[mapcars]

>“Children will start to be introduced gradually to issues around mental health, well-being and happiness right from the start of primary school,” he added.

Why wouldn't adults just solve their mental problems instead of introducing them to children? Children have no problems with happiness or well-being. It's us who should learn from them.

big facepalm

[andyjohnson0]

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being.

This seems rather naive to me. Unhappiness is far from absent from the lives of many children and young people, and social media is making it worse. See yesterday's yougov survey results that indicate that "18% of young people in UK do not think life is worth living" [1].

This new curriculum subject is about helping children to understand and navigate their own feelings and deal with stresses so that they are less likely to turn into messed-up teenagers and adults. As a parent of school-age children I think this is an entirely good thing.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/05/youth-unhapp...

[baybal2]

I spent most of my early childhood in a grimiest, gloomiest, dying city on Russian/Chinese border. From the age of 12 or so, I lived with one goal - get out of there. I had no time for stupid psychologising, nor could've imagined anybody living in glitzy cities of the West to be so dumb to waste time on that.

There were times I almost worshipped that imaginary version of Western culture I had with it being all about action, forward movement and unending progress. Once I finally got myself out of Russia, I was up for a big, big surprise... West had idleness as its second nature...

[andyjohnson0]

> West had idleness as its second nature...

I'm sorry that you had to deal with those things as a child, but I'm not sure what you're saying here. That children in the west are soft due to insufficient adversity?

Mental health is not something that's "so dumb to waste time on". Maybe you are tough enough to take what life throws at you, or maybe you just think you are. But I've been around long enough to know that people can be broken-down by events in even an ordinary life - and children need kindness and support just as much as they need challenge and the opportunity to learn from mistakes.

If I've misunderstood then please feel free to explain more.

[baybal2]

Purposeful pursuit of idle life should not be thought as a virtue. Not for young men in their prime, without a family.

I admit, I am a bit envious of other men of my age who managed to get that "settled down slow life" with happy family, but even at that stage in life, that "idleness" only comes as a great reward for years of work, and raising a child is a no joke effort.

[dTal]

>The initiative comes months after a survey commissioned by the National Health Service found that one in eight children in England between the ages of 5 and 19 suffered from at least one mental disorder at the time of their assessment in 2017.

>The survey, which was published in November, also indicated a slight increase in mental disorders in five to 15-year-olds, which rose to 11.2 percent in 2017 from 9.7 percent in 1999. Disorders like anxiety and depression were the most common, affecting one in 12 children and early adolescents in 2017, and appeared more often in girls.

[hvidgaard]

Have it ever occurred to you that adults have mental problems because they didn't learn to manage it as children and young adults?

Besides, depression and anxiety is surprisingly common among children.

[mapcars]

>Besides, depression and anxiety is surprisingly common among children.

Whom do you think they learned this from? Trees or cats?

[icebraining]

Even assuming depression must be "learned", what does it matter? School can't make sure they're never around depressed people. But it can help them protect themselves from it.

[mapcars]

You will meet all kinds of people that's true, but it worth decreasing the amount.

[icebraining]

How do you suggest the schools help with that?

[rsynnott]

Other kids? Childhood bullying is very, very common, and is a big driver of this sort of thing. Social media may have made this even worse, but it's always been a thing.

[hvidgaard]

It's not learned. It happens because other children are cruel, we do not prioritize healthy environment for them, and because there is an enormous pressure from social media from a young age.

[zimpenfish]

> Whom do you think they learned this from?

I suspect that in a non-ignorable number of cases, "no one", because it's entirely possible their brain chemistry is just screwy.

[DanBC]

No-one credible uses brain chemistry as an explanation for depression (unless you're talking about bi-polar). The emphasis is on the psycho-social bit of bio-psycho-social.

[zimpenfish]

> No-one credible uses brain chemistry as an explanation for depression

Presumably you're missing a "sole" before explanation there?

Because brain chemistry certainly seems to be definitely regarded as at least holding a coat even if it's not actively swinging punches.

