Posted 16 September 2014 – Mosaic The Science of Life – www.mosaicscience.com
Can children be made more psychologically ‘resilient’ to traumas like 9/11 – as well as the stress of everyday life? Emma Young meets a former school principal who believes they can.
“It was one of those perfect days. I think that’s what everyone remembers. And now whenever the day’s too perfect and the sky’s too blue, I think: what might happen?”
September 11, 2001. Lisa Siegman was in her first year as principal of Public School 3 (PS 3) in downtown Manhattan. Up on the fourth floor, the fifth-graders had a direct view down to the World Trade Center. “They had a perfect view of the towers,” Lisa says. “The kids saw people jumping. People were running into the halls of the school, just doubled over.”
PS 3 was far enough away to escape evacuation. But children from two other schools, PS 150 and PS 89, which were closer to the devastation, were sent there for safety. “People started converging on the school,” says Lisa. “We had parents wanting to take their kids, parents wanting to help; we had only two working phone lines.” By the afternoon the school had been identified as a potential site for a temporary morgue. Refrigerated trucks were lining up outside, along Hudson Street.
On what was just the sixth day of the school term, more than 5,000 schoolchildren and 200 teachers had to run for their lives. But kids all across the city were affected – from those who heard the non-stop sirens of the fire engines and ambulances to those in quieter neighbourhoods, who watched replays of the strikes over and over and over on TV.
By the end of that day the September 11th Fund had been established by two major local charities. Donations poured in. Money first went on immediate aid – hot meals for rescue workers, emergency cheques for victims and their families – and then funds were made available for programmes to help New Yorkers to recover. The damage wasn’t only physical, but psychological. Counsellors set up services in local churches, and psychiatrists came from around the country to offer their expertise and their insights. Thoughts turned to the city’s children – how would they deal with the stress and trauma?
Into the debate stepped Linda Lantieri. A former school principal in East Harlem and administrator with the city’s Department of Education, she had helped to develop social and emotional learning programmes for US schools, and was head of the National Center for Resolving Conflict Creatively, an organisation she’d co-founded to tackle school violence. Helping kids handle trauma and manage their emotions was Lantieri’s forte. She approached the Fund with her own take on resolving the problem: enhancing ‘resilience’ – a person’s ability to get through difficult circumstances without lasting psychological damage.
For scientists the concept of psychological resilience began in the 1970s with studies of children who did fine – or even well in life – despite significant early adversity, such as poverty or family violence. For a long time a person’s level of resilience was thought to be inherited or acquired in early life. This idea was supported by the often-replicated statistics on what happens after a trauma: while most people bounce back to normal relatively quickly, and some even report feeling psychologically stronger afterwards than they did before, about 8 per cent develop post-traumatic stress disorder, according to US figures.
The degree to which someone bounces back, or does even better – his or her resilience – has a genetic component. But “genes are not destiny here,” says Professor Dennis Charney, Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City. He bases this statement in part on interviews with people like Jimmy Dunne.
Dunne is a co-founder of the financial services firm Sandler O’Neill, which was formerly based in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. On 11 September 2001 he was out playing golf when he heard about the first plane crash. As further details emerged, he realised his colleagues were among those trapped above the burning wreckage. By mid-afternoon Dunne was on a train to Manhattan. He ran from Grand Central Station towards the small midtown satellite office where the firm’s survivors were gathering. About four blocks away he stopped running and started walking. “I remember thinking, as soon as I get there everybody’s gonna be looking at me, everyone’s gonna be looking for direction from me. I want to set a very different tone, one of total calm,” he said later.
Dunne told Charney that while he felt he was naturally quite pessimistic, “the moment I heard what the terrorists wanted, I decided to do exactly the opposite. Osama bin Laden wanted us to be afraid. I would show no fear. He wanted us to be pessimistic. I would be incredibly optimistic. He wanted anguish. I would have none of it.” His firm lost 66 of the 83 people who’d been working in its main offices, as well as its computer system and almost all of its records. Just six days after the attacks, it reopened for business.
Before 9/11 Charney and his collaborator Professor Steven Southwick at the Yale School of Medicine had been avidly studying people who’d experienced a trauma, looking for clues as to why some people are more resilient than others. Their interviewees include former American prisoners of war in Vietnam, serving members of the US Special Forces and their trainers, victims of sexual abuse in Washington DC, survivors of an earthquake in Pakistan, and later people who were hit hard by 9/11. “We started out with a blank slate,” Charney says. To the people who recovered well, they asked: “Tell us how you made it? What were the factors?”
As well as investigating psychological attitudes and mental strategies linked to resilience, Charney and Southwick have probed the neurobiology behind it. People whose bodies respond rapidly to a threat – with a surge of the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol – but who then recover quickly seem to cope better with stressful situations and jobs, such as working in the special forces.Could this drug make you mentally stronger?
More resilient people also seem to be better at using the hormone dopamine – which has a role in the brain’s reward system – to help keep them positive during stress. Charney’s team, along with colleagues from the National Institutes of Health, studied a group of US Special Forces soldiers. They found that the amount of activity in the reward systems of the soldiers’ brains remained high when they lost money in an experimental game, unlike in the brains of regular civilian volunteers. This suggests the system in resilient people’s brains may be less affected by stress or adversity. Each of the soldiers’ brains also featured a healthily large hippocampus (which as well as enabling the formation of new memories also helps regulate the release of the fight-or-flight hormone adrenalin) and a strongly active prefrontal cortex, the brain region dubbed ‘the seat of rational thinking’. This in turn helps inhibit the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes negative emotions such as fear and anger, allowing the prefrontal cortex to come up with a sensible plan to cope with a threat.
Through their research Charney and Southwick have identified ten psychological and social factors that they think make for stronger resilience, either alone or ideally in combination:
- • facing fear
- • having a moral compass
- • drawing on faith
- • using social support
- • having good role models
- • being physically fit
- • making sure your brain is challenged
- • having ‘cognitive and emotional flexibility’
- • having ‘meaning, purpose and growth’ in life
- • ‘realistic’ optimism.
Charney and Southwick are convinced that it is possible to develop these ten factors, and that this can lead to a positive change for generally healthy people in their ability to cope not just with a major trauma, but also with the day-to-day stresses of life.
Academic questionnaires to measure resilience do exist. They measure some of the factors that Charney and Southwick have identified. They’re decent tests, Charney says, but they haven’t yet been used to evaluate the extent to which a person’s resilience might be improved. Still, based on what he’s found out, Charney says that the extent to which these factors could be modified, in theory, is “a lot”.
For kids Charney’s first suggestion is ‘stress inoculation’ – getting them to learn that they can cope with a challenge and overcome setbacks, perhaps by playing competitive sport or through wilderness adventures. “I used this with my own kids,” he tells me. “I have five – four daughters and a son – and they like to say I got tougher on them.”
But Charney is also interested in another technique. It’s been shown in lab studies by other researchers to increase activity in the left prefrontal cortex. In theory this should allow people to recover more quickly from a negative emotion, in part by reducing inputs from the amygdala, as well as, studies suggest, by increasing activity in the brain’s reward system – all of which should boost resilience. Until recently this technique was relatively obscure. Now it’s everywhere: mindfulness.
Mindfulness has its origins in the Zen Buddhist tradition, but its central ideas – involving attention and awareness – are secular. A modern explanation is that it means paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally, to the unfolding of experience, moment to moment.
Lantieri believes that mindfulness and other fundamental stress-reducing strategies are vital foundations for the kinds of changes Charney talks about. “Many of the factors he mentions are internal strengths that can be cultivated through mindfulness – such as cognitive and emotional flexibility or facing fear. We can’t just tell people that it’s better to face their fear without helping them figure out how,” she says.
Mindfulness practices play a prominent role in Lantieri’s programmes for both adults and kids. Just before 9/11 Lantieri completed a series of intensive retreats, learning contemplative practices, including mindfulness – which involves meditation but also a conscious attempt to be ‘in the moment’, a strategy used by some psychologists to help people manage depression and anxiety.
