Measuring mindfulness in children: Breath counting is unrelated to self-reported mindfulness but improves after mindfulness practice in 9-13 year-olds

Winnie Zhuang^1*Laura Michaelson²Yuko Munakata³Sona Dimidjian¹

• ¹University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
• ²American Institutes for Research, Arlington, United States
• ³University of California Davis Center for Mind and Brain, Davis, United States

Recent calls for mindfulness measures beyond self-report abound, especially for children. Because breath awareness is central to many mindfulness practices, the breath counting task has been proposed as a behavioral measure of mindfulness for adults. In the current study, we investigated whether the breath counting task can also serve as a valid behavioral measure of children's mindfulness. We examined psychometric properties across breath counting, three established mindfulness questionnaires, and a behavioral cognitive control measure amongst a sample of 109 children ages 9–13 years. We also offered 1-2 weeks of audio-based mindfulness training to a subset of children (n = 67) who completed daily breathing exercises, then reassessed their breath counting and self-reported mindfulness. In the full sample, children's breath counting showed psychometric properties and patterns similar to those of adults, but was unrelated to their self-reported mindfulness (p's > .24). However, breath counting did improve following training amongst the subset of children who completed 1-2 weeks of daily mindfulness exercises (p < .001, η2 = 0.23), whereas self-reported mindfulness did not (p = 0.44). Our findings suggest that the breath counting task captures aspects of mindfulness separate from those measured by children's self-reports, and may be more sensitive to training impacts. We recommend the use of both self-report and behavioral measures of mindfulness, like the breath counting task, in future work.