[NeedMoreTea]

A society that promotes mainly unachievable levels of success, beauty, wealth, and influence?

[geggam]

It isnt unachievable, it is achievable by just enough you think you have a chance.

Like lottery :)

[ionised]

You are asserting that depression is a learned behaviour?

[fiala__]

They're probably also the kind of person who tells depressed people to "cheer up, life's not all that bad after all!"

[Cthulhu_]

I've seen a few posts like that in this comment section so far.

Obligatory Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/wowthanksimcured

"Homeless Chicago man suffering from hypothermia makes miraculous recovery after someone from Wisconsin informs him 'it's actually much colder where I'm from'"

[mapcars]

Depending on a situation I can do that as well. I do not exclude any possibility, what will work - I will do. Whatever "kinds" of people you invented - this is only your own problem.

[mapcars]

Not that it can not happen by itself, it's just seeing it around inclines you towards it.

[fiala__]

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being.

Have you ever met a child IRL?

[mapcars]

In my experience kids, until a certain age, run around, scream, shout, full of excitement, happiness, and life.

But once they start looking at adults - all they see only dark, gloomy, lifeless serious faces and so they start becoming the same.

If adults want to do something about it - we should teach happiness ourselves first. Kids will follow automagically.

[fiala__]

If you've never seen a depressed child then I beg you to pay attention. Children have incredibly complex, fascinating and perceptive minds, they aren't just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty.

It's exactly this kind of reductionism which leads parents to ignore their children's psychological needs, which leads to schools having to take action.

[mapcars]

>just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty

I did not say that. As I don't think that imposing complexity of mental bullshit from adult's minds on children makes things any better.

[arethuza]

"But once they start looking at adults"

I suspect one of the biggest sources of misery for a lot of kids are other kids.

[zimpenfish]

Certainly for me it was, compounded by adults not taking this seriously (and a certain amount of screwy brain chemistry.)

If your parent is a teacher at the same school, your school life is going to be A+ miserable.

[arethuza]

I don't think its just adults not taking it seriously in some quarters its surprisingly common for adults to use the "man up" or "stiff upper lip" approaches for physical or mental pain.

[dTal]

Are you suggesting we shouldn't teach mindfulness to children? That it's not a useful skill? That the time would be wasted?

>“It’s not just to make them feel better in the short-term,” Dr. Deighton said, “but to better equip them for later in life.”

[mapcars]

I think if needed it can be learned later, I don't see any problem with that. I started being interested in meditation around 23 when I was on the very bottom of my emotional state.

But I see that most people around me never experienced this and for them, meditation and yoga is an exotic exercise.

One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add one more boring official class.

[mercer]

> One thing which I really don't like here is instead of giving kids free time to experience life themselves they will add one more boring official class.

Being perpetually 'busy' and treating life as a collection of planned activities, like homework, classes, courses, workshops, appointments, etc. is something that runs deep in our entire (Western?) society, whether school-going or working age.

Mindfulness as yet another one of those activities feels uncomfortably like a band-aid solution that is dangerous precisely because it works.

It's a bit like taking aspirin to deal with headaches when really you should just stop drinking so much coffee and working so much.

I do think mindfulness can be more than that. I've experienced how beneficial it can be to make it part of life rather than just (or only) another planned activity, especially when it's a part or underpinning of a larger 'framework' (in my case I lean towards Zen Buddhism).

[michaelt]

Mindfulness is branded wrong.

Sceptics see it as (a) Some yoga-style mystic silliness reasonable people have been ignoring for decades, and (b) A 2014 self-help book, a fad-prone genre with relatively little credibility.

If the common sense ideas underlying mindfulness were given a different coat of paint, they might be more readily accepted.

[yoz-y]

I don't think that children who have problems with happiness or well-being will be helped by teaching them mindfulness.

I was a lucky kid, but those around me who had problems had them because they were excluded from groups, got parents divorced, were bullied or were simply spoiled by their parents and were unhappy if anything didn't go their way. Telling them to be mindful is straight out of Voltaire's Candide.

