Patricia A. Jennings: The Mindful School: Transforming School Culture Through Mindfulness and Compassion Guilford Press, New York, NY, 2019, 271 pp.

Excerpt

Today’s youth face well-documented challenges. There has been an increase in mental health concerns among K-12 students in recent years, including increased rates of depression and self-harm, and declines in measures of happiness and life satisfaction (Keyes et al. 2019; Twenge and Campbell 2018; Twenge et al. 2018). These mental health challenges have been exacerbated by the additional stress that has resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. These troubling mental health trends in youth have prompted school personnel to seek strategies to meet the needs of today’s struggling youth. One such categorical approach has included the integration of mindfulness-based practices into school settings to help students and school personnel manage stress and cultivate prosocial qualities to support mental health (Meiklejohn et al. 2012). The emerging evidence in support of the utility of mindfulness-based programming for youth (Felver et al. 2016; Klingbeil et al. 2017) has elicited a surge of interest in deploying these practices more widely and systematically in school settings. …