Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids (and Their Parents)

ELINE SNEL is a therapist and certified MBSR trainer and runs the Academy for Mindful Teaching in the Netherlands. She has been developing and teaching mindfulness-based courses for over twenty years and trains teachers to teach MBSR techniques to students. Her program has been used in numerous primary schools in the Netherlands. She has recently started a pilot project in various secondary schools to teach mindfulness practices to teenagers. Eline also teaches the program in Belgium, France, and Germany. More information is available on and . For children's training by AMT instructors, see Simple mindfulness practices to help your child (ages 5-12) deal with anxiety, improve concentration, and handle difficult emotions. Includes a 60-minute audio CD of guided exercises read by Myla Kabat-Zinn.

Mindfulness--the quality of attention that combines full awareness with acceptance of each moment, just as it is--is gaining broad acceptance among mental health professionals as an adjunct to treatment. This little book is a very appealing introduction to mindfulness meditation for children and their parents. In a simple and accessible way, it describes what mindfulness is and how mindfulness-based practices can help children calm down, become more focused, fall asleep more easily, alleviate worry, manage anger, and generally become more patient and aware. The book contains eleven practices that focus on just these scenarios, along with short examples and anecdotes throughout. Included with purchase is an audio CD with guided meditations, voiced by Myla Kabat-Zinn, who along with her husband, Jon Kabat-Zinn, popularized mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) as a therapeutic approach.