The development of self-regulation, which refers broadly to the goal-directed modulation of thought, action, and emotion, has received considerable attention in recent years in large part because it is associated with important developmental outcomes. Evidence suggests, for example, that self-regulation measured in preschool predicts school readiness in kindergarten (e.g., Blair and Razza 2007; McClelland et al. 2007) and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores in adolescence (e.g., Eigsti et al. 2006). Furthermore, self-regulation in childhood predicts substance dependence, socioeconomic status, and the likelihood of a criminal conviction at age 32 years, after controlling for social class of origin and IQ (Moffitt et al. 2011). Impairments in self-regulation are a prominent feature of numerous clinical conditions with childhood onset, including Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder, and autism (e.g., Barkley 1997; Hughes and Ensor 2011; Ozonoff et al. 1991).

Research on the importance of self-regulation for children’s development, together with major advances in our understanding of neural plasticity (e.g., Huttenlocher 2002), has encouraged efforts to improve self-regulation by “training the brain” (Bryck and Fisher 2012) through a variety of means. Empirical evidence demonstrates that self-regulation training results in behavioral improvements as well as corresponding changes in neural function. For example, Rueda et al. (2005) used computerized games to train basic attention skills in 4- and 6-year olds and observed improved performance on a computerized attention task after 5 weeks of training. Children in the training condition also showed improvement on a measure of general intelligence and displayed more adult-like patterns in a component of the event-related potential (the N2) located over frontoparietal and prefrontal areas.

A great deal of research on efforts to train self-regulation has been conducted (see Diamond and Lee 2011; Duckworth et al. 2011; Jaeggi et al. 2011). Childhood is a period of rapid growth of prefrontal cortex and prefrontal cortical function during which self-regulation may be relatively malleable. Boosting children’s self-regulation may initiate a cascade of benefits in which children become less likely to be disruptive, more likely to form positive relationships with teachers and peers, and more motivated and better able to learn.

One category of interventions designed to improve self-regulation is based on contemplative practices, such as meditation and yoga. Contemplative practices adapted for use with children are now being introduced widely into preschool and school contexts in both the United States and Canada (Wisner et al. 2010). Indeed, in the past decade, there has been an exponential increase in the number of contemplative programs being made available to children in both early childhood/preschool settings and in K-12 contexts.

Enthusiasm for these practices is based in large part on research with adults, which has now demonstrated that contemplative practices can improve aspects of self-regulation, including attentional control, emotion regulation (Ortner et al. 2007; Walsh and Shapiro 2006), and perspective taking (Baer 2003; Davidson 2010; Shapiro and Carlson 2009). Emerging research with children and adolescents suggests that these practices may also be beneficial earlier in development (e.g., Burke 2010; Biegel et al. 2009), although more research is clearly needed to establish the efficacy of these approaches and examine the possibility of iatrogenic effects.

The aims of the current paper are to (1) describe key features of contemplative practices being used with children, (2) to consider how these practices may help to foster self-regulation, and (3) review emerging research on the feasibility, promise, and (where possible) the efficacy of these practices. Finally, we offer directions for future research, highlighting the need for increased methodological rigor, expansion of the scope of outcomes studied (including long-term follow-ups), and the identification of best practices for integrating contemplation into educational settings.

What Are Contemplative Practices?

Although contemplative practices have historically been associated with spiritual or religious traditions, the practices themselves are not inherently religious. Contemplative practices can be introduced in a secular fashion, as is typically the case in clinical or educational contexts (e.g., Baer 2003; Burke 2010; Kabat-Zinn 2003). These practices at their core involve regulation of attention. In addition, these practices often focus on cultivation of prosocial attitudes and behavior, such as compassion, empathy, and respect for others, and as such, they reflect a system of values and have moral implications.

