Mindfulness training does not improve mental health for school childrenexperts have concluded, after a survey found that most students found the exercise too boring.
While the scheme helped some teachers avoid burnout, and also improved school culture, most students do not immediately benefit from it. For some, it worsened their mental health.
Prof Mark Williams, the founder and director of the Oxford Mindfulness Center and co-researcher, said that on average, students practiced mindfulness only once during the 10-week course.
“That’s like going to the gym once and hoping to get fit,” he said. ‘But why didn’t they practice? Many of them thought it was boring… Those students who did participate did improve.”
Mindfulness Meditation encourages people to pay attention to their thoughts and feelings without judgment, and is successfully used in adults to manage mental healthso researchers were eager to find out if it could help earlier in life as well.
The eight-year study involved more than 28,000 children aged 11-14, as well as 650 teachers from 100 schools across Britain.
At the start of the study, the team found that one in three students had mental or emotional problems, which was higher than previous figures.
‘Children not interested enough’
Mindfulness courses were taught to half of the students for 10 weeks, with a total of 30 to 50 lessons, and experts recorded changes in well-being, depression, social and emotional behavior.
However, the team concluded that it was no better than what schools are already doing mental healthand researchers found that eight in 10 children were not interested enough to practice mindfulness at home.
Willem Kuyken, a professor of mindfulness and psychological science at the University of Oxford, and one of the lead authors of the study, told a briefing that older children seemed to benefit more than younger children, but those with pre-existing mental health problems showed no improvement.
He added: “Looks like they might have got a little worse† Our hypothesis was that our mindfulness training would improve children’s mental health. It didn’t.
“Some people loved it, but a slightly larger group didn’t like it and a lot of kids didn’t practice at all. The kids who didn’t like it and didn’t practice didn’t do very well.”
Teachers reap the benefits of mindfulness
Although mindfulness was found to improve a school’s culture, make teachers more accessible, and encourage mutual respect, the effects waned after one year.
And while mindfulness training made teachers feel less burnt out, the benefit also diminished after a year.
The team concluded that mindfulness training should not be rolled out on a large scale to schools in Great Britain.
Tamsin Ford, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, and co-investigator, said: “Our work adds to the evidence that translating mental health treatments into curricula is difficult and that teachers may not be able to best placed to deliver without much training and support.
“Another approach would be for mindfulness practitioners to work with students at risk for poor mental health or who show a particular interest in attending mindfulness training.”
The research is published in the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Mental Health.