After 9/11, to best help the city’s kids, “I knew I had to start with the adults – with the teachers,” Lantieri says. The adults in a child’s life can have a huge influence, she says, and if they’re not coping they can’t be expected to adequately help the kids. She put forward a proposal to the September 11th Fund and it was accepted.
In September 2011, as New Yorkers began to clear away the physical debris of the terrorist attacks, Lantieri developed her Inner Resilience Program (IRP) for teachers. Working with them, she developed a suite of tools for use in the classroom, to help children cope not only with serious traumas, like the terrorist attacks, but also with more everyday stressors, from exams to poverty to conflict in the home. These include exercises designed to improve conscious awareness of the body and how to calm it down, in part to tackle stress and anxiety, and in theory to boost long-term psychological resilience.
We’ve been stuck in Manhattan rush-hour traffic for an hour, but now we’re on the FDR (the Franklin D Roosevelt expressway) speeding uptown, towards East Harlem. “Tom, the traffic angels have come to our aid,” says Lantieri down the phone. “We’re like at 103rd already, so we’ll be there by 20 after.” At 119th Street we turn off. The car stops by a complex marked with a Costco sign. “People come and park here and do their shopping,” says Lantieri, as the vehicle comes to a halt. “They have no idea they’re right round the corner from kids living in incredible poverty.”
Public School 112 is right across from the Costco. A rectangular block of a building, it’s three storeys high with diamond-patterned security gratings across the windows of the first two floors. Above the entrance, painted in uneven rainbow-coloured letters, are the words “Live your dreams”. Higgledy-piggledy kids’ paintings adorn the front walls. There are robots, a princess, something that might perhaps be a crocodile. Waiting inside is Tom Roepke, one of the teachers. He and Lantieri hug, and he leads us up to a kindergarten classroom.
It’s a bright, welcoming room, the walls plastered with artwork, an alphabet, a number chart. There are circular tables with little chairs, and two Apple iMacs on a low desk by the wall. Roepke goes and sits cross-legged on a rug in a circle with 14 kids.
He places a folded cloth down in front of him, and slowly, deliberately, opens it. “A chime!” cries one little boy. Roepke nods. In a quiet, warm voice, he asks the kids to put their hands on their bellies and take a few deep breaths. Everyone obeys. He strikes the chime, and the kids listen attentively to the clear, pure sound. At last, when the echo finally dies away, they all raise their arms very slowly. No one giggles. No one fidgets. They’re only five or six years old, and they’re fully engaged.
Roepke puts on a baseball cap. “I’m going to take you on a journey,” he says quietly. “We’ll cross a bridge, and take nectar from our pockets with our fingers. A butterfly may land on your finger. If something happens on the trail, what could you do to calm yourself down?” A girl puts one hand up and the other on her lower belly. “Yeah,” says Roepke. “Let’s practise. Low and slow.” He breathes deeply, three times, and the kids follow suit. Then he unfurls a long canvas strap.
One by one, the kids cross the imaginary bridge. All the time, Tom talks in an animated near-whisper, encouraging and guiding them. “Be careful of that bridge. It’s a little shaky… Pay attention to your breath as you’re going. Slow, low breaths.” The class teacher offers tips, and praise. “Watch your feet… Good, Makari, you’re being so careful and calm.” The kids are calm. But when they’re all at the other side, a few start to chatter. “Anybody excited?” asks Roepke. They nod. “Me too. What can we do to calm down?” As one, they put their hands on their bellies. Immediately, the room goes silent. They breathe. Roepke puts his finger in a pot of imaginary nectar and holds it up, and the kids do the same. They whisper about what they’re seeing. Roepke says: “Now one, two, three… Watch them go…”
Eyes still closed, the kids talk happily about where their butterflies flew off to. “Mine landed on a tree,” says one. “Mine went to planet Earth!” says another. Roepke passes round imaginary bottles of water. “Everybody’s thirsty. But don’t gulp it,” he says. “Feel it going down your throat.” Obediently, they pretend to drink, all apart from one little girl, who asks, “You got any soda?”
Through the butterfly hunt the kids learn two concepts crucial to Lantieri’s programme: how to connect with the body – to be ‘mindful’ of the physical signals of stress and excitement – and strategies to combat this. Lantieri recommends other exercises, such as more structured meditations and progressive muscle relaxation, which might be used during ‘Peace Time’, a defined period in the school day that slows the pace – helping the kids to calm down after the lunch-break, for example. Peace Time acts as a space in the curriculum for kids to learn ways to help themselves. The main goals are to teach students how to calm themselves when they’re upset, relax their bodies and minds, and help them pay attention, whether that’s in class or at home.
Meditation and relaxation techniques may help with acute stress. But there’s also evidence that, when practised regularly, they can help the body become less reactive in a stressful situation, boosting resilience to stress and anxiety disorders. Mindfulness meditation isn’t the only form that’s been shown in lab studies to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, as noted by Dennis Charney in his neurobiology research.
According to studies conducted at Harvard Medical School, transcendental meditation (which involves the repetition of a mantra) and yoga can also initiate what’s sometimes called the relaxation response. This is the physiological opposite of the fight-or-flight stress response. It’s controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system – the branch of our nerve network that calms us down after a stressful event – lowering our heart rate and reining in stress hormones. People who can calm down quickly, whose parasympathetic nervous system response is quick and effective, cope better physically and psychologically with stress. Meditation seems to be capable of improving its activity, as does exercise.Stronger body, stronger mind
Lantieri advocates setting up a ‘Peace Corner’ – a part of the classroom (or even the home) with perhaps a cushion and a few stress-releasing tools, such as paper and pencils, a music-player with recordings of sounds of nature, and a water bottle filled with glitter in solution for the kids to up-end and watch while breathing slowly. In the kindergarten classroom of PS 112 this is a chair with a sheet of paper on the wall that reads “Peace Corner Choices: Sit and Breathe. Read a Book.” After the butterfly hunt a few of the children talk about what they like to do in the Peace Corner or during Peace Time.
“You can draw your mother or your dad or hearts or your dog or you can write ‘I love my mom’,” one girl says.
The class teacher asks the kids when they might go to the Peace Corner. “If you’re scared or you’re nervous,” says one girl. “Or if you miss your mom and you’re crying.” A boy sitting near us says, “If someone died in your family, you could go to the Peace Corner.” There’s silence for a few moments. “Does that help you?” the teacher asks. The boy nods. “Yes.”
The idea, Lantieri explains, is that children learn that when they’re feeling sad, anxious or angry, or even excited, they can go to the Peace Corner to calm down. It’s not for the teacher to send a child there if they’re misbehaving. “A child is never told to go to the Peace Corner,” says Lantieri. “They learn to take themselves. This is about building self-regulation.”
Lantieri’s programme for teachers also includes a strong focus on methods for calming down. It involves weekend retreats, which offer yoga, workshops on stress management and conflict resolution, and introductions to mindfulness and other types of meditation, as well as opportunities for teachers to talk about the meaning of their work. There are also day courses and workshops. Teachers might have a massage, or join a session in which they are read a poem and asked to relate to a line as a way to encourage them to talk through issues that are concerning them. Lantieri also runs monthly meetings that enable local school administrators to come together, to take part in a meditation, use some of the other techniques taught in the retreats, or just to talk, without judgement.
Lantieri’s is one of the longest-running ‘resilience-building’ programmes for schools, but it isn’t the only one out there.
The concept of resilience in schools is a hot one. In February 2014 a UK cross-party government group produced a report calling for schools to promote “character and resilience”. May 2014 saw the launch of an all-party group to explore the potential for mindfulness in education, as well as in health and criminal justice. Chocolate meditation and mindfulness in schools
Professor Mark Williams, Director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre at the University of Oxford, is the joint-developer of a technique for treating depression called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. It involves encouraging patients to be aware of their thoughts and to accept them, without judgement. Research shows that it’s as effective as drugs at cutting the chances of a person who’s experienced one episode of major depression suffering another. What if, Williams and colleagues wondered, learning mindfulness-based skills could stop some kids from ever developing depression or an anxiety disorder? What if it could prevent stress, as well as helping them to focus and learn, and go on to be more productive, mentally strong adults?
