Handbook of Positive Psychology in Schools by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136258343
Publisher: Routledge

Caregiver Prevention and Intervention

Beyond its possible educational applications for students, current empirical evidence also suggests that the mindfulness construct and MBIs have potential utility in supporting the competency, effectiveness, and well-being of students’ caregivers. Although this area of research is rather new and still developing, preliminary findings indicate that MBIs provided to youths’ parents and teachers have been shown to have positive effects on both adults and youth (e.g., Benn et al., 2012; Coatsworth et al., 2010). Gutkin and Conoley (1990) have called this kind of indirect service delivery approach, in which educators and mental health professionals must “concentrate their attention and professional expertise on adults” in order to best serve students, the “paradox of school psychology” (p. 212). Although we do not go as far as they do in suggesting that service providers should “first and foremost” focus on adults at the expense of children, we concur that the most effective approaches to cultivating the well-being of youth will also include efforts to cultivate the well-being of their caregivers. Relative to the use of mindfulness in schools, then, possible caregiver prevention and intervention efforts could include MBIs in the form of parent–child after-school workshops or as part of staff development trainings. But given that only a few studies, so far, have investigated MBIs as caregiver interventions, practitioners would do well to use them as an adjunct to other indirect techniques that target parents and teachers for the purpose of improving youths’ school functioning (e.g., behavioral consultation; Erchul & Schulte, 2009).

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