Teens Work It Out: A Three-part Mindfulness Intervention For Adolescent Mental Health And School Success

PURPOSE: Adolescents have more stress than ever. Many experience trauma. Schools are not resourced to fully support mental health. We developed and measured the effectiveness of an integrated new resource for classrooms and families that will support middle schoolers to cope with stress, understand behaviors, and make connections between their minds and bodies. METHOD: Teens Work It Out is comprised of 10 weeks, repeated year long, of 3 short elements per week: 1) movement/yoga video lessons, 2) mindful breathing/relaxation audio lessons, and 3) cognitive reframing strategies video targeting thinking errors. Pre-post quantitative and qualitative focus groups methodologies are used with approximately 490 middle school students and their teachers in a large, under-resourced urban metropolitan area in the Midwest containing stressed youth, largely Arab-American (many immigrant), Black, and Latinx backgrounds. RESULTS: Quasi-experimental comparisons with whole school data for academic and behavioral data will also be presented. Means from pre-test data demonstrate mental health concerns for these youth with mean levels of continuous anger and sadness in the moderate ranges (means = 3.2-3.7 out of 5 being highest) and only moderate daily levels of feeling joy, happiness, and pride (means = 2.1-2.9). Similar patterns appear with a host of other variables, including past stress and trauma (mean = 3.2). Ten social and psychological factors, plus discipline referrals and academic achievement were measured. Quantitative results featuring change over the year, as well aggregate change over time compared to prior year whole school achievement and discipline data, will be presented, as will teacher and youth focus group themes. CONCLUSION: This sample has clear need for a program to help with stress, mental health coping, emotion regulation, and multiple sense of self constructs. Most have never been exposed to these types of lasting strategies. An additional positive benefit is whole school transformation and a culture of positivity, problem-solving, and self-awareness. This late-breaking study features data collection that is dependent on the school year cycle to share most current versus delayed findings, which also allows for more nimble refinement on our future iterations of the program.