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Comment by bencollier49 | Hacker News Reader

My five year-old son now talks about his mind in the third person as a result of this. I'm having to retrain him with responsibility for his own actions.

Lovely idea and all but having untrained people teaching psychological practices to reception-grade children seems rather foolhardy to me.

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That's a fair point; while mental health wasn't a class in my country, I've also found that these "extra" classes often suffered from giving them to random teachers. Just because they have some experience (and possibly a minor degree) in pedagogy doesn't mean they can teach every subject. Many here can barely teach their specialty.

Why is that a bad thing? If they can evaluate their thought process at such a young age, I would think that's a win.

Are they evaluating their thought processes, or are they parroting what they were taught while still being, you know, five years old?

I would be more worried if they begin absolving themselves of guilt due to this when they do something genuinely harmful to someone else out of childish behavior.

That seems like a fairly healthy thing to learn, no?

Sometimes we need to acknowledge that our brain can cause us to do things we don't want to, and not beat ourselves up for it. Obviously that can go too far, and you need to anticipate the consequences of your actions, owning your conscious decisions.

Teaching someone to act socially mature without understanding why is like teaching someone to pass a test without understanding the material.

Seems like schools are becoming experts at creating fakes.

I don't know where you get this idea from? Where does it say that schools are teaching kids to act socially mature without understanding why?

Mindfulness if taught well should provide the opposite. It gives you a framework to understand your thoughts and emotions and act in a more rational, thoughtful way. It's not a way of abdicating responsibility - just the opposite.

Maturation is a process one learns by experience. Faking the result skips the reasons. Granted it makes people more palatable to be around but the lessons why are lost.

Some things can only be learned by experience.

What does this mean: "Sometimes we need to acknowledge that our brain can cause us to do things we don't want to"?

Surely you mean "sometimes we do things we don't want to be doing"? Blaming it on your mind is rather strange. Your mind is part of you.

That's because you also talk about your mind in the third person and not aware of it. You are consistently talking to yourself in your mind throughout the entire day. (Try to stop it if you don't believe this is true and exactly this is what you are trying to stop with mindfulness)

Your child clearly understands the situation better. I recommend you take up mindfulness meditation as well.

My issue isn't with teaching mindfulness, it's with unqualified people teaching mindfulness badly to five year old children.

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