Effect of Mindfulness on Psychological Distress and Well-being of Children and Adolescents: A Meta-analysis. Mindfulness, 13, 285-300. Zhang, Y., Chen, S., Wu, H., Guo, C. (2022)

This current study improves upon the previous published reviews that have examined the combined effects of the impact of mindfulness training (MT) on children and adolescents. For this evaluation, the investigators isolated their focus to those with randomized samples of physically healthy children where MT was implemented in school settings.

Mental health outcomes were self-reported measures of anxiety, stress depression, and well-being. MT was facilitated by trained mindfulness teachers, using a variety of curricula or varying duration (1 -24 weeks) and an active or passive control group was used for comparisons.  Based on a total of 28 randomized control studies that consisted of 7943 participants, the authors report a significant impact of mindfulness training for the distress measures but not for well-being. The authors found that the type of mindfulness training (a standard or adapted curricula), length of duration of the program, age of the study population (children or adolescents) and nature of the control had moderating effects when they looked at different subgroups.  For example, MT had significant effect for depression on adolescents but not children, and programs that were 8-weeks or shorter were associated with reduced depression outcomes. Overall, however, the effect sizes of MT were not moderated by any of these study variables.