This seems rather naive to me. Unhappiness is far from absent from the lives of many children and young people, and social media is making it worse. See yesterday's yougov survey results that indicate that "18% of young people in UK do not think life is worth living" [1].
This new curriculum subject is about helping children to understand and navigate their own feelings and deal with stresses so that they are less likely to turn into messed-up teenagers and adults. As a parent of school-age children I think this is an entirely good thing.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/05/youth-unhapp...
There were times I almost worshipped that imaginary version of Western culture I had with it being all about action, forward movement and unending progress. Once I finally got myself out of Russia, I was up for a big, big surprise... West had idleness as its second nature...
I'm sorry that you had to deal with those things as a child, but I'm not sure what you're saying here. That children in the west are soft due to insufficient adversity?
Mental health is not something that's "so dumb to waste time on". Maybe you are tough enough to take what life throws at you, or maybe you just think you are. But I've been around long enough to know that people can be broken-down by events in even an ordinary life - and children need kindness and support just as much as they need challenge and the opportunity to learn from mistakes.
If I've misunderstood then please feel free to explain more.
I admit, I am a bit envious of other men of my age who managed to get that "settled down slow life" with happy family, but even at that stage in life, that "idleness" only comes as a great reward for years of work, and raising a child is a no joke effort.
>The survey, which was published in November, also indicated a slight increase in mental disorders in five to 15-year-olds, which rose to 11.2 percent in 2017 from 9.7 percent in 1999. Disorders like anxiety and depression were the most common, affecting one in 12 children and early adolescents in 2017, and appeared more often in girls.
Besides, depression and anxiety is surprisingly common among children.
Whom do you think they learned this from? Trees or cats?
I suspect that in a non-ignorable number of cases, "no one", because it's entirely possible their brain chemistry is just screwy.
Presumably you're missing a "sole" before explanation there?
Because brain chemistry certainly seems to be definitely regarded as at least holding a coat even if it's not actively swinging punches.
Like lottery :)
Obligatory Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/wowthanksimcured
"Homeless Chicago man suffering from hypothermia makes miraculous recovery after someone from Wisconsin informs him 'it's actually much colder where I'm from'"
Have you ever met a child IRL?
But once they start looking at adults - all they see only dark, gloomy, lifeless serious faces and so they start becoming the same.
If adults want to do something about it - we should teach happiness ourselves first. Kids will follow automagically.
It's exactly this kind of reductionism which leads parents to ignore their children's psychological needs, which leads to schools having to take action.
I did not say that. As I don't think that imposing complexity of mental bullshit from adult's minds on children makes things any better.
I suspect one of the biggest sources of misery for a lot of kids are other kids.
If your parent is a teacher at the same school, your school life is going to be A+ miserable.
>“It’s not just to make them feel better in the short-term,” Dr. Deighton said, “but to better equip them for later in life.”
But I see that most people around me never experienced this and for them, meditation and yoga is an exotic exercise.
One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add one more boring official class.
Being perpetually 'busy' and treating life as a collection of planned activities, like homework, classes, courses, workshops, appointments, etc. is something that runs deep in our entire (Western?) society, whether school-going or working age.
Mindfulness as yet another one of those activities feels uncomfortably like a band-aid solution that is dangerous precisely because it works.
It's a bit like taking aspirin to deal with headaches when really you should just stop drinking so much coffee and working so much.
I do think mindfulness can be more than that. I've experienced how beneficial it can be to make it part of life rather than just (or only) another planned activity, especially when it's a part or underpinning of a larger 'framework' (in my case I lean towards Zen Buddhism).
Sceptics see it as (a) Some yoga-style mystic silliness reasonable people have been ignoring for decades, and (b) A 2014 self-help book, a fad-prone genre with relatively little credibility.
If the common sense ideas underlying mindfulness were given a different coat of paint, they might be more readily accepted.
I was a lucky kid, but those around me who had problems had them because they were excluded from groups, got parents divorced, were bullied or were simply spoiled by their parents and were unhappy if anything didn't go their way. Telling them to be mindful is straight out of Voltaire's Candide.
Schools can't fix dysfunctional families. All they can do is give kids some tools to cope with such challenges. Even if it doesn't help a particular child, why would it be wrong to at least try?
Edit: Apologies for the sarcastic response, couldn't help it. Children can and do feel unhappy, some more than others. This feels like an amazing step in the right direction because many people (myself included) don't learn early on that feeling sad or overwhelmed is normal and ok. We strive to "feel good" and stress about it, without tools to cope. Most adults either ignore this or go to therapy, but maybe from now on people will be more prepared.