The word contemplate is derived from the Latin contemplationem (“the act of looking at”) or contemplari (“to gaze attentively, to observe”). Contemplative practices involve paying attention in a purposeful and sustained way to internal experiences (e.g., one’s thoughts, sensations, or breath) or external perceptions (e.g., the sound of a bell, an image, or other people). For example, common techniques involve focusing on one’s breathing as an anchor to the present moment or attending to the thoughts and perceptions that come to mind in one’s stream of consciousness. Regulation of attention is core to contemplative practice, but beyond simply attention regulation, there is also an intention to infuse the attention with attitudes of openness, acceptance, and interest (Shapiro et al. 2006).

Contemplation is often practiced in the context of formal sitting, standing, or walking meditations. However, one may also practice contemplation by focusing on a specific object, spending time in silence or in nature, and engaging in art or other activities. The contemplative component of contemplative practice can therefore be understood as intentional and structured means of investigating and relating to one’s experiences.

The practice aspect of contemplative practice entails, by definition, repeatedly engaging in contemplation. Repetition of mental and physical activity alters neurocircuitry, strengthening the synaptic connections that are used and reducing the strength of less frequently used connections (Stiles 2008). As a result, mental training (including contemplative practice) may increase the ease of engaging in the practiced behavior while decreasing the prepotency of nonpracticed behaviors that have the potential to interfere with that behavior (Slagter et al. 2011).

From the perspective of developmental neuroscience, age-appropriate contemplative exercises may be conceptualized as a neural training regime—targeting core self-regulatory skills that are important for problem-solving success in the classroom and in daily life and helping to create the neural networks that support those fundamental skills (Zelazo and Lyons 2012). A key feature of many contemplative exercises is that they encourage sustained reflection on one’s subjective experiences. Exercising the neural circuitry involved in reflection would be expected to increase the efficiency of that circuitry and produce a corresponding increase in the likelihood and ease with which children engage in reflection prior to acting. For these reasons, repeated practice in observing with open acceptance moment-to-moment experiences may reduce the tendency to respond automatically, impulsively, and reactively (e.g., with emotional responses or impulsive thoughts or actions). Likewise, repeated practice sustaining attention for longer and longer periods should increase the efficiency of the neural circuits involved in sustained attention, leading to an increase in the duration of time that a child can maintain focus before becoming distracted.

Contemplation in the Classroom

Contemplative practices taught to adults tend to be attentionally demanding and require relatively mature cognitive skills. Therefore, an important initial question concerns the feasibility of adapting these exercises for use with children. In recent years, a number of studies have investigated this issue, and Table 1 describes several prominent contemplative programs that have been used with children and adolescents, including iRest for Kids, Inner Kids, Mindful Schools, MindUp, Learning to Breathe, the Mindfulness in Schools Project, the Inner Resilience Program, Sfat Hakeshev, Still Quiet Place, Stressed Teens, Wellness Works in Schools, Little Flower Yoga, Yoga for Classrooms, and the Attention Academy Program. Children’s lessons in all of these programs typically include a variety of short formal meditation exercises interspersed with activities designed to foster self-reflection (e.g., reflection on one’s breathing, sensations, emotions, or thoughts) and observation of one’s surroundings (e.g., awareness of others and awareness of stimuli in the environment). These lessons are typically led by instructors who themselves have an ongoing contemplative practice. Compared with adult exercises, contemplative practices for children are usually much briefer. For example, sitting meditation activities may last only a few minutes for young children, compared with 45 min or an hour for adults (Saltzman and Goldin 2008).

Table 1 Contemplative practice programs in childhood education
Full size table

Props may also be used to scaffold young children’s attention. For example, to help children focus on their breathing, preschoolers may be asked to lie on the floor with a stuffed animal on their abdomens, and observe it rise and fall with their breathing (Kaiser-Greenland 2010). Alternatively, children may be invited to take deep full breaths that allow their entire ribcage to expand and contract in all directions while holding a Hoberman sphere that also expands and contracts, and synchronizing its movements with each of their breaths (Miller et al. 2011). Another example involves training attention through listening: children are invited to listen to the sound of a bell fade until they can no longer hear it.

