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?
Have you ever met a child IRL?