Mindfulness programmes have been designed specifically for schools – though not necessarily with the main aim of enhancing mental health. In the UK a pair of former teachers got together in 2010 to develop the Mindfulness in Schools Project. They developed a nine-lesson ‘.b’ curriculum to teach kids mindful meditations, such as ‘body scanning’, to encourage them to keep their attention focused in the present and to help them deal with stress. The effects of the curriculum – rolled out in six participating schools – have been scrutinised in a pilot study conducted by Professor Willem Kuyken at the University of Exeter along with other researchers who have worked with Williams. The results, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2013, found that the curriculum had promising effects on stress levels and wellbeing, and the researchers would like to investigate this further in a large-scale randomised controlled trial of the curriculum in British secondary schools.
Elsewhere, Professor Martin Seligman (sometimes dubbed the ‘father of positive psychology’) and a team at the University of Pennsylvania have developed the Penn Resiliency Program for late elementary and middle school students. Here the focus is on the content of thoughts. Over twelve 90-minute sessions students are taught to detect ‘inaccurate’ thoughts, evaluate the accuracy of them and challenge negative beliefs by considering alternative explanations (that popular girl just ignored me in the corridor because she didn’t see me, not because she hates my guts). Students are also taught techniques for assertiveness, negotiation, decision making and problem solving, as well as relaxation.
The Penn Resiliency Program has been evaluated in the USA and the UK, with mixed results. A US meta-analysis of 17 controlled evaluations concluded that its effects on depressive symptoms were statistically significant but small. The UK results of the Penn programme weren’t hugely encouraging either. There was a “small average impact on pupils’ depression scores, school attendance and English and maths grades” according to the final report, but this only lasted until the one-year follow-up study. By the two-year follow-up its impact had vanished.
Kuyken says the effects of the UK .b pilot study were also small. But this doesn’t mean the programme isn’t useful, he argues. Studies that involve giving an intervention to everybody, whether or not they have a problem, generally only get small overall results. “What these interventions have the potential to do is move the bell curve – that is, to help those most at risk of depression at one end of the curve, but also those who are flourishing and those in the middle who represent most people,” he says. Because mindfulness is based on a universal theory of how the mind works, rather than techniques for correcting ‘problem thoughts’, he hopes that a mindfulness-based intervention like the .b course may achieve longer-term results than the Penn programme. Kuyken and his team hope to carry out this research in the next ten years.
“Research is only beginning on the effects of mindfulness on youth, so it is far too early to think that such an approach would be ‘best’,” Joe Durlak, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Loyola University Chicago, told me – something echoed by Ron Palomares, a school psychologist at Texas Woman’s University.
There’s no one silver bullet when it comes to resiliency in kids, says Palomares. Between 2000 and 2013 he was on the staff of the American Psychological Association, working on the Association’s Road to Resilience campaign, which it set up after 9/11 to provide public information on how to become more resilient. For adolescents with depressive symptoms, perhaps the Penn Resiliency Program approach may work best, he says. The mindfulness programmes being developed in schools in the USA and the UK are focused more on emotional regulation, which some kids may need help with but others won’t.
Based on their research, Palomares’s team have identified sharing feelings through talking or other forms of expression, such as art or music, as being among the factors that help kids to “bounce back” from tragic or difficult events. They also found being part of a community, through church or sports, say, to be important, and likewise being able to look to the future. “I believe that a suite of tools is the best approach,” says Palomares, “because of the broad individual needs, strengths and weaknesses you come across in any group.”
The multifaceted approach of the Inner Resilience Program (IRP) may be best for a group, like a class, or an entire school, because it’s more likely to cover the various needs of most of the pupils. Yet, compared to the formal programmes, Lantieri’s IRP is more of a ‘bag of tricks’ – or “a bag of practical strategies”, as she describes it. She says she wants to give adults and kids options, as many as possible, to help children cope with whatever life throws at them. “As much as we like to think we can protect our children from what may come their way, we live in a very complex and uncertain world,” she says. “We have to give them all the skills of inner resilience, so they’re ready for just everyday life.”
Tom Roepke joined PS 112 a few years before 9/11, straight from a Waldorf (also known as a Steiner) school (which are, he explains, “very steeped in a rich conception of the human being”). “There was a lot of work among the faculty that feeds your inner life. I came from that to the NYC public schools system, and it was very unsettling,” he says. “Where was that richness?” After the terrorist attacks he heard about Lantieri’s programme. Roepke was among the first to sign up. “[It] gave me…what the Waldorf school used to provide,” he says. “A community of educators…all getting together, knowing that this is a job that requires we take care of ourselves.”
Roepke fully embraced Lantieri’s programme. He introduced the school’s principal, Eileen Reiter, and assistant principal to the monthly meetings and IRP concepts. Faculty meetings now start with the striking of a chime and a brief meditation. This doesn’t take much time, Roepke says, but it’s a real mood-shifter. “If for some reason we don’t do the meditation, you really notice it,” says Reiter. The inner resilience strategies for children have permeated the school, she says, though there’s been no formal implementation – some teachers use a lot of the techniques, others may use very few. It’s up to the individual.
The IRP has been adopted by schools in Ohio and Vermont as well as Manhattan, and a pilot project has been launched in Madrid, Spain. Lantieri estimates that over 6,000 teachers and 40,000 students have been exposed to it, but she says people will often come up to her at meetings telling her they’ve taken ideas from her books and used them in their classrooms, so it’s hard to know the exact numbers for sure.
There have been various evaluations. In a randomised controlled study involving 57 New York City teachers over the 2007/08 academic year, participants attended weekly yoga classes, monthly meetings (in which they learnt meditative techniques and other strategies to reduce their stress), a weekend residential retreat and training in the techniques for the classroom. At the end of the year these teachers reported experiencing less stress and improved attention, and felt they had better relationships with colleagues. There was also a significant drop in how frustrated third and fourth grade students said they were, and an increased sense that they had a ‘voice’ in the classroom. Another evaluation, focusing on school principals, found that between 70 and 80 per cent of participants felt the programme had improved their job satisfaction, their management style, their relationship with staff and their relationship with students.
As far as Lantieri is aware, the schools currently implementing her ideas for the classroom aren’t evaluating them formally. Given the “pick-and-mix” adoption of the programme, as the teachers I met at PS 112 and PS 3 describe it – some using IRP strategies often and others not at all – this would be tricky. “It is very organic,” Lantieri says. “It has to be, because every school is such a mix of people and attitudes and experiences. You can’t make everybody do the same.” PS 3, for instance, has many more middle-class, wealthier students than PS 112 in East Harlem. The atmosphere in the two schools is very different. In PS 3 the kids skip down the corridors (it’s one of the rules: you can skip or walk but not run), they call out ‘hi’ in the corridors, they chatter in class. Instead of journals they have ‘happy books’ where they write about their feelings, things like “I love snack” or “I love To Day”. PS 112, in contrast, seemed almost supernaturally self-controlled and calm – though to what extent that was down to a more thorough adoption of IRP practices, or the general focus of the individual principals, or the different needs of the children, it’s hard to say.
Principal Reiter of PS 112 has been teaching for 50 years. Interventions have come and gone, but for her the IRP’s focus on teachers as well as children sets it apart. She shares Lantieri’s view that if teachers are calm and nurtured, they’ll be in a better place to help their children. “It’s about taking care of the teachers so they can take care of the kids,” she says. And these particular children need all the help they can get.
“We have a lot of kids being raised by grandparents, or in foster care,” says Reiter. Some live in shelters, some have one parent, or both, in prison. Many of the kids also have special educational needs. When the Twin Towers came down, Reiter had just recently become principal. “We’re right next to the FDR and I remember hearing only ambulances or police cars,” she says. “Everybody [had] felt safe before that. It was an eye-opener for everybody. That was when we really had to think more deeply about how we support kids who are living in a lot of stress, just in general.”
