Teaching Meditation to Children, An Introduction

Edited 10/31/22

My youngest son has to learn how to meditate. Like, really meditate – sit still and quiet in a dark room for an hour and… meditate. He’s 10. He has ADHD. He can barely sit through a meal, even when on his meds. But in 3 or 4 months he will be taking his Black Belt test in Taekwondo, and meditation is a requirement of his final test. I’m super proud of all his hard work; he’s been studying Taekwondo for over 3 years and it hasn’t been easy, but for him, this is difficult in an entirely different way.

So what to do? Well, I’m a witch and a spiritual educator, I know how to meditate. And more importantly, I know that I don’t have to teach my son in a way that is antithetical to his way of being. He (and other children) can be introduced to the practice of meditation in a more approachable way to help them get started successfully, and then we can help them gradually bring stillness into their practice.

Even if your goal isn’t for your child(ren) to sit quiet and still for an hour in a dark room, teaching basic meditation skills to kids will help them build emotional resilience and get them better in touch with themselves. A practice they can truly benefit from in our increasingly uncertain world.

The key is to help them find their own way to stillness and quiet in their minds through activities that are more in line with their nature (depending on the child or group, of course). A few different ways meditation can be approached:

Walking meditations
Drawing/painting/writing meditations
Guided meditations
Yoga poses

By using prompts and reflections before and after an active meditation session, you can start to help your child(ren) understand what a meditative mindset feels like, and how to cultivate it. Slowly children will get more and more comfortable with focusing on their bodies and quieting their minds, to a point, with regular practice, that they are indeed capable of sitting quietly in a darkened room and truly meditating for an hour.

I had started writing this piece intending it to be just one article, but quickly realized that there was no way to encompass this subject in one go if I wanted to give actual lesson examples (which I do). So I’m planning on adding concrete exercises you can try with your child(ren) or group – hopefully in late 2022, or early 2023.

Blessed Be.