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Tara Segree is a Special Education English Teacher and the author of Bringing Mindfulness Into the Classroom: Easy Ideas You Can Try Tomorrow.
A recipient of the 2021 Innovative Educator Award and a collaborator on the Mini Meditations for Kids podcast, Tara empowers educators with practical strategies to help students build confidence, manage anxiety, and stay engaged through mindfulness. Her book offers easy-to-implement activities, a 30-Day Mindfulness Challenge, and family partnership ideas to create a lasting impact in and beyond the classroom.
The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Consult with a qualified professional for specific guidance.
Cheryl Bohn: “Mindful Mamma, Strong Son: Helping Our Children to Reset Stress” with guest Tara Segree. I’m Cheryl Bond and I’m here with Suzy Shaw, author of the book, Mothers of Boys Survival Guide. Hey, Suz.
Suzy Shaw: Okay. Hi, Cheryl. Yes, you know, I call our mothers of boys the MOB. And in today’s podcast, learn some strategies for teaching our boys mindfulness.
Cheryl Bohn: Our guest is Tara Segre, the author of Bringing Mindfulness Into the Classroom. Tara is a special education English teacher with a Zen-like passion for teaching children how to manage stress in and out of the classroom with techniques like meditation. Welcome, Tara. Hello.
Tara Segree: Thank you ladies. Thank you so much for having me.
Cheryl Bohn: What you are doing is amazing.
Tara Segree: What you both are doing, too, is so great because we need guidance. We need guidance as parents.
Suzy Shaw: It’s part of the MOB is sharing our lessons learned. So, Tara, what is mindfulness and how did you become interested in it?
Tara Segree: So mindfulness is as simple as just being conscious and aware of being in the present moment, not worrying about the past, not worrying about the future, but just being and to bring your awareness to the present moment is being mindful.
So, I started this mindfulness journey when I was a child. Like, I don’t remember not being mindful. Some of my earliest memories are at my grandmother’s house on Randall Street, downtown in Annapolis, and just listening to the tick of the clock, of that old clock. And I still love that sound when, like, nobody has a clock these days in their house that ticks. But whenever I am somewhere and I hear it, it brings me back, and I remember being still and quiet and just listening.
I must disclose I do not have any boys, but I do have four daughters. And even in my parenting, I really noticed how to just look deeply into their eyes or take that smile and just soak it up. And then, of course, being a teacher, I taught preschool. I’ve taught kinder music, art start, elementary, middle, and high school, and I’ve just carried mindfulness into all of my classrooms as a form of not only classroom management, which just happens because students are calmer, but in a way to build rapport with students and a way to teach them how to just be conscious and present in that moment.
Cheryl Bohn: And so, you seem like you were very naturally mindful. So, as a parent, you probably could handle your stress fairly well because you had this skill set. So, you were able to help your children. But if you don’t have that, you know, I think before we can help our children be mindful, we have to have our anxiety and our stress level in check. So, do you have some advice for what the moms can do to help them?
Tara Segree: Yes, absolutely. And we cannot pour from an empty cup. Meaning we need to fill ourselves first before we can help our children. Because, yeah, it comes naturally or it could come. It does come naturally to be conscious and present. But society has embedded something else in us where we’re on this rat race, and we are told to be perfect. And we are comparing ourselves to other mothers. And that’s all a fallacy.
But what is important before we can teach our children to be mindful, we ourselves have to be mindful. And the only way you can start this practice is really just by sitting still. Just sitting still and being and noticing. And once we start that practice of doing that every single day, we find that we are calmer. We find that we can respond to life’s challenges with grace and with peace instead of reacting to them. We find that we’re more creative; that we have more clarity, decisiveness, empathy, patience, better sleep, and heightened immune systems. All by giving ourselves some time each day.
If we can give ourselves 12 minutes in the morning, maybe before everybody has woken up, just to have that cup of coffee or tea and even just to reflect on the gratitude we have for the simple things in life, like a cup of tea, a chair, a warm blanket, our children, whatever it might be. And it’s then easier to go throughout your day and recognize when you need those times as well.
Maybe before your child gets in from soccer practice. Maybe before going into the grocery store. Before going into a big meeting, you can take a couple of moments just to feel your breath. And honestly, that’s the simplest way to just become mindful is just to feel your body breathe for you.
So, like, right now, you take a deep breath, and you let it out, and you’ll notice then allow your body to breathe for you naturally without forcing your breath and notice how you breathe. Are you breathing in and out of your nose, in and out of your mouth, or a combination of the two? And when you just notice and feel your breath, that’s being mindful and that’s it.
And that’s also the foundation of meditation, which has been scientifically proven to shrink the amygdala, which is in the frontal lobe part of your brain, which is that reptilian part of your brain that is fight or flight, holds depression, holds emotional regulation, stress factors. But when we breathe, we’re taking energy away from that part of the brain, and it’s going into our hippocampus part of the brain, which is retrieval of information, which is retrieval of knowledge, your intelligence. So there are all sorts of scientific benefits for spending time in meditation, spending time just going for a walk, looking at the beauty of nature, journaling, painting, gardening, and cooking, if that is your way of being mindful.
