The purposes of this study were to investigate if meditation activities for young children, which were selected and organized by considering their interest and developmental stages, would have effects on the improvement of their emotional and behavior...
The purposes of this study were to investigate if meditation activities for young children, which were selected and organized by considering their interest and developmental stages, would have effects on the improvement of their emotional and behavioral self-regulation abilities and to observe if meditation effects would last in young children through a post-test and follow-up test.
The subjects include 120 preschool five-year-olds from M Kindergarten in Seoul and H Kindergarten from Gwangmyeong City. They came from the middle class families whose social and economic levels were similar and had no experiences with a meditation program. The experiment group of 60 participated in meditation activities for 30 minutes per day in total 25 sessions over five weeks. Time for meditation activities was inserted in the regular program to apply meditation activities for young children that were selected and organized by taking into account young children's interest and developmental stages. Employed to measure young children's emotional self-regulation abilities was the "Emotional Regulation Scale" of the Self-Regulation Scale that Lee Gyeong-nam(2009) revised and supplemented based on the Self-Regulation Scale developed by Yang Ok-seung(2006) for teachers. Employed to measure their behavioral self-regulation abilities was the teacher's questionnaire made up by Jeong Eun-ju(2005) by revising the Behavioral Self-Regulation Scale by Gralinski and Kopp(1993) and Kalpidou(1997) and further revised and supplemented by the investigator. Using the SPSS WINDOWS 15.0 program, the test results of self-regulation abilities were analyzed in mean and standard deviation in the pre- and post-test. Two dependent(paired) samples t-test was conducted to see if there were significant differences in the increments of scores. The experiment group was put to a follow-up test and repetitive analysis of variance to see if the effects of meditation would maintain after the experiment was over.
The research findings were as follows:
First, the meditation activities for young children selected and organized by considering their interest and developmental stages turned out to have positive impacts on the improvement of their emotional self-regulation abilities. After the meditation activities, the experiment group's emotional regulation abilities made a statistically significant increase in the subfactors of emotional regulation, namely emotional perception, emotional control, and dealing.
The young children gradually got immersed in meditation activities session after session, maintaining the stable position and breathing, and they interacted with one another, freely talking about what they experienced during the meditation activities hours.
Second, the meditation activities for young children selected and organized by considering their interest and developmental stages turned out to have positive impacts on the improvement of their behavioral self-regulation abilities. The experiment group's behavioral regulation abilities made a statistically significant increase in the subfactors of behavioral regulation, namely safety, protection of possessions, respect for others, dietary habits, procrastination, manners, self-help, and classroom rules.
Finally, the meditation activities for young children selected and organized by considering their interest and developmental stages turned out to have lasting effects on the improvement of their self-regulation abilities.
Based on those research findings, the study has the following significance:
Meditation activities for young children that consider their interest and developmental stages encourage them to listen to their insides in a calm state and feel movements in their minds and provide them with experiences to regulate themselves by realizing their physical changes for themselves. Thus the study finds its significance in that it contributes to positive changes to young children's emotional and behavioral self-regulation abilities.