News Detail

This UW News article shares how Liliana Lengua and the Center for Child and Family Well-Being find positive results from mindful parenting.

Practicing mindfulness benefits parents and children, UW study says

Parents, picture the situation: Your child is misbehaving. You’ve had a hard day, and one more outburst sends you over the edge.

You threaten. You yell. Maybe you announce a punishment so over the top you know you won’t, and shouldn’t, follow through.

“That’s reacting based on emotions,” explains University of Washington psychology professor Liliana Lengua . “Not in the way you know you’ll be effective.”

What is effective, Lengua and her team report in a new research study , is practicing mindfulness: staying calm, seeing a situation from other perspectives and responding in an intentional way. Through a parenting program that UW researchers created and offered at two early childhood centers, participants learned strategies and techniques that helped them manage their own emotions and behaviors while supporting their child’s development.

“Our goal was to support parents engaging in practices that we know build up their children’s social and emotional well-being, and in a pretty brief program, parents showed improvement in their own feelings of emotional control, and demonstrated more of those parenting behaviors that support children,” said Lengua, who directs the Center for Child and Family Well-Being at the UW. “Our data show that when parents improve, kids improve.”

For this study, published in the journal Mindfulness, 50 parents of preschoolers participated in programs at two sites — one a kindergarten socialization class at a suburban elementary school with a high population of children receiving free or reduced-price lunch, the other a Head Start program at a community college. Over six weeks, researchers guided parents through a series of lessons on mindfulness and parenting strategies:

• Being present: noticing, listening and engaging with what’s happening right now
• Being warm: paying attention to the child’s emotions and giving the child opportunities to initiate interactions
• Being consistent: setting limits and developmentally appropriate expectations, praising the good things they do
• Guiding without directing (otherwise known as “scaffolding”): offering help when needed but encouraging independence and commenting on child’s accomplishments

Read the entire article here .

This subject was also covered by KNKX .