
everyday life. Whenever you do a gratitude practice, you deepen your feelings
of joy and increase the joy around you. Here’s the key: Don’t miss it!
Gratitude exercises for children
To help instill gratitude in your own
children, try starting a gratitude practice at the dinner hour. Perhaps you can
hold hands with your children and all share something that you were grateful
for that day. It can be something as simple as noticing a flower or the
kindness of a friend. Just sharing in this way helps parents and their kids to
get a better idea of what’s happening in each other’s lives and is a simple way
to build deeper family bonds.
At school, a practice we suggest is to
have children gather in a circle and pass around a special stone, sharing what
they are grateful for. With a little encouragement, children will come up with
many ideas, like “having Mom make my lunch” or “snuggling with my cat” or
“living on such a beautiful planet.”
Teachers can encourage kids to write
in a special journal about what they are grateful for or to make “gratitude
flags”—small pieces of fabric where they write down what they are grateful
for—and then hang them from a string in the schoolyard. That way, kids can
remember and show their friends what they are thankful for whenever they are
outside playing.
2. Help in
difficult times
Gratitude and other skills we write
about—like intention, mindfulness, and compassion—can be cultivated over time
through attention and practice, and they all lead to greater happiness and
social-emotional well-being.
But that doesn’t mean that life is
always joyful—nor should it be. One of the great truths is that life also
brings challenges. It’s important for us to breed joy in our lives not to avoid
the inevitable difficulties, but to meet them with strength and compassion.
The practice of embracing the
difficult is a vital part of awakening joy. The more we understand suffering
and are willing to come to terms with it, the greater the possibility of
developing a mind that is not afraid of the hard stuff when it comes—because
underneath the pain lies wisdom, compassion, and love that can open to it.
RAIN: How adults can work with
difficult feelings
When we suffer, we often experience
pain, anger, fear, or sadness. The acronym RAIN can help us remember how to
directly open to and work skillfully with these difficult feelings. Here are
the steps to doing this practice:
Recognize what
you’re feeling. Let yourself be open to your emotions of sadness, anger, or
fear, and name it.
Allow it to be
here. Let go of any agenda for it to change and, for a few moments, give it
permission to be just as it is.
Investigate how it
feels in your body on an energetic level without getting into the story behind
it or trying to get rid of it. Bring a curiosity or interest that involves
simply exploring the landscape of your emotion without needing to figure it
out.
Non-identification—meaning,
don’t take it personally; don’t assume the experience reflects who you are at
your core. (For example, don’t say to yourself, “I’m an angry person.”)
Recognize that everyone experiences emotions; they are part of the human
condition. Open up to that truth and don’t let it define you.
If exploring
difficult emotions becomes too hard, you can always practice a little mindful breathingor gratitude, and go back to exploring the
emotions later. This will help you to be kind to yourself, while bringing more
balance to your emotions.
Self-compassion
for adults
When working with a difficult experience,
the most important thing you can do is to be compassionate and caring toward
yourself—to not beat yourself up about it and invoke more pain. Practicing
self-compassion involves turning your caring attention toward yourself,
remembering that your pain is something everyone experiences.
Researcher
Kristin Neff suggests placing your hand on your heart and sending yourself
positive messages, like “Suffering is a part of life” and “May I hold my
suffering with kindness and compassion.” She has found that mindful
self-compassion practices have the potential to increase calmness, decrease
emotional reactivity toward others, and help us take setbacks less personally—all
useful in difficult situations.
Helping
children navigate difficult times
Many parents
want to “be there” for their kids, to support their growth and well-being. But
being there for them all the time, and not allowing them to experience
difficulties and frustrations, can keep them from learning resiliency or the
power of handling their emotions with wisdom and compassion. Over-protected children are
often more anxious than their peers and have trouble bouncing
back from setbacks.
To help children navigate difficult
times, we still need to encourage joy practices with our kids. Practicing
gratitude and mindfulness during the good times gives them the energy to really
put in a concentrated effort when things are difficult—sort of like charging a
battery.
But that doesn’t mean we ignore our
sadness, anger, fear, or pain. We want to teach children to express their
emotions in healthy ways rather than stuffing them down or exploding.
Reframing
kids’ thoughts
One thing
teachers can do in the classroom is to help children find antidotes to negative
thinking—often a big source of stress for kids as well as adults. Children get
a lot of negative messaging, and they need ways to counteract that so that it
doesn’t lead them down a spiral of despair or helplessness. Reframing or correcting distorted thinking is
one way to change negative thinking into realistic thinking.
One exercise involves giving children
a sheet of paper that has been divided in two. On one side, the children write
down one or more of their own negative thoughts—the kind that tends to run
around in their heads, like “I’m not good at math” or “No one likes me.” On the
other side, they write down the opposite or the antidote to those negative
thoughts, like “I find math challenging, but I’m taking on that challenge and
it’s OK if I don’t get every answer right; I’m learning,” or “Just because one
person was mean to me doesn’t mean I’m not likable; I can keep being open and
kind to others, because that helps me connect and be a good friend.”
Then teachers can ask their students
to notice throughout the next day or week when the more positive antidotes run
through their minds and encourage them to focus on these when a negative
thought arises. By doing this, you are helping to rewire their brains to pay
attention to the positive and make it their natural, default setting. This
helps kids to be courageous when things get tough, and to not get bogged down
in self-defeating thoughts.
Encourage
compassion in kids
Another thing
that helps is fostering compassionate action. When we learn how to help others
who are going through hard times, it can help us to strengthen our relationships,
an important resource in challenging situations.
Try this: Ask children to think of
someone—a person or an animal or even “the earth”—who is having a hard time. It
can be someone they are familiar with or whom they don’t know well.
Then ask them to think of an action
they could take to make things better. It’s important to encourage kids to take
baby steps and not expect them to solve the whole problem. But they can do
small things like write a get-well letter to a sick relative, make a quick
phone call to a friend who fell down at school, give a hug to a pet that’s been
home alone all day, or water the thirsty plants outside. Encouraging kids to
notice others going through challenging times and to take positive steps helps
them to stay attuned to the world around them. And it feels great!
We believe that sharing mindfulness
and social-emotional practices are vital not only to the next generation but to
the well-being of our planet. Whenever we teach our children—and
ourselves—to shine a light on the good and to rest our minds on uplifting
moments, we are strengthening the ability to empathize with others, feel more
connected, build resilience, and be inspired to make this a better world. And
that makes for a more joyful life for all!
This article is printed here
with permission. It originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good
Science Center (GGSC). Based
at UC Berkeley, the GGSC studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of
well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and
compassionate society.
Be
The Change: Experiment with using the practices in the article when interacting
with children in your own life.
