Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Count to ten.
Although these strategies for calming down during a stressful situation might be familiar to you, children do not inherently know them. Rather, they need to learn how to regulate their emotions and rely heavily on others to help. Beyond this, children need to experience what self-regulation feels like—what it means to be able to shift from tense to tranquil.
A new paper from the Family Resiliency Center (FRC) outlines how to implement a mindful movement program that promotes these skills among preschoolers. The protocol paper describes the process for teaching emotional cognitive self-regulation in the preschool classroom, outlining the study's research procedures, sample demographics, and survey data properties.
A central element of the project was showing the effects of such self-regulation strategies through the measurement of children's stress levels. Preschoolers often cannot give a reliable report about their own stress levels, so the study monitored the children's heart rates to show the biological impact of mindful movement practices like neural-based drills, aerobic activity, breathwork and reflective practices like a "feelings circle."
"Mindful movement provides preschool children with developmentally appropriate ways to build self-regulation through movement, breathwork, focused attention and expression of feelings," said Dana Eldreth, senior research scientist at FRC and co-lead author of the paper. "We have seen how those practices can lead to better behavioral outcomes. This study goes a step further by exploring the cognitive and physiological processes underlying positive change. Demonstrating those effects is very exciting to me."
The years between ages two and five are a pivotal time for the maturation of brain regions associated with self-regulation, cognition, and social competencies. Given these developmental changes, intervening in a preschool environment is the ideal setting.
"Early childhood is a crucial period to develop positive coping strategies because these skills play out across the lifespan," said Jacinda Dariotis, professor of human development and family studies and director of FRC. "Bringing evidence-based interventions into the preschool setting can foster positive trajectories in life, helping to avoid risky behaviors during adolescence—like violence, substance abuse and school dropout—that subsequently contribute to substantial social, economic and personal costs in adulthood, such as strained relationships, addiction and unemployment."
Dariotis explained that the program offers benefits for teachers as well. Although to date there have been no studies examining the effects of this mindfulness program on teacher outcomes, Dariotis suggested that the positive changes in children's behavior are beneficial for their instructors too.
"Teachers who participate in mindfulness-based educator training are less likely to burnout and more likely cultivate a prosocial classroom climate that is conducive to learning," she said. "Put simply, these teachers are better able to manage their stress. They report both greater well-being and better relationships with their students."
Going forward, the team intends to tease out the effects of specific components of the intervention in order to tailor future programs to diverse preschool populations.
"We hope that a large-scale randomized control trial will help us understand the mechanisms of change for different parts of the program," Dariotis said. "The future of public health is precision prevention; we want to find out what works best for whom and under what circumstances."