There remains the question of how to pay for all of this. Lantieri still runs the monthly school administrators’ meetings and keynotes at conferences on education around the world. But the funding for the IRP has virtually run out. Her short-term grants have expired, and when, at the start of 2013, she had to decide between fundraising or continuing to provide services, she opted for the services.
The week of my visit the National September 11 Memorial & Museum opened at Ground Zero – and Lantieri downsized from her own headquarters to a small office in a school. Both may be taken as signs of recovery from 9/11. But Lantieri hopes the part she has to play in helping the city’s kids cope well with the future, as well as the past, is far from over.
Professor Mark Williams has received funding from the Wellcome Trust, who publish Mosaic.
Author: Emma Young
Editor: Mun-Keat Looi
Fact checker: Francine Almash
Copyeditor: Rob Reddick
Photographer: Retts Wood
Art director: Peta Bell
16 September 2014 – Mosaic The Science of Life – www.mosaicscience.com
Professor Mark Williams has received funding from the Wellcome Trust, who publish Mosaic.
16 September 2014 – Mosaic The Science of Life – www.mosaicscience.com
Are you raising nice kids? A Harvard psychologist gives 5 ways to raise them to be kind
Posted in the Washington Post on July 18
By Amy Joyce
Richard Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist with the graduate school of education, and the Making Caring Common Project have come up with recommendations about how to raise children to become caring, respectful and responsible adults. (The Washington Post)
Earlier this year, I wrote about teaching empathy, and whether you are a parent who does so. The idea behind it is from Richard Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist with the graduate school of education, who runs theMaking Caring Common project, aimed to help teach kids to be kind.
I know, you’d think they are or that parents are teaching that themselves, right? Not so, according to a new study released by the group. About 80 percent of the youth in the study said their parents were more concerned with their achievement or happiness than whether they cared for others. The interviewees were also three times more likely to agree that “My parents are prouder if I get good grades in my classes than if I’m a caring community member in class and school.”
Weissbourd and his cohorts have come up with recommendations about how to raise children to become caring, respectful and responsible adults. Why is this important? Because if we want our children to be moral people, we have to, well, raise them that way.
“Children are not born simply good or bad and we should never give up on them. They need adults who will help them become caring, respectful, and responsible for their communities at every stage of their childhood,” the researchers write.
The five strategies to raise moral, caring children, according to Making Caring Common:
1. Make caring for others a priority
Why? Parents tend to prioritize their children’s happiness and achievements over their children’s concern for others. But children need to learn to balance their needs with the needs of others, whether it’s passing the ball to a teammate or deciding to stand up for friend who is being bullied.
How? Children need to hear from parents that caring for others is a top priority. A big part of that is holding children to high ethical expectations, such as honoring their commitments, even if it makes them unhappy. For example, before kids quit a sports team, band, or a friendship, we should ask them to consider their obligations to the group or the friend and encourage them to work out problems before quitting.
Try this
• Instead of saying to your kids: “The most important thing is that you’re happy,” say “The most important thing is that you’re kind.”
• Make sure that your older children always address others respectfully, even when they’re tired, distracted, or angry.
• Emphasize caring when you interact with other key adults in your children’s lives. For example, ask teachers whether your children are good community members at school.
2. Provide opportunities for children to practice caring and gratitude
Why? It’s never too late to become a good person, but it won’t happen on its own. Children need to practice caring for others and expressing gratitude for those who care for them and contribute to others’ lives. Studies show that people who are in the habit of expressing gratitude are more likely to be helpful, generous, compassionate, and forgiving—and they’re also more likely to be happy and healthy.
How? Learning to be caring is like learning to play a sport or an instrument. Daily repetition—whether it’s a helping a friend with homework, pitching in around the house, or having a classroom job—make caring second nature and develop and hone youth’s caregiving capacities. Learning gratitude similarly involves regularly practicing it.
Try this
• Don’t reward your child for every act of helpfulness, such as clearing the dinner table. We should expect our kids to help around the house, with siblings, and with neighbors and only reward uncommon acts of kindness.
• Talk to your child about caring and uncaring acts they see on television and about acts of justice and injustice they might witness or hear about in the news.
• Make gratitude a daily ritual at dinnertime, bedtime, in the car, or on the subway. Express thanks for those who contribute to us and others in large and small ways.
3. Expand your child’s circle of concern.
Why? Almost all children care about a small circle of their families and friends. Our challenge is help our children learn to care about someone outside that circle, such as the new kid in class, someone who doesn’t speak their language, the school custodian, or someone who lives in a distant country.
How? Children need to learn to zoom in, by listening closely and attending to those in their immediate circle, and to zoom out, by taking in the big picture and considering the many perspectives of the people they interact with daily, including those who are vulnerable. They also need to consider how their decisions, such as quitting a sports team or a band, can ripple out and harm various members of their communities. Especially in our more global world, children need to develop concern for people who live in very different cultures and communities than their own.
Try this
• Make sure your children are friendly and grateful with all of the people in their daily lives, such as a bus driver or a waitress.
• Encourage children to care for those who are vulnerable. Give children some simple ideas for stepping into the “caring and courage zone,” like comforting a classmate who was teased.
• Use a newspaper or TV story to encourage your child to think about hardships faced by children in another country.
4. Be a strong moral role model and mentor.
Why? Children learn ethical values by watching the actions of adults they respect. They also learn values by thinking through ethical dilemmas with adults, e.g. “Should I invite a new neighbor to my birthday party when my best friend doesn’t like her?”
How? Being a moral role model and mentor means that we need to practice honesty, fairness, and caring ourselves. But it doesn’t mean being perfect all the time. For our children to respect and trust us, we need to acknowledge our mistakes and flaws. We also need to respect children’s thinking and listen to their perspectives, demonstrating to them how we want them to engage others.
Try this:
• Model caring for others by doing community service at least once a month. Even better, do this service with your child.
• Give your child an ethical dilemma at dinner or ask your child about dilemmas they’ve faced.
5. Guide children in managing destructive feelings
Why? Often the ability to care for others is overwhelmed by anger, shame, envy, or other negative feelings.
How? We need to teach children that all feelings are okay, but some ways of dealing with them are not helpful. Children need our help learning to cope with these feelings in productive ways.
Try this
Here’s a simple way to teach your kids to calm down: ask your child to stop, take a deep breath through the nose and exhale through the mouth, and count to five. Practice when your child is calm. Then, when you see her getting upset, remind her about the steps and do them with her. After a while she’ll start to do it on her own so that she can express her feelings in a helpful and appropriate way.
Impact of meditation, support groups seen at cellular level in breast cancer survivors
November 3, 2014 Alberta Health Services
CALGARY — For the first time, researchers have shown that practising mindfulness meditation or being involved in a support group has a positive physical impact at the cellular level in breast cancer survivors.
A group working out of Alberta Health Services’ Tom Baker Cancer Centre and the University of Calgary Department of Oncology has demonstrated that telomeres – protein complexes at the end of chromosomes – maintain their length in breast cancer survivors who practise meditation or are involved in support groups, while they shorten in a comparison group without any intervention.
Although the disease-regulating properties of telomeres aren’t fully understood, shortened telomeres are associated with several disease states, as well as cell aging, while longer telomeres are thought to be protective against disease.
“We already know that psychosocial interventions like mindfulness meditation will help you feel better mentally, but now for the first time we have evidence that they can also influence key aspects of your biology,” says Dr. Linda E. Carlson, PhD, principal investigator and director of research in the Psychosocial Resources Department at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre.
“It was surprising that we could see any difference in telomere length at all over the three-month period studied,” says Dr. Carlson, who is also a U of C professor in the Faculty of Arts and the Cumming School of Medicine, and a member of the Southern Alberta Cancer Institute. “Further research is needed to better quantify these potential health benefits, but this is an exciting discovery that provides encouraging news.”
The study was published online today in the journal Cancer. It can be found at:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.29063/full
A total of 88 breast cancer survivors who had completed their treatments for at least three months were involved for the duration of the study. The average age was 55 and most participants had ended treatment two years prior. To be eligible, they also had to be experiencing significant levels of emotional distress.