Bringing it back to when I was raising my young daughters, it was pretty stressful, of course, because I also had this in my mind, even though I had a mindful mindset, that I had to be perfect in all the different categories of mothering and parenting, but being in the kitchen was a way for me, chopping the vegetables, creating a meal was a way for me to be mindful. But I also was very much aware of honoring myself, and that I need to take a moment and sit on a chair and just breathe or say some positive affirmations, and then go back to parenting.
Cheryl Bohn: I like that you sort of gave us the framework at the beginning, sort of even to just start with twleve minutes. That’s helpful, too, to hear how much time we should sort of set aside if we want to reset.
Tara Segree: Well, and the thing is, it could be two minutes. Twelve minutes is the proven scientific amount of time that heightens your immune system, reverses aging, and gives you optimum brain performance. All the great things we want to hear as we age. We want to give ourselves the best quality of life. Twelve minutes a day is scientifically proven that that’s what you need. If you just sit and just start to feel your breath, and if you fall asleep, that’s okay, because only three things can happen when you meditate: You can fall asleep, you can sit in your stillness, or you can have thoughts because thinking is part of the process.
We have 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day, which we want to. We need to be able to live and survive and feed the children and make sure we’re eating and all the other things, but we don’t need to pay attention to every thought. So thinking is what our brain does. It’s like our heart beating, right? Our lungs taking in air.
So the other great thing about when you meditate, so if those are the three things that happen, when you start to fall asleep, that’s okay. You just bring yourself back to your breath or to a positive mantra, like thank you, or I am aligned with love, or I am strong, I am peace. Whatever your mantra is that you want to say, but when you do that and you have a thought, you just let it pass by as if it’s a cloud, and you come back to your breathing or your mantra.
When we teach our children this, we are helping them to get over those attention issues. And whether you have been diagnosed with attention deficit or not, we’re all competing with TikTok, right, or an iPad, or whatever it is. But that’s the way society is. But when we teach our children to bring their awareness back to their breath, to bring their awareness back to a positive mantra or a visualization, we’re teaching them to recognize those thoughts, but then bring it back to what it is in front of them.
So when they’re in school, and they’re distracted by the snow that’s falling outside, great, it’s beautiful. That’s snow, that’s snow, you recognize it, and then you come back to the math problems in front of you. And we’re training and rewiring the brain to be able to attend a task, which makes us be able to have confidence in ourselves academically, then to be able to collaborate with others, create and solve problems.
Suzy Shaw: So Tara, I am not a morning person, so the idea of sitting still in the morning is not a great idea for me. But I will say that I remember sitting in my car before going into the grocery store and just sitting in the quiet of my car where no one was going to bother me or when I was waiting for kids to come off a field. And, you know, those were moments that I could become mindful. And one of the things I talk about in my book is what I call “soul putty.” And I find as a mother, just as a human, you know, there are life things that happen to you, which are kind of little cracks in your soul. And so for me, I needed to find what’s going to help me, you know, putty my soul, fill the cracks in my soul. And music was that. And when I took back as part of life balance, a piece of something that I love to do, you know, I found that it helped me just feel better, be more mindful, be a better mom, and also teach my kids that this is a positive thing to do. So can you sort of build on that and, you know, talk about that?
Tara Segree: Yeah. And I think, and just like there are different things for us, like for you, playing the guitar brought you peace. And Cheryl, maybe it was something else for you, painting or reading. But our children are the exact same way. So not, it’s not a one-size-fits-all. Children are their own unique beings. Just like we all have our own unique thumbprint, fingerprint, our children are like that as well. So we need to find what works for them. Maybe it is blowing bubbles if they’re younger. Maybe it is just sitting with them and spending time with them after taking a walk, sitting on a park bench, especially if they’re older kids. It’s hard to track down moments for them. But if we can kind of weasel our way into getting that time with them, but to find out what makes them tick. What are their joys? Do they enjoy being outside? Do they, you know, enjoy, hole-a-hooping? Whatever it might be, because we’re all unique and all different. And when we find out what that is for us, we definitely want to do more of it. And when we find out what that is for our children, we definitely want to use that to help them redirect their attention away from sometimes being emotionally wound, from all the challenges of growing up to then coming back to themselves, to what helps them self-soothe in a healthy way.
The other thing I want to say real quick with our children, when they come home and, I know that Suzy, you address this in your book of having tons of energy and bouncing off the walls or being completely exhausted. We need to remember that our children have been in school for seven hours and have been trying to do the right thing, saying just nice words to people, and people are rude back to them. And they have to be like, am I going to be kind? Am I going to ignore this? Or am I going to say something, and potentially get in trouble? Remember to raise their hand and not shout out. remembering to follow all the rules. That is exhausting.
