A Mindful Breath-Counting Practice for Teens and Tweens

An 8-minute breathing practice that teaches kids the basics of mindful awareness by counting each inhale and exhale.

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As a parent, your job is to prepare your child for the road ahead, rather than endlessly (and impossibly) trying to fix the road itself. You can’t predict every potential difficulty and protect your child from every pothole. But if you help your child cultivate mindfulness, research suggests they’ll develop resilience, improved executive function, and social and emotional skills that allow them to steer themselves when the time comes.

You can’t predict every potential difficulty and protect your child from every pothole. But if you help your child cultivate mindfulness, research suggests they’ll develop resilience, improved executive function, and social and emotional skills that allow them to steer themselves when the time comes.

You don’t need to be a “perfect” meditator to begin discussing meditation with your child — you just need to be genuinely interested in the process and honest about your own experience. Once you feel familiar with the ideas and practices, you can introduce them to your family. Be sure to talk about your own difficulty sustaining attention and resisting reactivity. This can be an important part of the lesson…