Activities may also be illustrated through the use of narratives and/or concrete metaphors. For example, in the iRest for Kids program (Miller et al. 2011), children are first read the story The Princess and the Pea. Next, they are invited to lie down with or without eyes closed while a cold pea is placed in the palm of their hand. Then they are asked questions to probe their sensory awareness (e.g., “I wonder if you can you be as sensitive as the princess? As I place the pea in your hand what do you notice? Is it warm or cold… heavy or light?). The use of props, narratives, and concrete metaphors may help children attend to internal sensations, thoughts, or feelings that may otherwise be too abstract or fleeting for them to notice.

Indeed, children (and adults) often find it difficult to reflect consciously on what James called the “stream of consciousness” (Flavell et al. 1995, 2000). However, emerging findings suggest that children may be able to monitor more concrete or salient subjective experiences, such as sensory perceptions (Lyons and Ghetti 2010). Many contemplative activities for children capitalize on this, directing children’s attention towards their somatosensory perceptions. For example, children might practice mindful eating, purposefully and intentionally paying attention to all aspects of the experience of eating a raisin—its color, texture, temperature, and taste (Kaiser-Greenland 2010). Such activities may provide children with an avenue into monitoring more abstract cognitive experiences, such as emotions or thoughts. For example, after attending to the perceptual features of the food one eats, children are asked to notice the “colors,” “texture,” or “temperature” of their emotions (Miller et al. 2011).

Potential Benefits of Contemplative Education in Childhood

Traditionally, curricula for young children have been designed mainly to promote rudimentary academic skills, such as literacy and math. Newer approaches to pedagogy have recognized the importance of more fundamental self-regulation skills, including social and emotional skills (e.g., Bierman et al. 2008) and executive function (Diamond and Lee 2011). Self-regulation skills make it possible for children to adapt to new challenges and solve problems—both within the classroom and outside of it. For example, to learn effectively in a classroom setting, children need to be able to sit still, pay attention, follow rules, and avoid disruptive behavior (e.g., McClelland et al. 2007). In the course of contemplative activities, children practice many of these key self-regulation skills, repeatedly and in ways designed to encourage skill building (e.g., by paying attention for longer and longer periods of time). Exercising these skills may be expected to promote the development of executive function, emotion regulation, and perspective taking. These, in turn, might be expected to improve functioning in a wide variety of contexts, including the classroom.

Executive Function

Executive function refers to those influences on self-regulation that are top–down, effortful, and consciously controlled. Zelazo and colleagues (e.g., Zelazo 2004; Zelazo et al. 2003) have argued that the development of reflection—the iterative reprocessing of information prior to responding—is a fundamental function of prefrontal cortex that underlies the development of particular executive function skills, such as cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and working memory. Age-appropriate contemplative practices may be particularly useful in scaffolding the development of executive function because these activities often require children to turn their attention inward, and engage in sustained, self-reflection on their own subjective experiences, exercising prefrontal cortical networks and driving their development. For example, during a mindful smelling game, children may be asked to smell different scents, notice how each scent smells, and reflect on any memories that each scent evokes (Miller et al. 2011). Practicing reflecting on one’s sensations and one’s thoughts in the contexts of such games may enhance children’s ability to reflect more deeply on their thoughts in more cognitively or emotionally demanding contexts, better positioning them to engage a range of executive function skills.

A growing body of research with adults and older children indicates that executive function may be improved through contemplative training. Long-term meditation experience is correlated with enhanced attentional control (e.g., Jha et al. 2007; Slagter et al. 2009), and short-term mindfulness-meditation training has been found to improve performance on a variety of executive function measures in adults (Chambers et al. 2008; Heeren et al. 2009; Tang et al. 2007; Zeidan et al. 2010; Zylowska et al. 2008).