So when our children come home, and they start acting out, and maybe they’re a little sassy with us, they’re trying out what they would say to, you know, the big mean kid who was being mean to them. Or they’re trying out what they would say to kind of try to fit into this crowd. And they’re trying out, you know, how to be sassy and maybe giving you a little bit of attitude because they’re exhausted and they just want to be left alone. And maybe listen to their music or maybe build their Legos or draw, whatever it is that they want to do. And so we need to grant them grace just as we need to grant ourselves grace. And instead of yelling at them, that’s it, go to timeout or give me your phone or whatever it might be, placing discipline on them, we should turn it into a game, like laughing about it. Oh my gosh, like why are you saying that? You know, like turn it into something that you both can laugh about and that then they realize, yeah, I shouldn’t have talked that way to my mom or whatever. But when you turn into a game, you’re creating a safe place for them to try out their independence and try out who they are becoming or really like realizing like, no, that’s really not what I should say to people. And then maybe role play and talk about how they can respond to those challenges differently.
Cheryl Bohn: At what age can you start teaching meditation and mindfulness to a child?
Tara Segree: Well, my youngest, besides teaching kinder music, well, there were babies who were six months old and taught them different ways of hearing sounds by using egg shakers on one side of their ear and then taking it over to the other side. And they start to hear and become aware and conscious and noticing. That’s a way of being mindful.
But I taught a preschool yoga class as young as two, and teaching them how to sit and just breathe is something that’s super powerful. And so, really, and using my podcast, there’s an animated version of my podcast.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, could you tell us what the name of the podcast is?
Tara Segree: Yeah, so it’s Mini Meditations for Kids, and it’s on all podcast platforms. It’s award-winning. Common Sense Media named it one of the best podcasts for children in 2022 and 2023. And it’s been downloaded in over 50 countries. So it is gaining traction. And then the animated version of the same podcast is on YouTube.
There are 29 mini-meditations that cross the spectrum from getting a shot, taking a test, trying out for a team or play, dealing with a bully, in times of hardships. There are 29 of these mini meditations for kids.
And so whether your kid or your child, your student wants to look at something visually or just listen to the podcast, you have both of those options. And so for preschoolers and elementary kids and even middle school kids who have grown up with a screen or TV in front of them, it’s real easy to be like, hey, I want you to see this. What do you think about this? When they get home from school and they are a little wound and you want them to reset before they have to start the homework. And then once they get used to the animated version or hearing my voice or knowing what it is, and you can be like, look, you can listen to it. And then they could listen to it. That’s a real easy, tangible way to start. You just want to remember you always want to be positive because we don’t want them to ever be turned off by sitting still.
Cheryl Bohn: That’s all wonderful and amazing advice that you’ve just given us. There’s a lot there. So we appreciate all your expertise in that area.
Suzy Shaw: So Tara, we ask all our guests to share a mantra or motto or a little saying that could be helpful to moms as they’re sort of stressed out and maybe dealing with their boys and their kids. What would you say to yourself during those moments?
Tara Segree: I would say to bring to mind a positive affirmation that you need at that moment. One that I still say is: I am peace. I am love. I am light. And that’s what our world needs, right? Our world needs peace, love, and light. So if we can do that, that ripple effect will only go out to our homes, our family, our community, and our world, which is what our world so desperately needs right now.
Suzy Shaw: A little butterfly effect.
Tara Segree: Yeah, absolutely.
Cheryl Bohn: Well, as we wrap up, we want to mention that you had written a book, Bringing Mindfulness into the Classroom: Easy Ideas You Can Try Tomorrow. And you’ve also recorded several podcasts, the mini-meditations for kids, and you can find these resources on the mothersofboys.life website. But we also would just like to hear a little summary about your book, if you can share with us.
Tara Segree: Absolutely, Cheryl. So the book is called Bringing Mindfulness into the Classroom, but it is not just for teachers. It is for parents as well because these same tools you can use in your own home.
There’s a seven-day mindfulness challenge for teachers that can be used for parents as well that shows you the framework of how to be mindful every day. There’s a meditation in there. There is a challenge that you would do throughout the day. For instance, smiling. That’s one of the activities to do for one of the days: just smile. Walk throughout your day and just smile. And even if you don’t feel like it, do it anyway. It releases endorphins and makes you feel better. And actually, the next thing you know, you’re just smiling. You’re like, oh, I feel great.
And everything takes less than 10 minutes.
Cheryl Bohn: Wow. Well, I mean, we can’t thank you enough for being here today and sharing all this wonderful information that’s just going to be so helpful to all our moms out there. And our MOB community.
Tara Segree: Awesome. I love being a pseudo-MOB.
Suzy Shaw: We’ll send some boys over to your house. So I’m sure you have plenty of what I call “man cubs” around your girls.
Tara Segree: Well, thank you, ladies. This was such a treat to be able to be on here with both of you and just have a conversation about something that is so necessary. And I’m so excited for all the mothers who listen to this as it will be life-changing.
Cheryl Bohn: Absolutely. Thank you again. Well, Tara, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today about mindfulness for our children. I think all the moms out there and the MOB community will find all your recommendations very valuable.
And thank you all for joining us today. Follow the mob on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and your favorite podcast platform. Be kind to yourselves, moms, and have a great week.
Mothers of Boys Survival Guide is a production of Flame Digital Communications and author Suzy Shaw. This episode was edited by Adam Radtke. Our theme music is by Raphael Fierro-Valerio of Pond5. Join the mob online at mothersofboys.life. See you next week.
