Chaplin speculates that perhaps it’s more important for a parent to be emotionally attuned to their child than to be either positive or negative in their interactions. Interestingly, expressions of positive or negative emotion alone didn’t seem to make that much of a difference in adolescent sexual behavior or drug use, even though prior studies have linked a parent’s negativity to adolescent risk taking. “Mindful parenting matters, even when you’re parenting a teen, and it matters for risk behaviors,” says Chaplin. In turn, sharing more positive emotion was associated with decreased drug use for the children (though not decreased sexual behavior). In their analysis, the researchers found that parents higher in mindful parenting demonstrated less negative emotion and more shared positive emotion with their children in the conversations than those lower in mindful parenting. Then, these results were compared to the adolescent’s reported sexual behavior and drug use. This conversation was recorded and analyzed to reveal how much parents expressed positive emotion, negative emotion, and shared positive emotion with their child. Here, parents who’d reported on their levels of mindful parenting were asked to engage in a conversation with their 12- to 14-year-old children concerning a difficult conflict in their relationship. What Mindful Parenting Looks LikeĬaitlin Turpyn and Tara Chaplin of George Mason University tried to investigate this relationship directly in another recent study, by bringing parents and kids into the lab to look at their real-time interactions.
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These skills potentially help preserve the parent-child relationship, while also providing positive role modeling of how to handle difficult situations.
Learning to pause before responding in anger,.Noticing your own feelings when you’re in conflict with your child,.In his view, there are three key factors to mindful parenting: While Parent’s study suggests that positive mindful parenting is related to positive outcomes for kids, it’s hard to know why. “When you’ve developed ingrained patterns of behavior with your family, they can be very hard to change,” he says. Interestingly, parents who simply had higher trait mindfulness did not see significantly better outcomes for their kids, suggesting that being mindful and being a mindful parent may be two different things. Parent suggests that working on a mindfulness practice may increase your mindfulness and reduce your stress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can apply these skills in more charged settings. “To bring mindful attention and awareness into your interactions with your child really seems to set the stage for you to be a good parent,” says Justin Parent, lead author of the study. They also reflected on their kid’s typical coping styles-if they tended to become anxious or depressed or act out in disruptive ways, like hitting or yelling during difficult situations.Īnalyses showed that parents who reported more mindful parenting engaged in more positive and less negative parenting behavior, which was then linked to more positive behavior in their kids-meaning less anxiety, depression, and acting out. Parents reported on their trait mindfulness (how mindful they are in everyday interactions), mindfulness in parenting (how attentive, non-judging, and non-reacting they are in interactions with their children), and positive versus negative parenting practices (for example, expressing unconditional love and setting limits versus using harsh physical punishments).
In one study, researchers at the University of Vermont surveyed over 600 parents of children ages 3-17 to see how mindfulness related to their children’s well-being. Now, two new research studies paint a different picture, suggesting that mindfulness may also help improve the well-being of others in our lives-in particular, our children-if we truly practice it. But according to critics, some mindfulness practitioners focus too much on self-improvement, to the point of becoming self-absorbed. Mindfulness has been gaining traction as a way of improving individual well-being, from our health to our happiness and resilience.
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