Mindfulness, Children, and Families

Abstract

We are delighted to present a Special Issue of the Journal of Child and Family Studies on Mindfulness, Children, and Families. The initial plan for this Special Issue came from an international conference where we first met in the summer of 2007. Although this seems like a long time coming, we had a shared perspective that a Special Issue might be a good way to take stock of the field and to offer a context for future development. Taking a look at the 12 papers and the book review that are a part of this issue, our initial enthusiasm has been proved worthwhile. At the same time, we could not have predicted the level of interest in the Special Issue and the high quality of the papers that have resulted from this exercise. We believe that this collection of papers give us all great hope for the future of mindfulness-based work with young people and their families. The state-of-the-art reviews of the use of mindfulnessbased interventions with children and adolescents (Burke) and with parents (Sawyer Cohen and Semple) provide a conceptual and empirical basis to a case for the utility of mindfulness approaches in supporting children and families. Both of these reviews identify important questions for future research, and at the same time call for more research studies, and especially those using powerful evaluation research designs. All of the following papers then appear almost in answer to these calls. Seven of the following papers present outcome data from mindfulness-based interventions with young people and/or their parents. The general findings reflect reductions in parental distress or children’s behavior problems, increases in mindfulness and positive well-being, and some evidence of long-lasting or generalized intervention effects. One paper (Pigni) reports case studies of the use of mindfulness to help traumatized mothers in challenging environments in Palestine. Two studies adopt single case experimental design methods to show that teaching mindfulness skills to mothers and their children has a larger impact on children’s non-compliant behavior than training mothers in mindfulness skills alone (Singh, Singh et al.), and that mothers previously trained in the use of mindfulness in a caregiving work setting seem to generalize their learning to have a positive impact on their own children’s behavior in the home setting (Singh, Lancioni et al.). In a third study using a single case experimental design, the authors report translational research, from trained experimenters to a community-based therapist who used a mindfulness-based procedure to reduce aggression in three individuals with intellectual disabilities (Adkins et al.). In further two studies, researchers report promising preand post-test data from mindfulness-based interventions with school teachers (Gold et al.) and in maternity settings (Duncan and Bardacke). Both of these teams also describe their mindfulness intervention programs. Moving up the evidence hierarchy, two teams report data from randomized controlled trail (RCT) evaluations of mindfulness-based interventions. Coatsworth et al. added a mindfulness component to an existing parenting program and found that this combination of approaches led to increased parental mindfulness and better parent-youth relationships than the original program. Semple et al. report the outcomes of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for children, including reductions in attention problems. R. P. Hastings (&) School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG Wales, UK e-mail: r.hastings@bangor.ac.uk