Until someone told you what is normal and what is not you have no problems doing something. So it's not about being sad is ok, it's about not judging at all.
I agree with you, I’m sure we think similarly, and it seems like talking to children about mindfulness could be amazing.
I fear that many schools/teachers won’t do a good job at it, judging exclusively from my own experience back in school... but that’s a different issue.
I disagree with it. I prefer to look at them somehow like I see bugs: they cannot be - in general - eliminated completely. They come with the process of people building products.
So I don't think we can solve those completely. This is why I think we should start educating children about how to think about live.
Maybe an inspiration from philosophy stage from Ancient time which originally I think was concerned (at least some of them) with how a life should be lived, what happiness means, what does it mean to be a homo sapiens ...
I think we should approach this as a society and start offering children tools about how to approach this.
How about children who are repeatedly raped by their parent? Are they happy?
How about children who's parent has died? Are they happy?
What about the children who are grappling with gender indentity or sexuality (and maybe with parents who are not supportive)? Are they happy?
What about children living with disability and who are being bullied because of it? Are they happy?
You are exactly approving my point that it's the adults who need to solve their problems (on different levels) first.
I'm happy for your past self, but your experience is not universal. Many people as children and teenagers have problems with these things. Its hard to take action to work on these without having a mental framework to organise your thoughts and communicate about them.
So there will be an experience of some "negative" states of mind and emotion, but to become a problem it needs support. Removing this support is what I'm talking about. In a form that adults should be a live example that "negative" things happen but do not grow into problems.
Because people live in an artificial world. In the absence of real problems everything is emotionally traumatic, first world problems.
As I sit next to a war on a military deployment I await people to prove me right with the sadness of their downvotes.
Conversely, do you have chronic income insecurity? Are you dodging bullets and bombs daily as some people do? Were you ever a victim of child slavery in a third-world nation? I suspect if you have internet access you probably have reliable shelter and don't stress over food insecurity. Those are real problems, and yet the people who live through those stressors typically aren't the ones needing mindfulness. The difference is a matter of perspective from perseverance. The lack of perseverance in normal childhood development is certainly a first-world problem.
But no, I was never dodging bullets. I lived in a Western country and the assailant used other weapons and wasn't part of a paramilitarized group, so I guess it doesn't count.
Which is why is fucking bothers me that you dismiss life for kids in the developed world as an "absence of real problems". Just because we're not scavenging for food, doesn't mean we don't have real problems.
Sure, thankfully many kids won't need that knowledge until they're older, if ever. But it's not always clear who will. My family certainly didn't meet the stereotype.
People are never properly prepared for tragedy. That is the difference between trauma and sadness. No less, these things happen. Trauma lives in the past. When you reflect on these past experiences they can define you or become you. That is the difficult choice you must confront when dwelling on these memories. With effort you can choose to let the pain of past memories go, if willing. The acceptance of such choices is the nature of perseverance.
So he goes back for another deployment. Another deployment in a pointless and meaningless war, yet another racket that has everything to do with the interests of the powerful and nothing to do with sentimental crap like serving your country. But he feels that it is meaningful.
“War is a racket”
This is my fourth deployment. When I go back to my comfy civilian job as the elite senior developer it is a bit depressing seeing the things people complain about at the job.
As an example consider this scenario that I went through:
Another developer was telling me I was using the wrong IDE. I needed to be using Atom because it has the fantastic extension called Atom Beautify that beautifies a whole bunch of different languages with a huge ton of options. I guess he didn't realize I am a collaborator on the project and many of the supported languages are available because of my beautifier integrated into the extension. Then when I am leaving the company for this military separation I had to hear from my boss in the exit interview that some code I wrote months ago was horrid, because the other developers only know how to read OOP code (even though I provided extensive documentation). Nobody bothered to talk about it or explain their distaste. How am I supposed to process that?
It is as much about being literate in the issues as it is about solving them.
Should we learn Maths or English from experience? Without the literacy, we don't have the tools and terms to understand our experience. The early years are exactly the time to introduce them, since that is where our experiences have the most profound and long-lasting effect.
Either you had a fairly idyllic life as a child of (more likely) you are looking at the past through rose tinted glasses (many people do this). Kids have problems.
Why wouldn't adults just solve their mental problems instead of introducing them to children? Children have no problems with happiness or well-being. It's us who should learn from them.
big facepalm