You’re probably aware—either from personal experience or simply from reading the news—that more and more children and adolescents in the U.S. are suffering from more and more mental stress and anxiety than ever before. (Merely for starters: Fourty-four percent of high school students report feeling persistently sad or hopeless, and nearly one in three high school girls say they’ve considered suicide, a 60% rise over the last decade.)
You’re probably also aware of the impact that four-time Grand Slam tennis champion Naomi Osaka has had on mental health awareness after speaking out about the matter forcefully and consistently over the past few years. Now, she’s joined forces with Modern Health, a global platform focusing on mental health and wellness, to create a series of free and publicly available audio meditations specifically for children to help combat stress and anxiety.
“As someone who suffers from anxiety, having a daily mechanism to help me cope has been really comforting,” Osaka says, “and when the team at Modern Health and I discussed putting together guided meditations for children, it really excited me.”
As for the meditations themselves: They’re centered around “evidence-based techniques used for mindfulness in kids and teens,” says Sharon Adusei, PhD, clinical strategy lead of outcomes and quality at Modern Health and a licensed child clinical psychologist. They incorporate what Adusei calls “open-ended language allowing youth to choose how they want to practice meditation, and statements that encourage building positive habits. Children are telling us that they’re struggling—and mental health services are under extreme strain, with a chronic shortage of providers who specialize in working with youth and a rising demand for support. Not only do we need to focus on quality interventions, but we also need to focus on prevention efforts that help build skills to manage stress at home, school, and around the world.”
Osaka has recorded three separate meditations for three different ages, each of them coordinated with developmentally age-appropriate skills and language. The one for children age five to seven focuses on allowing them to acknowledge their big feelings and helps them visualize a safe place where they can cope with them. The meditation for eight to eleven-year-olds helps teach self-compassion skills—in part by asking kids to imagine the advice of a trusted friend. And the meditation for those nine and older helps listeners find a sense of groundedness when so much of their lives can feel overwhelming and distracting.
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