Meditation for kids

and solve ADD without a pill

Studies in adults have shown that the brain's prefrontal cortex (a region at the front of the brain) plays a big role in focusing attention. People with attention disorders display less activity in this region than people without the disorder.

Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist at UCLA, said willfully directing attention increased activity in the prefrontal cortex. And mindfulness meditation, with its emphasis on paying attention, appears to strengthen the prefrontal cortex, said Schwartz, whose own research has examined how mindfulness techniques can be used to overcome obsessive compulsive disorder.

"That's what's so exciting for so many people about doing this [meditation] with kids," said Inner Kids' Greenland. "If you can start early on to help them train their ability to pay attention, the brain will become a stronger muscle."

But because the prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions of the brain to develop (usually not until the 20s), some psychiatric experts caution against applying such evidence to children.

Teaching children a technique their brains are not ready for could potentially frustrate them, creating or aggravating anxiety instead of allaying it, said Amishi Jha, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who served as a scientific advisor for the Garrison Institute report. Her own research focuses on the brain patterns related to memory and attention.

Furthermore, said Jha, it's possible that meditation techniques could help one type of attention at the expense of others. Meditation strengthens selective or focused attention, which is crucial for, say, reading a book. But improving only selective attention might hurt the development of flexible or open attention, she said, which people use to monitor their environment as a whole. Both types are critical for learning. Children need selective attention to stay focused, but if their flexible attention is weak, they'll have trouble taking in more than one piece of information at a time.