Teaching our Children
“I can’t believe I did this,” the teenage girl said. “The other day on my way to school I noticed that
the man walking in front of me dropped some money from his pocket. I ran and snatched it up off
of the ground. It was $20! I was so excited! That’s a lot of money to me. I could buy this pair of
shoes I wanted – this really, really cute pair of shoes – with that money.”
She looked at me and began playfully shaking her head. “But then I started thinking. What if he
needs this money? What if he just lost his job, or has kids to support? How would he feel if he lost
this money? I just couldn’t keep it. I caught up with him and gave it back.”
I was talking with a 16-year-old girl enrolled in our Cognitively- Based Compassion Training
(CBCT; see
program for adolescents in Atlanta’s foster care system. CBCT is a
secularized form of compassion meditation derived from the Tibetan Buddhist
lojong
or “mind
training” tradition. The protocol involves the systematic cultivation of compassion through the
development of mindfulness, emotion regulation, self-compassion, equanimity, perspective taking
and empathy.
This particular girl had returned to take CBCT for a second time and was giving the class an
update on what she had learned during the first round of the program.
“So, how did it feel to give back the money?” I asked, smiling.
“Sounds like you really wanted those shoes!”
We both laughed. “You know I did!” she said. “But I couldn’t help but think about that man. I
couldn’t stop thinking about his situation, what his life might be like, or how he might feel to lose
that money…”
I nodded.
“I never would have cared before,” she said. “This compassion meditation is
doing
something to
me!”
Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT)
The CBCT program was originally developed in 2005 as a means to prevent and reduce rates of
depression and stress among undergraduate students at Emory University (for more detail about
the program see
. The promising results of this project
encouraged us to explore means
of adapting and delivering CBCT to a variety of other populations (see
). For example, in
addition to employing CBCT as a means of reducing stress and enhancing immune function, we
have begun to conceive of ways in which CBCT could promote prosociality and mental flourishing,
and ameliorate or protect against the effects of trauma. Below we briefly outline two of our current
projects – CBCT for adolescents in foster care and for children in elementary school – and share
some of the ways in which we have adapted and taught this program for these groups.
Though the needs of adolescents in foster care and elementary school children differ in significant
ways, the CBCT program that we adapted for each population operates on the same basic
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