[rsynnott]

The major application of mindfulness for which there is actually evidence is stress/anxiety reduction. This would obviously be useful for kids who are bullied and/or have bad home environments.

[icebraining]

News articles don't stop at the title. The classes involve more than just "telling them to be mindful".

[fiala__]

I'm no mental health expert but isn't mindfulness a proven method for improving one's mental health?

Schools can't fix dysfunctional families. All they can do is give kids some tools to cope with such challenges. Even if it doesn't help a particular child, why would it be wrong to at least try?

[aurbano]

You were a very lucky child then :)

Edit: Apologies for the sarcastic response, couldn't help it. Children can and do feel unhappy, some more than others. This feels like an amazing step in the right direction because many people (myself included) don't learn early on that feeling sad or overwhelmed is normal and ok. We strive to "feel good" and stress about it, without tools to cope. Most adults either ignore this or go to therapy, but maybe from now on people will be more prepared.

[mapcars]

>many people (myself included) don't learn early on that feeling sad or overwhelmed is normal and ok

Until someone told you what is normal and what is not you have no problems doing something. So it's not about being sad is ok, it's about not judging at all.

[aurbano]

I think this topic is too complicated to discuss over text like this.

I agree with you, I’m sure we think similarly, and it seems like talking to children about mindfulness could be amazing.

I fear that many schools/teachers won’t do a good job at it, judging exclusively from my own experience back in school... but that’s a different issue.

[icebraining]

Yes, in an utopia, this class may be useless.

[mapcars]

There are still many places on a planet where kids are not burdened by depression and sadness. It happens to them as well, of course, but not in any extraordinary amounts.

[icebraining]

Most kids in the UK don't need to know multiplication to get their basics fulfilled either. Most of schooling is about preparing them for the future, not for the present. But some will benefit sooner, and you can't always tell which ones.

[076ae80a-3c97-4]

You're gatekeeping metal health problems.

[mapcars]

In my experience most things which people call "mental problems" are caused by themselves. And the solution is to stop causing them, not to learn how to "manage" with them.

[DanBC]

"I don't know anything about zoology, biology, geology, geography, marine biology, crypto zoology, evolutionary theory, evolutionary biology, meteorology, liminology, history, herpatology, paleontology, or archeology, but I think ..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzOv14fA-BI

[mapcars]

This is a subject where you don't need to know (intellectually), the experience is more important. Do you "know" joy better by experiencing it or by learning from a textbook or a school class?

[gls2ro]

I think your hypothesis here is that the mental health issues, unhappiness and issues with well-being can be fixed completly from the society.

I disagree with it. I prefer to look at them somehow like I see bugs: they cannot be - in general - eliminated completely. They come with the process of people building products.

So I don't think we can solve those completely. This is why I think we should start educating children about how to think about live.

Maybe an inspiration from philosophy stage from Ancient time which originally I think was concerned (at least some of them) with how a life should be lived, what happiness means, what does it mean to be a homo sapiens ...

I think we should approach this as a society and start offering children tools about how to approach this.

[DanBC]

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being

How about children who are repeatedly raped by their parent? Are they happy?

How about children who's parent has died? Are they happy?

What about the children who are grappling with gender indentity or sexuality (and maybe with parents who are not supportive)? Are they happy?

What about children living with disability and who are being bullied because of it? Are they happy?

[mapcars]

The problems you mentioned, while being a completely different matter, will not (and should not) be solved by mindfulness anyway.

You are exactly approving my point that it's the adults who need to solve their problems (on different levels) first.

[afarrell]

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being

I'm happy for your past self, but your experience is not universal. Many people as children and teenagers have problems with these things. Its hard to take action to work on these without having a mental framework to organise your thoughts and communicate about them.

[mapcars]

>Many people as children and teenagers have problems with these things

So there will be an experience of some "negative" states of mind and emotion, but to become a problem it needs support. Removing this support is what I'm talking about. In a form that adults should be a live example that "negative" things happen but do not grow into problems.

[austincheney]

> Why wouldn't adults just solve their mental problems instead of introducing them to children?

