Why Yoga and Mindfulness are important for our kids?

Stay at Home Dad has been looking into why Yoga and Mindfulness are important for kids from an early age. William has been studying yoga since the age of four, both in a class with Yoga Bears and via YouTube with Cosmic Yoga.

Yoga is becoming increasingly popular among American and European children. A national survey, carried out by NICE, found that 3% of U.S. children (1.7 million) did yoga as of 2012 — that’s 400,000 more children than in 2007.

Yoga and mindfulness have been shown to improve both physical and mental health in school-age children (ages 6 to 12). Yoga improves balance, strength, endurance, and aerobic capacity in children. Yoga and mindfulness offer psychological benefits for children as well. A growing body of research has shown that yoga can improve focus, memory, self-esteem, academic performance, and classroom behaviour, and can even reduce anxiety and stress in children.

Emerging research studies suggest that yoga can help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by improving the core symptoms of ADHD, including inattentiveness, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. It can also boost school performance in children with ADHD. A growing number of schools now integrate yoga and mindfulness into physical education programs or classroom curriculums, and many yoga studios offer classes for school-age children. Yoga can be playful and interactive for parents and children at home, as well.

Experts recommend making yoga playful and fun for kids, whether in the classroom or at home. They suggest that in classes, instructors weave in fun games and stories with positive themes like compassion, gratitude, and strength.

Yoga is really effective because it’s so tangible. Learning physical postures builds confidence and strength as well as the mind-body connection. Experts have also found that yoga’s effects go beyond physical fitness and allow kids to build confidence and awareness beyond the classroom. Through yoga, kids start to realize that they are strong, and they can take that strength, confidence, acceptance, and compassion out into the world.

The benefits of yoga for kids

As we have established, yoga is not just for adults! In fact, it can give children very important life skills that can help them succeed in the world.

Here is a more detailed explanation of how teaching yoga to kids and using yoga in the classroom can have a positive impact on children’s well-being:

• Yoga helps children manage their anxiety:

The breathing exercises and relaxation techniques learned from practising yoga can help children with stress management. Teaching children how to reduce stress healthily is an important life skill that will help them as children and as adults.

• Yoga improves children’s emotional regulation:

Another benefit of yoga for children is that it helps children learn to be in the present moment while relaxing and gaining a peaceful state of mind, ultimately improving their emotional regulation.

• Yoga boosts children’s self-esteem:

Yoga for kids can do wonders for their self-esteem. Perfecting a pose or improving their balance and flexibility can give young children a sense of personal empowerment.

• Yoga increases children’s body awareness and mindfulness:

Going through a variety of yoga poses helps children learn about their bodies and the movements they’re capable of doing.

• Yoga enhances children’s concentration and memory:

One of the top benefits of kids’ yoga is that the different types of moves require children to focus and work on their memorization skills, which can translate over into their academic performance.

• Yoga develops children’s strength and flexibility:

Yoga helps strengthen children’s growing bodies and improve their flexibility, reducing their chance of injury.

• Yoga teaches discipline and reduces impulsivity:

Yoga can reduce challenging behaviours in the classroom by providing a physical outlet for children to express themselves. It also teaches children about discipline as they work on clearing their minds and perfecting their poses.

Simple and fun yoga exercises for kids

Here are some fun yoga exercises and games for kids. If you are a parent familiar with yoga, you can try these at home with your family.

Simple yoga breath exercise

• Take a deep breath in and hold it for a count of three.
• Breathe out forcefully, like you’re blowing out a candle.
• Repeat this for five cycles of breath.

Flying bird breath

• Stand tall, with arms at your sides and feet hip-width apart in standing Mountain Pose.
• Imagine being a beautiful, strong bird.
• Pretend to prepare to fly by inhaling and raising your arms (“wings”) until your palms touch overhead. Keep your arms straight.
• Exhale slowly as you bring your arms back down to your sides, palms facing down.
• Repeat in a steady motion with each breath: inhale as you raise your arms, and exhale as lower your arms.
• Optional: Close your eyes as you repeat the movements with breath, and imagine yourself flying in the sky like a bird.

Yoga games

Mirror, mirror.