Research specifically related to children indicates that mindfulness meditation, a form of contemplative practice which emphasizes intentionally attending to one’s moment-to-moment experiences, improves executive function in school-age populations. In child and adolescent psychiatric outpatients, for example, weekly group mindfulness-training sessions have been found to reduce attention problems (Boegels et al. 2008; Semple et al. 2010; Van der Oord et al. 2012). In community samples, bimonthly mindfulness-training activities (implemented over the course of the school year) have been found to improve second and third graders’ ability to sustain their attention (Napoli et al. 2005). Such activities may be especially beneficial for children with limited executive control skills (Flook et al. 2010).

Consistent with these findings, Johnson et al. (2012) found that a brief mindfulness-training curriculum (administered in small groups in bi-weekly sessions over the course of 5 weeks) improved preschool children’s performance on a Flanker task (Rueda et al. 2005), a widely used measure of selective attention and inhibitory control.

Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation involves managing the emotions that arise automatically in the context of important events (Gross 2002; Rubin et al. 1995), including processes that monitor and control which emotions are experienced when, and how they are expressed (Cole et al. 2004). Emotion regulation skills are associated with important aspects of social development in young children, including social competence during peer interactions, and empathy (Eisenberg et al. 2002; Ramani et al. 2010). In addition, emotion regulation is needed to maintain attention and motivation in the face of emotional ups and downs (e.g., excitement over an upcoming event or anger at a classmate over a dispute during recess). Problems with emotion regulation are associated with poor mental health, as indexed by clinical levels of problem behaviors (Bierman and Welsh 1997; see also Blair et al. 2004). Emotion regulation has also been linked to academic achievement (Raver 2004).

A growing body of research with adults, adolescents, and children indicates that emotion regulation improves as a result of contemplative practice (Davidson 2010; Ortner et al. 2007). For example, in a randomized design, 7 weeks of mindfulness training attenuated the interfering effect of negative stimuli on a simple cognitive task (with corresponding reductions in skin conductance responses to those stimuli), as compared with an active control group trained in relaxation meditation (Ortner et al. 2007). In adults with social anxiety disorder, an 8-week course on mindfulness-based stress reduction training (MBSR) was found to produce reductions in self-reported social anxiety, depression, and rumination. These changes are accompanied by changes in neural activation that are indicative of more efficient emotion regulation (Goldin and Gross 2010).

Research with children indicates that mindfulness training reduces anxiety in a range of populations, including adolescent outpatients with psychiatric disorders (Biegel et al. 2009), inner city children (Semple et al. 2010), and typically developing first, second, and third graders (Napoli et al. 2005). Mindfulness practice also appears to reduce depressive symptoms in children and adolescents (Biegel et al. 2009; Liehr and Diaz 2010; Mendelson et al. 2010), including rumination and intrusive thoughts (Mendelson et al. 2010).

Contemplative exercises in the classroom may help support the development of emotion regulation by shaping the neural circuitry underlying both automatic and controlled aspects of emotion regulation. With regard to the former, contemplative practices emphasize nonreactive awareness of one’s moment-to-moment experiences—experiencing the world in a nonjudgmental way. As a result, contemplative practices may promote a more balanced approach to one’s daily life, so that events are less likely to capture one’s attention and elicit an emotional reaction automatically. In addition, by promoting the capacity to reflect on one’s current thoughts and emotions, contemplative practice may also afford children a better ability to use their top–down control skills to consider the multiple options for responding in a given situation, allowing children to respond flexibly and adaptively in the face of emotional events. Moreover, increasing children’s capacity to reflect on their emotional experiences through contemplative practices may repeatedly engage networks involving prefrontal cortex when an emotion-eliciting event occurs, strengthening the connections between prefrontal cortex and limbic systems and thereby fortifying the neural circuitry that will support emotion regulation throughout the child’s life.

