Neonatal and Pediatric Medicine
Open Access

The previous pandemic is an indication of the increasingly complicated demands we encounter in today's society, which have further consequences for our collective and individual mental health. Anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues are becoming more common among adolescents and infants. There is a need for more, acceptable, and accessible approaches. Meditation is one method that has attracted a lot of attention as a health intervention for people of all ages. Meditation, in particular, is gaining popularity as a way to improve elements of child and adolescent health.

Meditation is a sort of mental exercise that has been intended to improve and maintain human well-being and happiness. It has been defined as a family of self-regulation practices that focuses on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control, thereby fostering general mental wellbeing and development, as well as specific capacities like calm, clarity, and concentration. When meditation is practiced frequently, it tries to transform thought-based processes, such as emotions and mental images, resulting in the individual being in a relaxed and tranquil condition. Meditation should be taught by well-trained instructors to make it easier to practice and achieve the best effects.

There are various varieties of meditation, but the two most common are focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation. Focused attention meditation employs concentration as the primary underlying principle, whereas open monitoring meditation uses awareness as the primary concept. While sitting or lying down, focused attention meditation entails regulating breathing while focusing on a single thought, object, or sound. Transcendental Meditation(TM) is the most commonly evaluated type of focused attention meditation in research. The auditory value of mantra is used by TM to direct attention to the mind, resulting in a calm but intellectually alert condition. It is a well-known sitting meditation from the ancient Indian Vedic tradition that is taught in a structured manner by well-trained teachers, with careful attention to the program's delicacy through regular review of TM sessions. Adults practice TM by sitting with their eyes closed for 20 minutes twice a day, while infants practice it for roughly 10 minutes.

The goal of open monitoring meditation is to become familiar with emotional and cognitive patterns by actively observing presentmoment experiences without reacting or judging them. Mindfulness, which has been described as the awareness that develops when we pay attention in a specific way, is the most systematic and evaluated open monitoring meditation technique. Unlike other meditation techniques, this one focuses on cultivating awareness and the ability to control attention with a variety of purposes in mind, including the relief of mental, bodily, and emotional distress. There are currently a variety of mindfulness-based stress reduction programs for stress and chronic pain management, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression relapse prevention, and dialectical behavioral therapy for personality disorder, among others. Adults can practice these programs for 15 to 45 minutes per day, while infants can train for 10 to 15 minutes per day.

There is growing evidence of the positive effects of daily meditation practices (TM or mindfulness) on infant’s health, especially psychosocial wellbeing, with no known negative side effects. Although a few publications did not disclose this level of information, most meditation teachers had substantial training and background in the meditation intervention. The fact that some of the meditation therapies were taught and performed in schools raises the likelihood of introducing meditation as a strategy to improve infants overall wellbeing.