To complain to the school.

[runforthesun]

Dd has had a letter from school to say that they will be having an hour long session in mindfulness every week when they return to school. Dd is fairly bright but does struggle a bit with maths. AIBU to complain to school that at this point in her education I would rather she was getting up to speed on academic subjects ? I don't think IABU but am prepared to be told I am. If it makes a difference they are 8 and 9 year olds.

[HermioneWoozle]

Ten minutes a day would be much better, and a more realistic habit for life.

[SofiaAmes]

I know this sounds very new age and useless, but I do have to say, from personal experience, it's an amazing opportunity. I grew up in Berkeley, CA and we had meditation for PE (we called it creative sleeping) when we were around age 10 or 11. However I used the skills that we were taught throughout high school and university and on into life to help calm myself when I was over anxious or overwhelmed. My parents (both distinguished professors of Biochemistry) were completely skeptical and supercilious about the classes and at 10, I didn't understand the worth and was mostly bemused. However I used the simple skills we learned over and over and over again as I matured. I still managed to learn enough math to get to M.I.T. and 2 graduate degrees too!
And now as my ds was diagnosed with bipolar at puberty and struggled/struggles with finding a calm space in his mind, I find that he has benefitted from mindfulness skills and frequently uses them to calm himself when anxious or manic. And all of it adds up to better balanced child with a lesser need for powerful medications to drug him into calmness.
So please try to keep an open mind. I promise you that your dd will find the skills useful at some point in her life, even it it's not quite now. (And I would highly recommend volunteering to help so you can get some free mindfulness skills for yourself...you might find them useful.)

[HermioneWoozle]

While it's a good thing to learn to be calm and focus, it's not to be used as a sticking plaster. Anxiety isn't always pointless, kids and adults actually do have genuine things they worry about and talking about and tackling the worries is also important.

[Heirhelp]

The U.K. Is considered to have some of the most unhappy children in the world. Your child will be doing stats in year 6 and this is a great cause of anxiety in children so I would not be complaining to a school for trying to give them skills to deals with this.

[GilMartin]

YANBU

Mindfulness. Or to give it its traditional name: 'sit down and stop fucking mithering for a bit'.

If parents want to sign up their children for this hippy-dippy middle class fad, they should do so in their own time and own expense. School should devote their time and resources to teaching academic subjects.

[MrsTerryPratchett]

Yeah. Fuck all the peer reviewed, scientifically valid studies that show the benefits of meditation and mindfulness. Middle class bullshit.

[Scooby20]

Why would you complain?

If the letter doesn't explain what they are trying to achieve, why not just discuss it with them. Why does it need to be in the form of a complaint?

It's totally unrelated to your dd struggling with maths. Most children will struggle with something and schools can't put on extra sessions for every subject.

Deal with that separately.

[Graphista]

Yabu

Good mental health as well as good physical health is a great foundation for the ability to do well academically.

We DO have among the unhappiest, most stressed kids in the developed world. I'd love if my dd had been able to do this at primary.

[Allfednonedead]

Knittedblanket, mindfulness is very powerful, but if you're trying to avoid the present, you need to be careful. You may not be ready to do such a thing, and certainly don't try it without an experienced teacher or with a therapist as back-up.
Having said that, needing to avoid the present is probably not a good sign. Can you do anything to make things better?
OP, sorry for the hijack. I'm with everyone else on this - mindfulness for 10-15 mins a day would be fantastic. An hour a week would worry me, but not because it pushes out academic subjects.

[BikeRunSki]

I think it's a great idea. There are so many threads about children stressed by SATs, exams etc that this seems like a very positive initiative by the school.

[JerryFerry]

Lots of research to show that mindfulness is very beneficial to both teachers and students. Try to trust that your school has your child's best interests at heart and is not trying to "waste" precious time.

