Kids Gain Brain Power Courtesy of Goldie Hawn

Last week was not Goldie Hawn's first visit to Washington. The Academy Award winning actress and producer, who grew up in a D.C. suburb, returns to the brick house of her youth every few years. Once, when no one was home, she even crawled through an open window to take a look around the duplex that her family sold long ago.

But this trip was all business. Hawn was in town to receive an award for her advocacy on behalf of children's mental health and to talk with members of Congress as well as Education Secretary Arne Duncan about her passion--teaching kids how to reduce stress and strengthen their emotional well being to sharpen their focus on learning.

"They say our schools are broken," Hawn says. "So are our kids. You have to ask which came first."

Hawn started the Hawn Foundation to address the problem, she says, after the Twin Towers fell, because "I couldn't bear to see unhappy children." This is not the throwaway line it first seems to be. As a young girl, when people asked her what she wanted to be as an adult, her answer was, "Happy."

This outcome was not always a given. A defining moment for her came during the Cold War, when she was in sixth grade. "The government was putting out these horrible movies that would show what would happen in the event of an attack. I thought I was going to see an agricultural film, and I saw complete annihilation. It completely freaked me out. I couldn't sleep. I thought we were being bombed."

Decades later, recognizing a link among anxiety, depression, and the inability to solve problems, Hawn marshaled neuroscientists, educators, and psychologists to develop a program called MindUp that would teach kids how to get in touch with their brain and understand how and where their emotions are triggered.

"They're not able to speak about emotions because they can't identify them," she says, adding, "A lot of children don't express their fears, but they manifest in many ways--eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, school grades going down, drugs, self-medication. I said, 'If one child could be saved by teaching them some tools, all the better.'"

The program, which Hawn has put about $1 million into so far, consists of 13 45-minute lessons and short breathing exercises woven into the weekly teaching plan. It offers instruction on "very simple things," says Hawn--"the fact that there are three brains inside their brain and what each part does. We talk about the amygdala, which is the area that expresses emotions. The brain can get activated because of fear. If you stay in that state, your executive function, which does the analyzing and critical thinking, closes down. It's like, 'I have too much going on to think straight.' We've all said it. It's actually true. You can't think straight."

So far, some 600 schools in the United States and Canada have implemented MindUp to train about 10,000 kids. And Hawn says that researchers at the University of British Columbia have submitted a paper on the program's efficacy--embargoed pending acceptance for publication--to Science Journal.

The embargo didn't stop her, though, from making the rounds in the nation's capital, where she received an award from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, briefed members of Congress, and stopped by a number of congressional offices not just to promote MindUp but social-emotional programs generally.

"There are many schools out there that have them," Hawn says, "but not enough. I think they should be mandatory. I don't know why, when we know these preventions are going on, that we're not using them every day."