In the Mindfulness-Based Cancer Recovery group, participants attended eight weekly, 90-minute group sessions that provided instruction on mindfulness meditation and gentle Hatha yoga, with the goal of cultivating non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. Participants were also asked to practise meditation and yoga at home for 45 minutes daily.
In the Supportive Expressive Therapy group, participants met for 90 minutes weekly for 12 weeks and were encouraged to talk openly about their concerns and their feelings. The objectives were to build mutual support and to guide women in expressing a wide range of both difficult and positive emotions, rather than suppressing or repressing them.
The participants randomly placed in the control group attended one, six-hour stress management seminar.
All study participants had their blood analysed and telomere length measured before and after the interventions.
Scientists have shown a short-term effect of these interventions on telomere length compared to a control group, but it’s not known if the effects are lasting. Dr. Carlson says another avenue for further research is to see if the psychosocial interventions have a positive impact beyond the three months of the study period.
Allison McPherson was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. When she joined the study, she was placed in the mindfulness-based cancer recovery group. Today, she says that experience has been life-changing.
“I was skeptical at first and thought it was a bunch of hocus-pocus,” says McPherson, who underwent a full year of chemotherapy and numerous surgeries. “But I now practise mindfulness throughout the day and it’s reminded me to become less reactive and kinder toward myself and others.”
Study participant Deanne David was also placed in the mindfulness group. “Being part of this made a huge difference to me,” she says. “I think people involved in their own cancer journey would benefit from learning more about mindfulness and connecting with others who are going through the same things.”
The research was funded by the Alberta Cancer Foundation and the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance.
Calgary-area cancer patients can access information about Alberta Health Services programs in both mindfulness meditation and supportive expressive therapy, as well as other support programs at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, by calling 403-355-3207.
Alberta Health Services is the provincial health authority responsible for planning and delivering health supports and services for more than four million adults and children living in Alberta. Its mission is to provide a patient-focused, quality health system that is accessible and sustainable for all Albertans.
The University of Calgary is a leading Canadian university located in the nation’s most enterprising city. The university has a clear strategic direction – “Eyes High” – to become one of Canada’s top five research universities by 2016, grounded in innovative learning and teaching and fully integrated with the community of Calgary. For more information, visit ucalgary.ca .
Pain – Our Precious Teacher
By John Bruna
“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.” Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
It is quite natural and very healthy to seek out pleasure in our lives and try to avoid pain. From the moment we wake up, it is a natural instinct to seek happiness and try to plan our day around people and activities that bring us joy. I have yet to meet the person that wakes up with the attitude of intentionally seeking pain.
Having said that, pain is an integral part of life and does serve a very important purpose. Pain lets us know what we needs attention. When we are sick our body is letting us know that it is out of balance and we need to tend to it. A pain in our body, such as a stubbed toe, broken finger or a sore muscle, let us know we need to take care of it. Likewise, mental and emotional suffering in our life, informs us that we have some inner work to do.
If we look back in our lives, we will find that the times that we grew the most were often the result of painful events in our lives. It is when times are difficult and challenging that we are driven to look inside and develop ourselves. When life is easy and everything is going our way, we are rarely inspired to stretch ourselves and grow. It is the challenges of life that give us the opportunity to cultivate our highest potentials.
Of course this is not fun, nor do I suggest that we search out pain so that we can grow. Rather, that we understand that pain is a normal part of life and that it serves a purpose. When painful or challenging events in life do arise, and they will, instead of trying to avoid or minimize them, we have the opportunity to learn from them. They inform us about ourselves and the world we live in and provide us with the incentive to develop ourselves, cultivating the qualities, values, and wisdom to be the person we want to be.
In truth, life is filled with ups and downs, joys and sorrows, challenges and opportunity, pain and pleasure. For some reason, we think that our life should only contain the good stuff. As unrealistic as this is, it tends to be a pervasive attitude and makes even common problems and difficulties all the more challenging to deal with. If we can remember that we’ve already overcome much adversity in our lives, and it was in dealing with the adversity that we grew the most, when pain inevitably does show up, we can see it as a teacher, one more time, guiding us to look within and grow.
The Problem With Positive Thinking
OCT. 24, 2014
New York Times Sunday Review
By GABRIELE OETTINGEN
MANY people think that the key to success is to cultivate and doggedly maintain an optimistic outlook. This belief in the power of positive thinking, expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, informs everything from affirmative pop anthems like Katy Perry’s “Roar” to the Mayo Clinic’s suggestion that you may be able to improve your health by eliminating “negative self-talk.”
But the truth is that positive thinking often hinders us. More than two decades ago, I conducted a study in which I presented women enrolled in a weight-reduction program with several short, open-ended scenarios about future events — and asked them to imagine how they would fare in each one. Some of these scenarios asked the women to imagine that they had successfully completed the program; others asked them to imagine situations in which they were tempted to cheat on their diets. I then asked the women to rate how positive or negative their resulting thoughts and images were.
A year later, I checked in on these women. The results were striking: The more positively women had imagined themselves in these scenarios, thefewer pounds they had lost.
My colleagues and I have since performed many follow-up studies, observing a range of people, including children and adults; residents of different countries (the United States and Germany); and people with various kinds of wishes — college students wanting a date, hip-replacement patients hoping to get back on their feet, graduate students looking for a job, schoolchildren wishing to get good grades. In each of these studies, the results have been clear: Fantasizing about happy outcomes — about smoothly attaining your wishes — didn’t help. Indeed, it hindered people from realizing their dreams.
Why doesn’t positive thinking work the way you might assume? As my colleagues and I have discovered, dreaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals.
In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we asked two groups of college students to write about what lay in store for the coming week. One group was asked to imagine that the week would be great. The other group was just asked to write down any thoughts about the week that came to mind. The students who had positively fantasized reported feeling less energized than those in the control group. As we later documented, they also went on to accomplish less during that week.
Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we’ve already attained our goal, slackening our readiness to pursue it.
Some critics of positive thinking have advised people to discard all happy talk and “get real” by dwelling on the challenges or obstacles. But this is too extreme a correction. Studies have shown that this strategy doesn’t work any better than entertaining positive fantasies.
What does work better is a hybrid approach that combines positive thinking with “realism.” Here’s how it works. Think of a wish. For a few minutes, imagine the wish coming true, letting your mind wander and drift where it will. Then shift gears. Spend a few more minutes imagining the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing your wish.
This simple process, which my colleagues and I call “mental contrasting,” has produced powerful results in laboratory experiments. When participants have performed mental contrasting with reasonable, potentially attainable wishes, they have come away more energized and achieved better results compared with participants who either positively fantasized or dwelt on the obstacles.
When participants have performed mental contrasting with wishes that are not reasonable or attainable, they have disengaged more from these wishes. Mental contrasting spurs us on when it makes sense to pursue a wish, and lets us abandon wishes more readily when it doesn’t, so that we can go after other, more reasonable ambitions.
In a recent study on healthy eating and exercise, we divided participants into two groups. Members of one group engaged in mental contrasting and then performed a planning exercise designed to help them overcome whatever obstacles stood in their way. Four months later, members of this group were working out twice as long each week as the control group and eating considerably more vegetables. In other studies, we found that people who engaged in mental contrasting recovered from chronic back pain better, behaved more constructively in relationships, got better grades in school and even managed stress better in the workplace.
Positive thinking is pleasurable, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for us. Like so much in life, attaining goals requires a balanced and moderate approach, neither dwelling on the downsides nor a forced jumping for joy.
Secrets of the strong-minded
Posted 16 September 2014 – Mosaic The Science of Life – www.mosaicscience.com
Can children be made more psychologically ‘resilient’ to traumas like 9/11 – as well as the stress of everyday life? Emma Young meets a former school principal who believes they can.
“It was one of those perfect days. I think that’s what everyone remembers. And now whenever the day’s too perfect and the sky’s too blue, I think: what might happen?”
September 11, 2001. Lisa Siegman was in her first year as principal of Public School 3 (PS 3) in downtown Manhattan. Up on the fourth floor, the fifth-graders had a direct view down to the World Trade Center. “They had a perfect view of the towers,” Lisa says. “The kids saw people jumping. People were running into the halls of the school, just doubled over.”
