Why Mindfulness Must Be Taught
A Back-to-School Essential - for Everyone
The digital world has created a widespread practice of distraction that now requires mindfulness to be taught as a skill to help youth harvest the social, emotional and academic benefits of focus. Focus is an essential ingredient for creating confident learners, thoughtful leaders, and kind, productive classmates, friends and citizens.
Elizabeth Heller
Pre-digital age, mindfulness was part of how life was lived. If your mom was late picking you up from school, you simply waited. Maybe you read a book or stared at the clouds. Noticed feelings of frustration or boredom and managed them. You didn’t text your mom 10 times, chat complaints to friends, post distorted pics of your bored face, and scroll through social media. We live in a world where we now need to teach mindfulness as a life skill. It is no longer a baked-in part of living.
Mindfulness means paying attention on purpose to the present moment without judgment. It is a practice of pausing to notice feelings and body sensations as they show up and without any need to change them.
Unfortunately, mindfulness has become an overused and often misinterpreted concept. Mindfulness is NOT a process for chasing a singular feeling—like calm or non-stop happiness. Humans are not designed like that. Feelings are not a goal to be pursued and attained. Feelings are just information—important information—about who you are in a particular moment and indicators of what you need. All feelings change—including calm and happiness. They change because, as I’ve mentioned, they are information about the present. The present moment changes all day, everyday.
If you have a practice for noticing feeling without judgment (non-judgment is key), you are poised for absorbing the self-discovery and growth that are essential elements for mental, emotional and physical health. And for an interesting, rich life. I believe it is our responsibility to teach kids the tools of self-awareness. Our youngest citizens were born into a world that adults have created. It is truly our job to offer them the skills to navigate it.
TRY THIS: Consider re-naming your Calm Corner a Mindful Me space (or something similar). A simple name change can encourage kids to pause, notice what’s happening, and use mindfulness tools to manage it. This can have profound benefit over unintentionally directing kids to go to the corner to live up to the attainment of a singular feeling—calm.
Of course there are benefits to the digital age. It’s also becoming well-researched that overuse, among other profound challenges for youth, promotes a practice of distraction and normalizes instant gratification. Both obfuscate the self-awareness gained through present moment focus and the human truth that everything worthwhile takes time, patience, effort, and attention. Today, we have to teach mindfulness as a skill to enable youth to harvest the social, emotional and academic benefits of focus that create confident learners, thoughtful leaders, and kind, productive classmates, friends and citizens.
In my view, mindfulness is a back-to-school (and life) essential. Breathe Move Journal aims to help make mindfulness for youth (and the adults in their lives) a simple, accessible and fun practice. We have designed our Breathe Move Journal books for kids and teens with 3 evidence-based tools—yes, breathing, moving and journaling—that youth can use for a lifetime of managing, embracing and creating focused wellbeing.
As you head into the new school year, remember that youth only know the digital world. It is essential to their wellbeing to offer them mindfulness practices as a healthy, empowering process for managing it.
Wishing everyone a stellar 2025-2026 school year, Elizabeth