Several contemplative exercises are aimed at helping children manage their emotions in a positive way by promoting acceptance and understanding of the nuances of emotions. For example, in the iRest for Kids program, preschool teachers present children with swatches of fabric or stones that vary in texture and ask them to select the swatch that best matches how they feel when they experience a particular emotion (e.g., anger). Next, the teacher asks children to take turns saying where in their body they feel the emotion (e.g., children may say that when they feel angry they feel it in their throats). By repeating this exercise with a variety of emotions (e.g., sad, scared, happy, and angry), children become more acute observers of their emotions, helping them to notice when particular emotions are being experienced, and to respond volitionally, rather than reactively.

Perspective Taking

A third target of early contemplative training is perspective taking. We use the term perspective taking in a broad sense, to refer to variety of metacognitive skills, including self-awareness of one’s own cognitive processes as such, the attribution of mental states to others (i.e., theory of mind; Wellman and Liu 2004), social perspective taking (i.e., discerning the thoughts and feelings of others), and flexible shifting between one’s own and others’ perspectives. Perspective taking in this broad sense is clearly essential for empathy, compassion, and healthy interpersonal skills.

First, contemplative practices require children to reflect on their own perspectives, as such. That is, children are provided with practice reflecting on and attending to their own subjective experiences, as when children are asked to describe their emotional reactions. As children become increasingly able to reflect on nuances of their ongoing emotions, they may be challenged to reflect further on their emotions (e.g., “What is the opposite of the emotion you are currently experiencing? Where do you feel that in your body? What would the texture of the opposite emotion be?”). They are also asked to switch back and forth between imagining the original emotion and its opposite, practicing flexible perspective taking (Miller et al. 2011). Such activities are designed to help children to be more aware of their own subjective experiences, as such, but they may also have the added benefit of helping children become aware of what other children may feel in similar situations, which may help cultivate empathy. Children also learn that other children may not feel the same way they do when they are experiencing an emotion.

Other contemplative practices focus more directly on social perspective taking. In the MindUp program, for example, children retell common fairy tale stories from the perspective of the antagonist (e.g., the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood), thinking about the feelings that might motivate a character with whom one does not usually sympathize. By encouraging children to reflect on their own emotions and share them, and by explicitly addressing alternative perspectives, these practices may be expected to promote empathy towards self and others, leading to more effective interpersonal interactions.

Contemplative practices have been found to enhance metacognition in adults (Teasdale et al. 2002), and practices specifically aimed at encouraging a more decentered perspective on one’s thoughts and emotions, termed “reperceiving,” have been found to produce a variety of positive outcomes (Orzech et al. 2009; Teasdale et al. 2002). In a randomized controlled study with adults (premedical and medical students), for example, Shapiro et al. (1998) found that compared with a wait-list control group, the meditation group showed increased levels of self-reported empathy and decreased levels of anxiety and depression. These results held during the students’ stressful exam period, and the findings were replicated when participants in the wait-list control group received the meditation intervention. Improvements in empathic concern have also been observed in counseling students who participated in an 8-week MBSR course, following a pre-post-test design, compared with a matched control group (Shapiro et al. 2006).

Research on the effects of contemplative practices on perspective taking in children is limited, however preliminary evidence is encouraging. Johnson et al. (2012), for example, found that a brief (5-week) course on mindfulness improved preschool children’s theory of mind understanding (as assessed using Wellman and Liu’s 2004 battery; see also Bierman et al. 2008).

Additional Targets of Early Contemplative Education

There are several other domains that are potential targets of contemplative exercises in the classroom. Although it is too soon to draw conclusions concerning the potential benefits of contemplative exercises in these domains, there are theoretical reasons to expect benefits and there is some empirical evidence suggesting that these areas warrant further investigation. Below, we briefly review each of these domains: self-compassion, moral development, creativity, and learning.

Self-Compassion

In addition to training concern for others, contemplative activities in the classroom may enhance positive regard for oneself. Self-compassion entails being kind toward oneself in instances of pain or failure rather than being harshly self-critical. It also involves keeping one’s negative experiences in perspective, and recognizing them as part of a larger set of experiences that also include positive experiences (Neff 2003). Self-compassion has been found to predict other positive psychological variables including wisdom, personal initiative, curiosity and exploration, happiness, optimism, positive affect, and psychological health (Neff 2003).

