Meditating on Their Feet Helps Calm Aggressive Kids
I wish I had known about this mindfulness practice when I was a teacher.
Picture this. Small boy running through the hallways of a school. He’s fast. Here comes the teacher right behind him, knowing she’s going to be in big trouble if the kid gets off of school property. What if he runs into the street and gets hit by a car?
Teacher is out of breath. Boy escapes through the door and onto the playground. Running on the gravel. The day is hot, she’s sweating. Teacher trips, skins her knee on the gravel but manages to grab the kid’s collar as she falls. Did she grab too hard?
That teacher was me.
One reason I left teaching was because of children who spit at me, bit me, and threw chairs at other students. Kids who disrupted the learning of other students because the classroom had to be cleared when the aggressive child began using a pencil as a weapon.
These are some of the most difficult students for teachers to deal with — students whose behavior is often extremely defiant, obstinately uncooperative, and sometimes dangerously aggressive towards other students and even staff members and teachers.
Educators are leaving the profession in droves right now. It’s being called The Great Resignation. One reason teachers are leaving is because of student behavior issues.
What do you do when a child attacks you or other students? I was trained by the school district on how to physically restrain a student when they were a danger to themselves or others. The training only lasted a few hours. There were lots of caveats about the dangers of using holds.
According to the Crisis Prevention Institute (who trained me), Staff must be aware that serious physical and psychological risks are inherent in any physical intervention. The only truly safe physical restraint is the one that never occurs.
I can’t remember any of these holds now. At the time, the restraint techniques seemed too complicated to remember unless you practiced them every day and “muscle memory” took over — also known as procedural memory — like learning to ride a bike, you practice a motor task until you can perform it without thinking.
Imagine taking a karate class for two hours and then being asked to demonstrate your knowledge of karate three months later.
Now imagine you’re being asked to “break a board” when you’re feeling threatened. Your job is on the line and so is the safety of other children, the safety of the child who’s being aggressive. You’re in “fight or flight” mode. Are you going to remember those karate moves?
But if you don’t remember how to do the moves correctly, you’re going to get disciplined. You could hurt a child and also get hurt yourself.
It’s physically and mentally painful to use physical restraints.
“I would lock myself in the bathroom at work and cry, and I know that I wasn’t the only one,” says D, who spent a year working as a teaching assistant at a private school for students with autism.”
So what do you do with aggressive children? Do you — the parent, teacher, principal, or social worker — do you let the child scratch your eye, bite you, pull your hair? Defending yourself could make you a target — of a disciplinary action or a lawsuit. You could get fired and your career ended forever. If you’re a parent, you could get reported to social services.
Is there another alternative?
What about teaching a mindfulness practice to these children?
Research (Singh et al., 2011) shows that teaching three adolescents with autism a simple mindfulness exercise led to large decreases in their aggressive behavior.
Aggressive incidents occurred 14–20 times per week during the collection of baseline data and dropped to 4–6 times per week during mindfulness training. During the last four weeks of the intervention, aggressive incidents dropped to zero.
The teenagers were taught a mindfulness exercise called Meditation on the Soles of Your Feet. The directions for this practice are:
Slowly, wiggle your toes, feel your shoes on your feet, feel your socks, feel the bottoms or soles of your feet and the heels of your feet against the back of your shoes. Keep breathing and focus on the soles of your feet until you feel calm.
Singh et al. (2007) also tested the efficacy of this practice on aggressive behavior in three seventh-graders who were at risk of expulsion from school. Different baseline data was collected for each of the three adolescents: on bullying and fire setting by Ricky, aggression, and cruelty to animals by Kent, and aggression by Libby.
During the training phase, a therapist met with each student separately for 15 minutes, three times/week, for four weeks. In the first session, students said “they were not very interested in learning anything new because they were already in control of their lives,” (p. 59), but agreed they needed to change their behavior to stay in school.
In the next 11 sessions, the adolescents learned the technique, Meditation on the Soles of Your Feet. Using this practice led to large decreases in the students’ aggressive behavior; they were not expelled and they reduced their aggressive behavior to tolerable levels until they graduated from middle school.
I wish I had known about this mindfulness practice when I was a teacher. Do you know of any children you would like to try this with? Do you think it would help them?
Thank you for reading.
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