Investigating the Effect of Mindfulness-based Intervention for Children on their Mindfulness and Mental Health

The use of mindfulness-based interventions is now common in various psycho-educational and therapeutic investigations for adults and adolescents. However, this intervention is not used for Iranian children. Therefore, this study evaluates the effect of Children Mindfulness-based Intervention on mindfulness and mental health of Iranian school-aged children.
This is a two group pre-test post–test quasi-experimental research. The population of this study was Iranian school-aged children aged 5-12. Convenience (voluntarily) sampling was used to recruit the participants. A total of 234 participants (116 boys, 118 girls) were randomly assigned to control (n=117) and intervention (n=117) groups. The Intervention group received 9 weeks of mindfulness-based educational-intervention (each session was 45-70 min), while the control group did not receive. The instruments to assess mindfulness and mental-health were CAMM and PCS-17 respectively. ANCOVA procedures were used to analyze the data.
The results showed an increase in children’s mindfulness (F(1,229)=52.70, p Mindfulness-based intervention for children could be used as an intervention to increase children’s mental health and to decrease externalizing and internalizing disorders as it increases their mindfulness.