By promoting children’s ability and propensity to notice their experiences without judging them, and to observe their ongoing thoughts and emotions without reacting to them, early contemplative exercises may facilitate the development of self-compassion. Kind feelings towards oneself and others are also a specific target of certain contemplative exercises for children. For example, in the friendly wishes activity developed by Kaiser-Greenland, children practice sending kind thoughts towards a stuffed toy, people they care about, and themselves.

Several studies with adults have found that meditation-based interventions significantly increase self-compassion in health care professionals (Shapiro et al. 2005) and counseling psychology students (Shapiro et al. 2006), offering promising evidence that early contemplative activities may promote kindness towards oneself as well as others.

Moral Development

Fostering moral maturity is of great psychological, social, and global significance. Meditative traditions emphasize the importance of moral development, and regard moral maturity as integral to contemplative practice. Contemplative practices show promise for enhancing ethical motivation and behavior via several mechanisms. According to Walsh and Shapiro (2006) these include sensitizing awareness to the costs of unethical acts (such as guilt in oneself and pain produced in others), reducing problematic motives and emotions (such as greed and anger), strengthening morality supporting emotions (such as love and compassion), cultivating altruism, and enhanced identification with others (p. 237).

Preliminary research supports the suggestion that contemplative practice leads to moral development. For example, among practitioners of Transcendental Meditation (TM), scores on scales of moral development correlate with duration of practice, with higher scores correlating with greater practice (Nidich et al. 1983). In college students, mindfulness-based practice has been found to lead to improvements in ethical decision-making (Shapiro et al. 2012). Taken together, this preliminary research lends support to the potential of teaching contemplative practices to children as a way to foster moral development and ethical decision-making.

Creativity and Learning

Finally, by promoting inquisitiveness and fostering children’s curiosity about their experiences, contemplative exercises may also amplify children’s tendency to use their top–down attention and self-control skills in the service of exploring their environments in new and creative ways (both inside and outside of the classroom). For example, contemplative exercises that prompt children to describe their emotions in terms of color or texture, or to express their thoughts through art, may promote ways of thinking about the world that complement more rational and analytical ways of knowing (Hart 2004). In addition, research indicates that when information is processed in a deeper, more reflective fashion, it is more likely to be integrated into one’s knowledge base and retained (Kapur et al. 1994). By practicing being fully engaged in the present moment (as opposed to distracted by intrusive thoughts) and by promoting inquisitiveness about one’s moment-to-moment experiences, contemplative exercises may help children to learn in a more active, reflective fashion, and this type of learning is likely to be more effective than more passive, rote learning (Marcovitch et al. 2008).

Preliminary research with adolescents and young adults suggests that meditation can cultivate creativity, lending support to the notion that contemplative activities may cultivate creativity in children. Cowger and Torrance (1982), for example, studied 24 college undergraduates who were taught Zen meditation and ten who were taught relaxation. The meditators attained statistically significant gains in creativity as defined by self-reported heightened consciousness of problems, perceived change, invention, sensory experience, expression of emotion/feeling, humor, and fantasy. Improvements in creativity as a result of contemplative training have also been documented in high school and junior high school students (So and Orme-Johnson 2001), offering further support for the notion that contemplative exercises in childhood may foster children’s ability to creatively explore and learn from their environments.

Future Directions

Research in the area of contemplative practice and early childhood education is in its infancy. Creative and rigorous designs are needed to determine how these practices and interventions will be of greatest benefit to children. Below, we highlight directions for research that will benefit investigations of contemplative practices for children.