PS 3 was far enough away to escape evacuation. But children from two other schools, PS 150 and PS 89, which were closer to the devastation, were sent there for safety. “People started converging on the school,” says Lisa. “We had parents wanting to take their kids, parents wanting to help; we had only two working phone lines.” By the afternoon the school had been identified as a potential site for a temporary morgue. Refrigerated trucks were lining up outside, along Hudson Street.
On what was just the sixth day of the school term, more than 5,000 schoolchildren and 200 teachers had to run for their lives. But kids all across the city were affected – from those who heard the non-stop sirens of the fire engines and ambulances to those in quieter neighbourhoods, who watched replays of the strikes over and over and over on TV.
By the end of that day the September 11th Fund had been established by two major local charities. Donations poured in. Money first went on immediate aid – hot meals for rescue workers, emergency cheques for victims and their families – and then funds were made available for programmes to help New Yorkers to recover. The damage wasn’t only physical, but psychological. Counsellors set up services in local churches, and psychiatrists came from around the country to offer their expertise and their insights. Thoughts turned to the city’s children – how would they deal with the stress and trauma?
Into the debate stepped Linda Lantieri. A former school principal in East Harlem and administrator with the city’s Department of Education, she had helped to develop social and emotional learning programmes for US schools, and was head of the National Center for Resolving Conflict Creatively, an organisation she’d co-founded to tackle school violence. Helping kids handle trauma and manage their emotions was Lantieri’s forte. She approached the Fund with her own take on resolving the problem: enhancing ‘resilience’ – a person’s ability to get through difficult circumstances without lasting psychological damage.
For scientists the concept of psychological resilience began in the 1970s with studies of children who did fine – or even well in life – despite significant early adversity, such as poverty or family violence. For a long time a person’s level of resilience was thought to be inherited or acquired in early life. This idea was supported by the often-replicated statistics on what happens after a trauma: while most people bounce back to normal relatively quickly, and some even report feeling psychologically stronger afterwards than they did before, about 8 per cent develop post-traumatic stress disorder, according to US figures.
The degree to which someone bounces back, or does even better – his or her resilience – has a genetic component. But “genes are not destiny here,” says Professor Dennis Charney, Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City. He bases this statement in part on interviews with people like Jimmy Dunne.
Dunne is a co-founder of the financial services firm Sandler O’Neill, which was formerly based in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. On 11 September 2001 he was out playing golf when he heard about the first plane crash. As further details emerged, he realised his colleagues were among those trapped above the burning wreckage. By mid-afternoon Dunne was on a train to Manhattan. He ran from Grand Central Station towards the small midtown satellite office where the firm’s survivors were gathering. About four blocks away he stopped running and started walking. “I remember thinking, as soon as I get there everybody’s gonna be looking at me, everyone’s gonna be looking for direction from me. I want to set a very different tone, one of total calm,” he said later.
Dunne told Charney that while he felt he was naturally quite pessimistic, “the moment I heard what the terrorists wanted, I decided to do exactly the opposite. Osama bin Laden wanted us to be afraid. I would show no fear. He wanted us to be pessimistic. I would be incredibly optimistic. He wanted anguish. I would have none of it.” His firm lost 66 of the 83 people who’d been working in its main offices, as well as its computer system and almost all of its records. Just six days after the attacks, it reopened for business.
Before 9/11 Charney and his collaborator Professor Steven Southwick at the Yale School of Medicine had been avidly studying people who’d experienced a trauma, looking for clues as to why some people are more resilient than others. Their interviewees include former American prisoners of war in Vietnam, serving members of the US Special Forces and their trainers, victims of sexual abuse in Washington DC, survivors of an earthquake in Pakistan, and later people who were hit hard by 9/11. “We started out with a blank slate,” Charney says. To the people who recovered well, they asked: “Tell us how you made it? What were the factors?”
As well as investigating psychological attitudes and mental strategies linked to resilience, Charney and Southwick have probed the neurobiology behind it. People whose bodies respond rapidly to a threat – with a surge of the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol – but who then recover quickly seem to cope better with stressful situations and jobs, such as working in the special forces.Could this drug make you mentally stronger?
More resilient people also seem to be better at using the hormone dopamine – which has a role in the brain’s reward system – to help keep them positive during stress. Charney’s team, along with colleagues from the National Institutes of Health, studied a group of US Special Forces soldiers. They found that the amount of activity in the reward systems of the soldiers’ brains remained high when they lost money in an experimental game, unlike in the brains of regular civilian volunteers. This suggests the system in resilient people’s brains may be less affected by stress or adversity. Each of the soldiers’ brains also featured a healthily large hippocampus (which as well as enabling the formation of new memories also helps regulate the release of the fight-or-flight hormone adrenalin) and a strongly active prefrontal cortex, the brain region dubbed ‘the seat of rational thinking’. This in turn helps inhibit the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes negative emotions such as fear and anger, allowing the prefrontal cortex to come up with a sensible plan to cope with a threat.
Through their research Charney and Southwick have identified ten psychological and social factors that they think make for stronger resilience, either alone or ideally in combination:
Charney and Southwick are convinced that it is possible to develop these ten factors, and that this can lead to a positive change for generally healthy people in their ability to cope not just with a major trauma, but also with the day-to-day stresses of life.
Academic questionnaires to measure resilience do exist. They measure some of the factors that Charney and Southwick have identified. They’re decent tests, Charney says, but they haven’t yet been used to evaluate the extent to which a person’s resilience might be improved. Still, based on what he’s found out, Charney says that the extent to which these factors could be modified, in theory, is “a lot”.
For kids Charney’s first suggestion is ‘stress inoculation’ – getting them to learn that they can cope with a challenge and overcome setbacks, perhaps by playing competitive sport or through wilderness adventures. “I used this with my own kids,” he tells me. “I have five – four daughters and a son – and they like to say I got tougher on them.”
But Charney is also interested in another technique. It’s been shown in lab studies by other researchers to increase activity in the left prefrontal cortex. In theory this should allow people to recover more quickly from a negative emotion, in part by reducing inputs from the amygdala, as well as, studies suggest, by increasing activity in the brain’s reward system – all of which should boost resilience. Until recently this technique was relatively obscure. Now it’s everywhere: mindfulness.
Mindfulness has its origins in the Zen Buddhist tradition, but its central ideas – involving attention and awareness – are secular. A modern explanation is that it means paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally, to the unfolding of experience, moment to moment.
Lantieri believes that mindfulness and other fundamental stress-reducing strategies are vital foundations for the kinds of changes Charney talks about. “Many of the factors he mentions are internal strengths that can be cultivated through mindfulness – such as cognitive and emotional flexibility or facing fear. We can’t just tell people that it’s better to face their fear without helping them figure out how,” she says.
Mindfulness practices play a prominent role in Lantieri’s programmes for both adults and kids. Just before 9/11 Lantieri completed a series of intensive retreats, learning contemplative practices, including mindfulness – which involves meditation but also a conscious attempt to be ‘in the moment’, a strategy used by some psychologists to help people manage depression and anxiety.
After 9/11, to best help the city’s kids, “I knew I had to start with the adults – with the teachers,” Lantieri says. The adults in a child’s life can have a huge influence, she says, and if they’re not coping they can’t be expected to adequately help the kids. She put forward a proposal to the September 11th Fund and it was accepted.
In September 2011, as New Yorkers began to clear away the physical debris of the terrorist attacks, Lantieri developed her Inner Resilience Program (IRP) for teachers. Working with them, she developed a suite of tools for use in the classroom, to help children cope not only with serious traumas, like the terrorist attacks, but also with more everyday stressors, from exams to poverty to conflict in the home. These include exercises designed to improve conscious awareness of the body and how to calm it down, in part to tackle stress and anxiety, and in theory to boost long-term psychological resilience.
