A Study of Mindfulness Intervention and Effectiveness in a Children's Home

Problematic child behavior in children's homes in Japan has become an issue. Since immature emotional control has been indicated as a cause of problem behavior, approaches to emotional control are needed for behavioral management. Since mindfulness helps improve emotion regulation, this study focused on mindfulness and implemented a mindfulness training intervention. The intervention took place eight times over one month in a children's home. The participants were nine resident children. Questionnaires were administered before and after the intervention to measure mindfulness, emotion regulation, and problem behaviors. T-test results revealed that before and after the intervention, peer relationship problems were significantly lower, and prosocial behaviors were substantially higher among the problem behaviors. It is thought that this is because the children acquired the ability to understand and express their own and others' feelings through the intervention, and their interpersonal relationships improved. In terms of emotion regulation, a child who could express one’s emotions verbally showed improvement. Emotion Intelligence (EI) includes the skill of expressing feelings in words. Since it has been shown that there is a relationship between mindfulness and EI, it is suggested that mindfulness training may have increased not only mindfulness but also EI