Children are the heirs of the world. Our children today will eventually take over the economy, education, and society in general.
We often forget the importance of educating our young, and this Baltimore school has made some interesting findings of how we have been teaching our children wrongly.
Although they’re a handful, kids are great! Their carefree attitudes should be highly inspiring to adults all over the world. We actually have much to learn from our children! However, we also have a lot to teach our children. When kids – or people in general – do something bad, they must be punished. That is basic human nature. However, with the modern day society, we have extremely complicated everything.
When it comes to disciplining our children we are too often taking the approach of crime, rather than simple mistakes. Kids are learning individuals and they all learn in different ways, however, trial and error are one of the most important lessons a kid will learn in life. But, is there a chance we might be enforcing this wrongly? When kids do something wrong in school we really just throw them in detention. A project performed by a school in Baltimore has shown this might be the wrong approach after all.
Detention has been used for years in schools, but we might need to end it now. Robert W. Coleman School has created a meditation program for the kids instead of sending them to detention. The result is breathtaking, actually. Instead of staring at the walls, kids attend the Holistic Me after-school program where they learn how to practice yoga, mindfulness, meditation, centering and breath work.
“Combined with extra-curricular and academic components – and dinner – the award-winning after-school program empowers youth with the skills for peaceful conflict resolution, improved focus and concentration, greater control and awareness of thoughts and emotions, improved self-regulation, anger management and stress reduction,” the Open Society Institute-Baltimore wrote about the program. The society helps fund the after-school time.
According to a report done by Bored Panda, the meditation program has even caused academic performance to increase! “Kids in underserved communities might be stressed because they can’t eat, they don’t have food or they come to school with their clothes dirty and they get joked,” explained founder Ali Smith. “Kids at private school are stressed too. They have achievement anxiety or they’re not connecting with their parents because they’re traveling or working. It just manifests itself differently. But it can be damaging, no matter what, if they don’t learn how to address it.”