Because people live in an artificial world. In the absence of real problems everything is emotionally traumatic, first world problems.

As I sit next to a war on a military deployment I await people to prove me right with the sadness of their downvotes.

[icebraining]

My teenage brother just lost his father to cancer. But that's surely just a first-world problem.

[austincheney]

That is a tragic event. Healthy people bounce back from trauma after a healing period. Healthy people aren't the ones in need of institutional self-awareness.

Conversely, do you have chronic income insecurity? Are you dodging bullets and bombs daily as some people do? Were you ever a victim of child slavery in a third-world nation? I suspect if you have internet access you probably have reliable shelter and don't stress over food insecurity. Those are real problems, and yet the people who live through those stressors typically aren't the ones needing mindfulness. The difference is a matter of perspective from perseverance. The lack of perseverance in normal childhood development is certainly a first-world problem.

[icebraining]

Yes, I was forced to leave my home and sleep on friend's houses multiple times during my childhood; once, we were forced to leave by threat of force in the evening, and spend three months living on a floor mattress in another city. For a couple of years, I often struggled to fall asleep due to fear, not just for me but also for my younger brother - my chest would compress at every loud noise. Randomly crying when alone (particularly in the shower) was common during that time.

But no, I was never dodging bullets. I lived in a Western country and the assailant used other weapons and wasn't part of a paramilitarized group, so I guess it doesn't count.

[austincheney]

That is a dreadful experience that will empower you in ways others can never understand or appreciate. I have tried to explain living like this to my kids in the past and they just look at me like I am stupid.

[icebraining]

No, it won't. It screwed me up in ways I still haven't fully grasped, and has long term negative consequences in my life. And I certainly wished I had been more mentally prepared to handle its impact.

Which is why is fucking bothers me that you dismiss life for kids in the developed world as an "absence of real problems". Just because we're not scavenging for food, doesn't mean we don't have real problems.

Sure, thankfully many kids won't need that knowledge until they're older, if ever. But it's not always clear who will. My family certainly didn't meet the stereotype.

[SomethingOrNot]

You’re like the main character in Hurt Locker at the end of the movie. He has come home from deployment and is standing in a supermarket. The mundane, everyday reality of First World civilian life seems meaningless in contrast.

So he goes back for another deployment. Another deployment in a pointless and meaningless war, yet another racket that has everything to do with the interests of the powerful and nothing to do with sentimental crap like serving your country. But he feels that it is meaningful.

“War is a racket”

[austincheney]

I don't disagree with you. Seeing civilians with real struggles in a world destroyed by years of warfare that would crush the soul of the average depressed American puts your own trivial problems in a completely different perspective, especially when they are happily making the best of their situation.

This is my fourth deployment. When I go back to my comfy civilian job as the elite senior developer it is a bit depressing seeing the things people complain about at the job.

As an example consider this scenario that I went through:

Another developer was telling me I was using the wrong IDE. I needed to be using Atom because it has the fantastic extension called Atom Beautify that beautifies a whole bunch of different languages with a huge ton of options. I guess he didn't realize I am a collaborator on the project and many of the supported languages are available because of my beautifier integrated into the extension. Then when I am leaving the company for this military separation I had to hear from my boss in the exit interview that some code I wrote months ago was horrid, because the other developers only know how to read OOP code (even though I provided extensive documentation). Nobody bothered to talk about it or explain their distaste. How am I supposed to process that?

[kitd]

I suggest you RTFA before facepalming.

It is as much about being literate in the issues as it is about solving them.

[mapcars]

By being literate I will only learn from other people's experience. But I can only truly rely on my own experience.

[kitd]

That's so mixed up, I'm not sure where to start.

Should we learn Maths or English from experience? Without the literacy, we don't have the tools and terms to understand our experience. The early years are exactly the time to introduce them, since that is where our experiences have the most profound and long-lasting effect.

[rsynnott]

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being.

Either you had a fairly idyllic life as a child of (more likely) you are looking at the past through rose tinted glasses (many people do this). Kids have problems.