We’ve been stuck in Manhattan rush-hour traffic for an hour, but now we’re on the FDR (the Franklin D Roosevelt expressway) speeding uptown, towards East Harlem. “Tom, the traffic angels have come to our aid,” says Lantieri down the phone. “We’re like at 103rd already, so we’ll be there by 20 after.” At 119th Street we turn off. The car stops by a complex marked with a Costco sign. “People come and park here and do their shopping,” says Lantieri, as the vehicle comes to a halt. “They have no idea they’re right round the corner from kids living in incredible poverty.”
Public School 112 is right across from the Costco. A rectangular block of a building, it’s three storeys high with diamond-patterned security gratings across the windows of the first two floors. Above the entrance, painted in uneven rainbow-coloured letters, are the words “Live your dreams”. Higgledy-piggledy kids’ paintings adorn the front walls. There are robots, a princess, something that might perhaps be a crocodile. Waiting inside is Tom Roepke, one of the teachers. He and Lantieri hug, and he leads us up to a kindergarten classroom.
It’s a bright, welcoming room, the walls plastered with artwork, an alphabet, a number chart. There are circular tables with little chairs, and two Apple iMacs on a low desk by the wall. Roepke goes and sits cross-legged on a rug in a circle with 14 kids.
He places a folded cloth down in front of him, and slowly, deliberately, opens it. “A chime!” cries one little boy. Roepke nods. In a quiet, warm voice, he asks the kids to put their hands on their bellies and take a few deep breaths. Everyone obeys. He strikes the chime, and the kids listen attentively to the clear, pure sound. At last, when the echo finally dies away, they all raise their arms very slowly. No one giggles. No one fidgets. They’re only five or six years old, and they’re fully engaged.
Roepke puts on a baseball cap. “I’m going to take you on a journey,” he says quietly. “We’ll cross a bridge, and take nectar from our pockets with our fingers. A butterfly may land on your finger. If something happens on the trail, what could you do to calm yourself down?” A girl puts one hand up and the other on her lower belly. “Yeah,” says Roepke. “Let’s practise. Low and slow.” He breathes deeply, three times, and the kids follow suit. Then he unfurls a long canvas strap.
One by one, the kids cross the imaginary bridge. All the time, Tom talks in an animated near-whisper, encouraging and guiding them. “Be careful of that bridge. It’s a little shaky… Pay attention to your breath as you’re going. Slow, low breaths.” The class teacher offers tips, and praise. “Watch your feet… Good, Makari, you’re being so careful and calm.” The kids are calm. But when they’re all at the other side, a few start to chatter. “Anybody excited?” asks Roepke. They nod. “Me too. What can we do to calm down?” As one, they put their hands on their bellies. Immediately, the room goes silent. They breathe. Roepke puts his finger in a pot of imaginary nectar and holds it up, and the kids do the same. They whisper about what they’re seeing. Roepke says: “Now one, two, three… Watch them go…”
Eyes still closed, the kids talk happily about where their butterflies flew off to. “Mine landed on a tree,” says one. “Mine went to planet Earth!” says another. Roepke passes round imaginary bottles of water. “Everybody’s thirsty. But don’t gulp it,” he says. “Feel it going down your throat.” Obediently, they pretend to drink, all apart from one little girl, who asks, “You got any soda?”
Through the butterfly hunt the kids learn two concepts crucial to Lantieri’s programme: how to connect with the body – to be ‘mindful’ of the physical signals of stress and excitement – and strategies to combat this. Lantieri recommends other exercises, such as more structured meditations and progressive muscle relaxation, which might be used during ‘Peace Time’, a defined period in the school day that slows the pace – helping the kids to calm down after the lunch-break, for example. Peace Time acts as a space in the curriculum for kids to learn ways to help themselves. The main goals are to teach students how to calm themselves when they’re upset, relax their bodies and minds, and help them pay attention, whether that’s in class or at home.
Meditation and relaxation techniques may help with acute stress. But there’s also evidence that, when practised regularly, they can help the body become less reactive in a stressful situation, boosting resilience to stress and anxiety disorders. Mindfulness meditation isn’t the only form that’s been shown in lab studies to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, as noted by Dennis Charney in his neurobiology research.
According to studies conducted at Harvard Medical School, transcendental meditation (which involves the repetition of a mantra) and yoga can also initiate what’s sometimes called the relaxation response. This is the physiological opposite of the fight-or-flight stress response. It’s controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system – the branch of our nerve network that calms us down after a stressful event – lowering our heart rate and reining in stress hormones. People who can calm down quickly, whose parasympathetic nervous system response is quick and effective, cope better physically and psychologically with stress. Meditation seems to be capable of improving its activity, as does exercise.Stronger body, stronger mind
Lantieri advocates setting up a ‘Peace Corner’ – a part of the classroom (or even the home) with perhaps a cushion and a few stress-releasing tools, such as paper and pencils, a music-player with recordings of sounds of nature, and a water bottle filled with glitter in solution for the kids to up-end and watch while breathing slowly. In the kindergarten classroom of PS 112 this is a chair with a sheet of paper on the wall that reads “Peace Corner Choices: Sit and Breathe. Read a Book.” After the butterfly hunt a few of the children talk about what they like to do in the Peace Corner or during Peace Time.
“You can draw your mother or your dad or hearts or your dog or you can write ‘I love my mom’,” one girl says.
The class teacher asks the kids when they might go to the Peace Corner. “If you’re scared or you’re nervous,” says one girl. “Or if you miss your mom and you’re crying.” A boy sitting near us says, “If someone died in your family, you could go to the Peace Corner.” There’s silence for a few moments. “Does that help you?” the teacher asks. The boy nods. “Yes.”
The idea, Lantieri explains, is that children learn that when they’re feeling sad, anxious or angry, or even excited, they can go to the Peace Corner to calm down. It’s not for the teacher to send a child there if they’re misbehaving. “A child is never told to go to the Peace Corner,” says Lantieri. “They learn to take themselves. This is about building self-regulation.”
Lantieri’s programme for teachers also includes a strong focus on methods for calming down. It involves weekend retreats, which offer yoga, workshops on stress management and conflict resolution, and introductions to mindfulness and other types of meditation, as well as opportunities for teachers to talk about the meaning of their work. There are also day courses and workshops. Teachers might have a massage, or join a session in which they are read a poem and asked to relate to a line as a way to encourage them to talk through issues that are concerning them. Lantieri also runs monthly meetings that enable local school administrators to come together, to take part in a meditation, use some of the other techniques taught in the retreats, or just to talk, without judgement.
Lantieri’s is one of the longest-running ‘resilience-building’ programmes for schools, but it isn’t the only one out there.
The concept of resilience in schools is a hot one. In February 2014 a UK cross-party government group produced a report calling for schools to promote “character and resilience”. May 2014 saw the launch of an all-party group to explore the potential for mindfulness in education, as well as in health and criminal justice. Chocolate meditation and mindfulness in schools
Professor Mark Williams, Director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre at the University of Oxford, is the joint-developer of a technique for treating depression called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. It involves encouraging patients to be aware of their thoughts and to accept them, without judgement. Research shows that it’s as effective as drugs at cutting the chances of a person who’s experienced one episode of major depression suffering another. What if, Williams and colleagues wondered, learning mindfulness-based skills could stop some kids from ever developing depression or an anxiety disorder? What if it could prevent stress, as well as helping them to focus and learn, and go on to be more productive, mentally strong adults?
Mindfulness programmes have been designed specifically for schools – though not necessarily with the main aim of enhancing mental health. In the UK a pair of former teachers got together in 2010 to develop the Mindfulness in Schools Project. They developed a nine-lesson ‘.b’ curriculum to teach kids mindful meditations, such as ‘body scanning’, to encourage them to keep their attention focused in the present and to help them deal with stress. The effects of the curriculum – rolled out in six participating schools – have been scrutinised in a pilot study conducted by Professor Willem Kuyken at the University of Exeter along with other researchers who have worked with Williams. The results, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2013, found that the curriculum had promising effects on stress levels and wellbeing, and the researchers would like to investigate this further in a large-scale randomised controlled trial of the curriculum in British secondary schools.
