Susan Kaiser Greenland

Susan Kaiser Greenland, JD (born October 1, 1956) is an American author and teacher of mindfulness and meditation. She is the author of Mindful Games and The Mindful Child.

Susan Kaiser Greenland was born in Paw Paw, Michigan in 1956. She attended Paw Paw High School and Kalamazoo College, and graduated cum laude from Brooklyn Law School. She is a corporate lawyer admitted to practice in New York and California. Kaiser Greenland has studied meditation with teachers from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition since 1997.

Kaiser Greenland represented ABC network-owned radio and television stations from 1988 to 1993, and CBS network-owned radio and television stations from 1994 to 2005. While working as a lawyer she volunteered in schools teaching secular mindfulness. During her volunteer work she developed the Inner Kids program, a hybrid of classical mindfulness and meditation practices that she adapted for children and families. Kaiser Greenland eventually left her law practice to teach mindfulness and meditation full-time.

Kaiser Greenland and her husband founded The InnerKids Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that taught secular mindfulness in schools and community-based programs in the greater Los Angeles area from 2001 through 2009.

She currently works in the United States and abroad as an author, public speaker, and educator on the subject of sharing secular mindfulness and meditation with children and families.

Susan Kaiser Greenland is married to writer Seth Greenland. They live in Los Angeles and have two grown children.

Books

-Mindful Games (Shambhala, 2016)

-The Mindful Child (Free Press, 2010)

Forewords

-“Foreword: Teaching Mindfulness Skills to Kids and Teens”, C. Willard, A. Saltzman, (Guilford, 2015).

-“Foreword: The Autism Playbook for Teens”, Irene McHenry and Carol Moog, (Instant Help, 2014)

Chapters

-B. Galla, D. Black, and S. Kaiser Greenland, “The Use of Mindful Awareness Practices to Promote Attention and Executive Function in Childhood: The Effects of the ‘Inner Kids’ Program,” Handbook of Mindfulness in Education K. Schonert-Reichl and R. Roeser (Ed.) (Springer, 2016).

-T. Goodman and S. Kaiser Greenland, D. Siegel, “Mindful Parenting as a Path to Wisdom and Compassion” Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy, C. Germer, R. Siegel (Ed.)(Guilford, 2012).

-T. Goodman and S. Kaiser Greenland, “Mindfulness with Children: Working with Difficult Emotions,” Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness, F. Didonna (Ed.)(Springer, 2009)

Research

-“Effects of Mindful Awareness Practices on Executive Functions in Elementary School Children,” Journal of Applied School Psychology. Volume 26, Issue 1 (2010). L. Flook, S.L. Smalley, M.J. Kitil, B. Galla, S. Kaiser Greenland, J. Locke, E. Ishijima, and C. Kasari.

A school-based Inner Kids program was evaluated in a randomized control study of 64 second- and third-grade children ages 7–9 years. The program was delivered for 30 minutes, twice per week, for 8 weeks. Teachers and parents completed questionnaires assessing children’s executive function immediately before and following the 8-week period. Multivariate analysis of covariance on teacher and parent reports of executive function (EF) indicated an interaction effect baseline EF score and group status on posttest EF. That is, children in the group that received mindful awareness training who were less well regulated showed greater improvement in EF compared with controls. Specifically, those children starting out with poor EF who went through the mindful awareness training showed gains in behavioral regulation, metacognition, and overall global executive control. These results indicate a stronger effect of mindful awareness training on children with executive function difficulties.

The finding that both teachers and parents reported changes suggests that improvements in children’s behavioral regulation generalized across settings. Future work is warranted using neurocognitive tasks of executive functions, behavioral observation, and multiple classroom samples to replicate and extend these preliminary findings.