Special issue on yoga and mindfulness interventions in schools

Abstract

Yoga is going through a transformational period in the USA. A few decades ago, yoga was a relatively obscure activity. However, yoga is growing in popularity and becoming a mainstream health and fitness activity. According to the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), in 2007 yoga was the sixth most popular ‘complementary or alternative’ health activity following nonvitamin, nonmineral, natural products (17.7% of the US population), deep breathing exercises (12.7%), meditation (9.4%), chiropractic or osteopathic manipulation (8.6%), and massage (8.3%). The 2007 NHIS estimated that 6.1% (13 million) Americans participated in yoga (Barnes & Bloom, 2008). This is an increase from 5.1% of Americans practicing yoga in 2002 and 3.7% in 1997. Of the yoga practitioners in the 2007 survey, about 1.5 million were children. Although it appears that interest in yoga for children is growing exponentially, scientists cannot tell you with any certainty what it is or what it does. There is a lack of coherence and quality control in the promulgation of putative benefits of yoga for youth. One influential author noted that yoga is at a crossroads between science and pseudoscience – between pursuing truth and pursuing dogma unconstrained by facts or theory (Broad, 2012). We are concerned that pseudoscientific approaches to yoga for children may eclipse evidence-based yoga interventions for children, which require time and resources to study with rigor. A systematic review of published peer-reviewed research literature from 1997 to 2008 with participants aged 0–21 found only 34 studies (Birdee et al., 2009). This is dwarfed by comparison with 138 million internet search engine hits for ‘yoga and children.’ Careful examination of the studies from the internet search revealed that a large number of studies (over 100) did not support the efficacy of yoga for children. Some of the errors were mismatches with the population. Many of these studies have serious methodological limitations, such as lack of validated measures, non-randomized designs, and inclusion of activities that are not clearly yoga. Thus, readers need to be very careful in selecting sources to cite in support of yoga or mindfulness for children (Greenberg & Harris, 2012). The purpose of this special issue is to promote better science with regard to the potential for yoga to promote school mental health. Moreover, we want to highlight the development of approaches to yoga that will actually be used in schools. In addition to the methodological limitations of the published studies, there has been very little attention to the acceptability and feasibility of school-based yoga (Serwacki & Cooke-Cottone, 2012). Thus, as a first step in promoting school-based yoga research, this special section presents unique information about acceptability and feasibility of school-based yoga that should help to improve future research on this topic. Smith, Connington, McQuillin, and Biearman (2014) make unique contributions by introducing the use of the Deployment-Focused Treatment Development Model (Weisz,