First, it is important to elucidate the specific effects of different contemplative training exercises, and how these differ developmentally. For example, concentration practices are thought to foster sustained attention and concentration, increased clarity, and calmness of mind. By contrast, mindfulness practices are believed to enhance self-insight, self-regulation, compassion, and wisdom. Understanding the impact of different kinds of contemplative practice, will not only provide important knowledge that may be used in applied settings but also provide insight into basic developmental processes underlying age-related changes in such fundamental skills as self-regulation.

In doing this work, it will be critical to use assessment tools that are age appropriate, reliable, and valid. To fully understand the effects of contemplative exercises in the classroom, future research should employ instruments tapping first-person (subjective), second-person (e.g., peer, parent, or teacher report), and third-person (e.g., behavioral tasks or observations and electrophysiological measures) outcomes. These assessments should target a broad scope of outcomes, including not only self-regulation but also interpersonal relationships, ethical behavior, and creativity and learning. When possible, outcomes should be assessed a year or more following interventions, to assess whether interventions have lasting effects on development.

Research on the efficacy of contemplative interventions must balance experimental rigor with the fact that (true) contemplative practice requires participant “buy in.” By definition one cannot engage in contemplative practice without an attitude of openness, curiosity, and acceptance. Therefore, teachers and students who are skeptical of the benefits of contemplative practice may not fully benefit from such activities. At the same time, teachers and researchers who are enthusiastic about the potential benefits of contemplative practices must be equally interested in determining which approaches do NOT yield hypothesized benefits, and adjusting their curricula and hypotheses accordingly. Randomized controlled designs are the gold standard in clinical research, and it is essential that research on the benefits of contemplative training during childhood include active control conditions involving a noncontemplative program that controls for instructor attention, expectancies regarding outcomes, time commitment, and other elements that provide structural equivalence to the contemplative practice intervention. Community studies that identify “best practices” for introducing contemplation into early childhood education classrooms are also necessary, to ensure that such exercises are implemented in a way that is maximally beneficial.

Finally, future research should investigate the effects of contemplative exercises on teachers and parents. A growing number of studies have shown that providing teachers with contemplative training may yield significant improvements on teachers’ well-being and their classroom climate, potentially yielding benefits for children, even if children do not directly participate in such activities. Similarly, engaging parents in contemplative exercises that can be practiced individually or as a family may also facilitate the development of self-regulation skills.

Conclusions

Contemplative practices for children are becoming increasingly widespread, and preliminary evidence is encouraging. Preliminary empirical and theoretical evidence supports the suggestion that introducing contemplative practices into childhood education may cultivate healthy patterns of behavior and brain development that are beneficial to children immediately and throughout their lifetime. Indeed, childhood may be an especially opportune period to learn contemplative practices because of the plasticity of relevant brain regions and the potential for cascading consequences of any salubrious effects, such as a boost in self regulation.

Careful and nuanced consideration of potential pitfalls of introducing contemplative practices to children must be considered. In addition, determining the most effective means of cultivating self-regulation is complex. Self-regulation is multifaceted, encompassing top–down processes (such as selective attention and working memory) and bottom-up influences that may either impair self-control (e.g., cortisol/stress; e.g., Pechtel and Pizzagalli 2010; Sapolsky 1996) or boost it (e.g., dopamine/approach-oriented emotions such as happiness and curiosity; e.g., Ashby et al. 1999). Contemplative practices have the potential to address both of these types of process, training top–down attentional skills while also disrupting the automatic elicitation of emotional responses (e.g., by stimuli in the environment), resulting in greater calmness and emotional stability (Zelazo and Lyons 2012).

This article represents a beginning step in the conversation exploring the potential benefits of integrating contemplative practice into childhood education. Our interest is to establish a foundation upon which further investigations can build, leading to answers to the questions raised here, as well as to the articulation of new questions. Future interdisciplinary and multifaceted research investigating the integration of contemplative practices into early education holds significant potential for children’s social, emotional, behavioral, and academic well-being, both short and long term. Ideally, research and practice will inform one another other, developing and refining contemplative practice interventions that can contribute best to childhood development and well-being.