This game is a good warm-up exercise to increase focus.

• One person starts as the leader. The leader chooses a pose to do and shows it to the others.
• The other players copy the leader’s pose as if they are looking into a mirror.
• Change the leader with each round of poses, so that everyone has a turn at being the leader.

Yogi says

One person is selected as the Yogi. The other players must do the yoga poses that the Yogi tells them to do if the instruction starts with “Yogi says.” If the Yogi doesn’t use “Yogi says,” then players do not do the pose. Keep changing the person who is Yogi, so that everyone gets a turn.

Red light, green light yoga

One person is chosen as the Stoplight. He or she stands at the front of the room. The other players are the “cars,” and they start at the opposite wall. The Stoplight starts the game by calling “Green light!” The other players then use yoga poses to move forward. When the Stoplight calls “Red light!” each player needs to be in a yoga pose and remain still. Everyone takes a turn being the Stoplight.

Meditation

Meditation can be short and simple and does not involve complex yoga poses or to stay still in a quiet, dark room. One parent, who is also a physician, describes playing a “meditation game” with her children before bedtime, when she turns off electronic devices and reflects on the day with her children, using questions like, “What are you grateful for today?”

Here are a few simple meditations for children, which can be done for as little as 30 seconds or several minutes.

Mindful awareness meditation

• Find a comfortable seated position or lie down.
• Close your eyes.
• Try to listen to every single sound in the room.

Loving-kindness meditation

• Find a comfortable seated position or lie down.
• Close your eyes and think about someone you love.
• Hold them tight in your heart and continue to think about that person.

Mindfulness for kids

Children of all ages can benefit from mindfulness, the simple practise of bringing a gentle, accepting attitude to the present moment. It can help parents and caregivers, too, by promoting happiness and relieving stress. Here, we offer basic tips for children and adults of all ages, as well as several activities that develop compassion, focus, curiosity and empathy. And remember, mindfulness can be fun.

How It Helps

Adversity comes at us from the moment we are born. Infants get hungry and tired. Toddlers grapple with language and self-control. And as children develop through adolescence to become teenagers, life grows ever more complicated. Developing relationships, navigating school and exercising independence — the very stuff of growing up — naturally creates stressful situations for every child.

At each developmental stage, mindfulness can be a useful tool for decreasing anxiety and promoting happiness. Mindfulness — a simple technique that emphasizes paying attention to the present moment in an accepting, nonjudgmental manner — has emerged as a popular mainstream practise in recent decades. It is being taught to executives at corporations, athletes in the locker room, and increasingly to children at home and school.

Early Habits

Children are uniquely suited to benefit from mindfulness practice. Habits formed early in life will inform behaviours in adulthood, and with mindfulness, we have the opportunity to give our children the habit of being peaceful, kind and accepting.

For children, mindfulness can offer relief from whatever difficulties they might be encountering in life. It also gives them the beauty of being in the present moment.

Part of the reason why mindfulness is so effective for children can be explained by how the brain develops. While our brains are constantly developing throughout our lives, connections in the prefrontal circuits are created at their fastest rate during childhood. Mindfulness, which promotes controlled skills in the prefrontal cortex, like focus and cognitive control, can therefore have a particular impact on the development of skills including self-regulation, judgment and patience during childhood.

Modelling Mindfulness

Mindfulness isn’t something that can be outsourced. For parents and caregivers, the best way to teach a child to be mindful is to embody the practise oneself.

“Learning mindfulness isn’t like piano lessons, where you can have someone else teach it to your children,” said Susan Kaiser Greenland, a mindfulness instructor who works with children. “You have to learn it yourself.”

Of course, being a parent is an incredibly stressful experience in its own right. For those raising children, practising mindfulness exercises — and ideally practising mindfulness meditation for even a few minutes a day — can be profoundly beneficial, allowing caregivers to share the skills of happiness and acceptance with a new generation and take better care of themselves at the same time.

“In order to play the game of life mindfully,” said Sumi Loundon Kim, a Buddhist chaplain at Duke University who works with youth, “you have to practice mindfulness.”

In summary, teaching your child the art of Yoga and Mindfulness will stand them in very good stead, not only as a child, but later life as well.