Elsewhere, Professor Martin Seligman (sometimes dubbed the ‘father of positive psychology’) and a team at the University of Pennsylvania have developed the Penn Resiliency Program for late elementary and middle school students. Here the focus is on the content of thoughts. Over twelve 90-minute sessions students are taught to detect ‘inaccurate’ thoughts, evaluate the accuracy of them and challenge negative beliefs by considering alternative explanations (that popular girl just ignored me in the corridor because she didn’t see me, not because she hates my guts). Students are also taught techniques for assertiveness, negotiation, decision making and problem solving, as well as relaxation.
The Penn Resiliency Program has been evaluated in the USA and the UK, with mixed results. A US meta-analysis of 17 controlled evaluations concluded that its effects on depressive symptoms were statistically significant but small. The UK results of the Penn programme weren’t hugely encouraging either. There was a “small average impact on pupils’ depression scores, school attendance and English and maths grades” according to the final report, but this only lasted until the one-year follow-up study. By the two-year follow-up its impact had vanished.
Kuyken says the effects of the UK .b pilot study were also small. But this doesn’t mean the programme isn’t useful, he argues. Studies that involve giving an intervention to everybody, whether or not they have a problem, generally only get small overall results. “What these interventions have the potential to do is move the bell curve – that is, to help those most at risk of depression at one end of the curve, but also those who are flourishing and those in the middle who represent most people,” he says. Because mindfulness is based on a universal theory of how the mind works, rather than techniques for correcting ‘problem thoughts’, he hopes that a mindfulness-based intervention like the .b course may achieve longer-term results than the Penn programme. Kuyken and his team hope to carry out this research in the next ten years.
“Research is only beginning on the effects of mindfulness on youth, so it is far too early to think that such an approach would be ‘best’,” Joe Durlak, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Loyola University Chicago, told me – something echoed by Ron Palomares, a school psychologist at Texas Woman’s University.
There’s no one silver bullet when it comes to resiliency in kids, says Palomares. Between 2000 and 2013 he was on the staff of the American Psychological Association, working on the Association’s Road to Resilience campaign, which it set up after 9/11 to provide public information on how to become more resilient. For adolescents with depressive symptoms, perhaps the Penn Resiliency Program approach may work best, he says. The mindfulness programmes being developed in schools in the USA and the UK are focused more on emotional regulation, which some kids may need help with but others won’t.
Based on their research, Palomares’s team have identified sharing feelings through talking or other forms of expression, such as art or music, as being among the factors that help kids to “bounce back” from tragic or difficult events. They also found being part of a community, through church or sports, say, to be important, and likewise being able to look to the future. “I believe that a suite of tools is the best approach,” says Palomares, “because of the broad individual needs, strengths and weaknesses you come across in any group.”
The multifaceted approach of the Inner Resilience Program (IRP) may be best for a group, like a class, or an entire school, because it’s more likely to cover the various needs of most of the pupils. Yet, compared to the formal programmes, Lantieri’s IRP is more of a ‘bag of tricks’ – or “a bag of practical strategies”, as she describes it. She says she wants to give adults and kids options, as many as possible, to help children cope with whatever life throws at them. “As much as we like to think we can protect our children from what may come their way, we live in a very complex and uncertain world,” she says. “We have to give them all the skills of inner resilience, so they’re ready for just everyday life.”
Tom Roepke joined PS 112 a few years before 9/11, straight from a Waldorf (also known as a Steiner) school (which are, he explains, “very steeped in a rich conception of the human being”). “There was a lot of work among the faculty that feeds your inner life. I came from that to the NYC public schools system, and it was very unsettling,” he says. “Where was that richness?” After the terrorist attacks he heard about Lantieri’s programme. Roepke was among the first to sign up. “[It] gave me…what the Waldorf school used to provide,” he says. “A community of educators…all getting together, knowing that this is a job that requires we take care of ourselves.”
Roepke fully embraced Lantieri’s programme. He introduced the school’s principal, Eileen Reiter, and assistant principal to the monthly meetings and IRP concepts. Faculty meetings now start with the striking of a chime and a brief meditation. This doesn’t take much time, Roepke says, but it’s a real mood-shifter. “If for some reason we don’t do the meditation, you really notice it,” says Reiter. The inner resilience strategies for children have permeated the school, she says, though there’s been no formal implementation – some teachers use a lot of the techniques, others may use very few. It’s up to the individual.
The IRP has been adopted by schools in Ohio and Vermont as well as Manhattan, and a pilot project has been launched in Madrid, Spain. Lantieri estimates that over 6,000 teachers and 40,000 students have been exposed to it, but she says people will often come up to her at meetings telling her they’ve taken ideas from her books and used them in their classrooms, so it’s hard to know the exact numbers for sure.
There have been various evaluations. In a randomised controlled study involving 57 New York City teachers over the 2007/08 academic year, participants attended weekly yoga classes, monthly meetings (in which they learnt meditative techniques and other strategies to reduce their stress), a weekend residential retreat and training in the techniques for the classroom. At the end of the year these teachers reported experiencing less stress and improved attention, and felt they had better relationships with colleagues. There was also a significant drop in how frustrated third and fourth grade students said they were, and an increased sense that they had a ‘voice’ in the classroom. Another evaluation, focusing on school principals, found that between 70 and 80 per cent of participants felt the programme had improved their job satisfaction, their management style, their relationship with staff and their relationship with students.
As far as Lantieri is aware, the schools currently implementing her ideas for the classroom aren’t evaluating them formally. Given the “pick-and-mix” adoption of the programme, as the teachers I met at PS 112 and PS 3 describe it – some using IRP strategies often and others not at all – this would be tricky. “It is very organic,” Lantieri says. “It has to be, because every school is such a mix of people and attitudes and experiences. You can’t make everybody do the same.” PS 3, for instance, has many more middle-class, wealthier students than PS 112 in East Harlem. The atmosphere in the two schools is very different. In PS 3 the kids skip down the corridors (it’s one of the rules: you can skip or walk but not run), they call out ‘hi’ in the corridors, they chatter in class. Instead of journals they have ‘happy books’ where they write about their feelings, things like “I love snack” or “I love To Day”. PS 112, in contrast, seemed almost supernaturally self-controlled and calm – though to what extent that was down to a more thorough adoption of IRP practices, or the general focus of the individual principals, or the different needs of the children, it’s hard to say.
Principal Reiter of PS 112 has been teaching for 50 years. Interventions have come and gone, but for her the IRP’s focus on teachers as well as children sets it apart. She shares Lantieri’s view that if teachers are calm and nurtured, they’ll be in a better place to help their children. “It’s about taking care of the teachers so they can take care of the kids,” she says. And these particular children need all the help they can get.
“We have a lot of kids being raised by grandparents, or in foster care,” says Reiter. Some live in shelters, some have one parent, or both, in prison. Many of the kids also have special educational needs. When the Twin Towers came down, Reiter had just recently become principal. “We’re right next to the FDR and I remember hearing only ambulances or police cars,” she says. “Everybody [had] felt safe before that. It was an eye-opener for everybody. That was when we really had to think more deeply about how we support kids who are living in a lot of stress, just in general.”
There remains the question of how to pay for all of this. Lantieri still runs the monthly school administrators’ meetings and keynotes at conferences on education around the world. But the funding for the IRP has virtually run out. Her short-term grants have expired, and when, at the start of 2013, she had to decide between fundraising or continuing to provide services, she opted for the services.
The week of my visit the National September 11 Memorial & Museum opened at Ground Zero – and Lantieri downsized from her own headquarters to a small office in a school. Both may be taken as signs of recovery from 9/11. But Lantieri hopes the part she has to play in helping the city’s kids cope well with the future, as well as the past, is far from over.
Professor Mark Williams has received funding from the Wellcome Trust, who publish Mosaic.
Author: Emma Young
Editor: Mun-Keat Looi
Fact checker: Francine Almash
Copyeditor: Rob Reddick
Photographer: Retts Wood
Art director: Peta Bell
16 September 2014 – Mosaic The Science of Life – www.mosaicscience.com
Professor Mark Williams has received funding from the Wellcome Trust, who publish Mosaic.
16 September 2014 – Mosaic The Science of Life – www.mosaicscience.com