![]() ![]() This “intention-to-treat” approach – analyzing all subjects, whether or not they engaged with the intervention – is widely considered to provide more insight into the potential effectiveness of the intervention once it is applied in everyday group settings, like classrooms, where not everyone is likely to take part, Obradović said. Also in keeping with the real-life approach to the study design, the researchers did not monitor children or provide extra encouragement to implement the deep breathing instruction. The rest watched an informational video that featured similar animated images but did not involve the breathing exercise.Īll of the children were shown their assigned video in small groups, at tables set up adjacent to the site from where they were recruited, to maintain a natural setting for the study. Roughly half of the children were assigned to a group to watch the animated video with the deep breathing guidance. “From a pragmatic point of view,” Obradović said, “we thought a very short sequence, four breaths, seemed doable for this age group.”įor their randomized field experiment, the Stanford researchers recruited 342 young children – 7 years old, on average – with their parents’ permission, at a children’s museum, a public playground and three full-day summer camps in the San Francisco Bay Area. The animated video shows young children how to slowly inhale by pretending to smell a flower and to exhale by pretending to blow out a candle. To help elementary schoolers learn the technique, the researchers worked with a team of artists at RogueMark Studios, based in Berkeley, Calif., to produce a one-minute video. They are more successful in taking several deep breaths if they have a visual guide.” ![]() “When you ask young children to take a deep breath, many don’t really know how to slowly pace their inhale and exhale, if they haven’t had any training,” Obradović said. They set out to isolate the activity of breathing and investigate its impact – taking practical considerations into account, including the likelihood that young children might not have the capacity for even a couple of minutes of deep breathing, and that they would need help learning how to do it. But prior to this study, research had not clearly shown whether slow-paced breathing itself could significantly alter a young child’s physiological stress response, the researchers said. Mindfulness practices that incorporate deep breathing, such as yoga and meditation, have found their way into the classroom at many schools. 16 in the journal Developmental Psychobiology. Sulik and doctoral student Emma Armstrong-Carter, was published on Nov. The study, which was coauthored by GSE research associate Michael J. So we’re excited that we can also offer an easy-to-use tool to help kids learn this technique.” “But just telling children to take a deep breath may not be enough – children need scaffolding. ![]() “This study is the first to show that taking a few slow, deep breaths in an everyday setting can have a significant effect on a child’s stress physiology,” said the study's lead author, Jelena Obradović, an associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and director of the Stanford Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids (SPARK Lab). It can also help parents prepare kids for a potentially stressful situation – a vaccine appointment, say, or a holiday gathering. What’s more, the short, animated video developed for the study is now freely available online, providing a proven tool that can be used in the classroom to introduce children to deep breathing as a way to self-regulate. By measuring the effects in naturalistic settings such as day camps and playgrounds, the study is also groundbreaking for its design, which more closely reflects a child’s experience than a study in a lab would. It’s one of the first things parents and teachers tell a child who gets upset: “Take a deep breath.” But research into the effect of deep breathing on the body’s stress response has overwhelmingly ignored young children – and studies done with adults typically take place in a university lab, making them even less applicable to children’s actual lives.Ī new study by Stanford researchers is the first to show that taking just a few slow, deep breaths significantly reduces young children’s physiological arousal.
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