[WhooooAmI24601]

DS1 is 11 and has ASD. He's incredibly high-functioning and thrives in his mainstream primary school but his anxiety and stress levels can go through the roof at times (two weeks before christmas they did a week of SATs test papers and were told "these results will affect the rest of your life"which sent him into a tailspin). He's learned meditation through an Aunt of mine who teaches it across many schools and, thankfully, he knows enough of it to calm himself in times of high-stress.

Initially I thought it was a little middle-class-pretentious-bollocks. He attempted to take his own life last year, saying he felt like he couldn't cope with anything and I would have taught him to rain dance naked to the moon if it could have helped. The mindfulness he's learned helps keep him calmer, happier and alive. There's nothing middle-class-bollocky about that.

[trinity0097]

I doubt they will be cutting English and Maths lessons for this!

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

Mindfulness should help with maths.

More maths practice would almost certainly help more though.

[Ibloodyhatethomasthetankengine]

Personally, YABU - mindfulness as a skill is invaluable.

[CannotEvenDeal]

If delivered by a suitably qualified professional, mindfulness is actually very worthwhile.

[Grumpbum]

My Son has been going to mindfulness club once a week for the last 2 years he finds it so useful when he gets stressed he will take himself away and sit on the floor 'like a frog'
He is 6.
It is optional though

[gamerwidow]

I wonder if the posters who think mindfulness is hippy dippy new age shit have ever suffered from mental health problems?
If I had learned skills to manage my unreasonable levels of anxiety when I was young i probably wouldn't have spend my 20s being so ill. We put our children under ridiculous pressure to succeed from such a young age now we need something to balance it imo.

[Oliversmumsarmy]

Wouldn't actually telling kids SATS are really worthless and whether you get 100% or 1% they don't make a blind bit of difference to their lives. No one apart from certain primary schools who do them give a flying f**k about the exam.
Wouldn't just stopping pointlessly testing pupils every few years which in the grand scheme of things mean nothing and to actually raise the starting levels of school to 7years old do more for stress levels.

We seem to be putting more and more pressure on tiny children to perform at higher and higher levels then wonder when more and more children cant cope and fall behind we think bringing in an hour of thinking time per week to fix the problem.

Sofia by the time you were just being taught about mindfulness a British pupil will have had 2 lots of SATS tests to sit through. One which according to teachers the result of which "will effect you for the rest of your life"

I have one who's school didn't believe in them and consequently didn't do them and one who did SATS and was never asked about his results ever

[user1066]

Considering schools are being expected to solve all the world's ills by adding it to their curriculum and one of the current concerns is pupils' well-being and mental health the school is probably trying to meet the requirements by these sessions. How often do we hear "surely schools should be addressing this" when things are raised? The debate should be how many more responsibilities schools should have added to their limited teaching time and aim that at the powers that dictate this rather than the school.

[noblegiraffe]

I'd be concerned that the primary teachers would be expected to deliver this on the back of a rushed INSET session and with no real expertise in either mindfulness or mental health. From what I've read, there isn't any proper evidence on its use in children that young, and also that there can be negative side effects.

[GilMartin]

gamer yes I have. What helped me was proper counseling with an appropriately qualified professional and in the shirt term antidepressants. Being told to sit and concentrate on my breathing by a primary school teacher would have been like trying to treat stick an Elastoplast over a gaping wound.

[Renniehorta]

As a pp has said my concern would be how it is being delivered. So many of these initiatives are done 'on the cheap'. The poor class teachers are given a twilight session and then are supposed to pass on what they have very quickly been told about.

This happens so often in education. The initiative is then quietly dropped when it fails. This is such a shame as plenty of good ideas have failed purely though poor implementation.

[allowlsthinkalot]

YABU. Why are you more concerned about your child's maths than their emotional and psychological health? The former is much easier to catch up on.

[SuperRainbows]

Couldn't agree more with previous poster advocating later starting age for school. Too much too soon is what happens in UK. Then jaded kids are stressed out about tests that don't matter and we wonder why our kids don't score well in happiness ratings.