Thought you were the only one experiencing stress. Toddlers at the tender age of three can also be privy to it. This is when they are grappling with stress in its most nascent stages. What better than the 5000-year-old practice of yoga to help them alleviate it? Enroll your child in kindergarten for developing physical skills, and improve strength, balance, and flexibility.
Why Do Kids Even Need Yoga?
That’s a good question. The benefits of yoga are varied and extend to not merely the physical well-being of an individual, but their mental, emotional, and spiritual welfare, too. Regular yoga practice will help kids develop skills that will be of value to them in adolescence and even later in life.
How much Yoga is Appropriate for Kids?
You want to make yoga a pleasurable experience for kids, so we recommend not more than 15 minutes per yoga session. Any more than that, and they might just be prone to injuries.
Yoga Tips to Help Get You Started
You want to read these tips before you go all guns blazing vis-a-vis teaching yoga to your kids.
- Prepare a flexible plan. Things will not go to plan when dealing with toddlers. Just have a basic sense of what you’re going to do, then let the day’s energy dictate the rules.
- Welcome a sense of playfulness. Throw in elements like dance, puppetry, and even musical instruments, and you have kids screaming, ‘More yoga!’
- Keep it simple. The most important thing is, keeping your kids safe. Let them enjoy poses like ‘Tree Pose’ and ‘Mountain Pose’, and don’t focus on alignment.
- Keep it simple. The most important thing is, keeping your kids safe. Let them enjoy poses like ‘Tree Pose’ and ‘Mountain Pose’, and don’t focus on alignment.
- Give them positive feedback. Give kids a high five for a posture mastered to perfection. See how that motivates them!
Here are the Top 10 Benefits of Yoga for Kids
Here’s a list of the absolute best benefits of yoga for kids.
1. Enhanced Physical Flexibility
Flexibility is no stranger to children. The great thing about yoga is it helps preserve their innate flexibility with the passing years.
How: Yoga for kids helps introduce them to the art of moving their bodies and muscles in ways that challenge them, ensuring increased flexibility and agility.
2. Improved Focus
Move over to Attention Deficit Disorder! Concentration in kids is indeed a tough nut to crack. There needs to be a fine balance between an emphasis on concentration and that ‘wandering mind’, which helps spark their creativity.
How: By focusing on one pose (asana) at a time, children are introduced to the concept of concentration uniquely and tangibly. One of the best benefits of yoga, indeed.
3. Improved Sleep
Yoga for kids works wonders for their health. For instance, it helps them sleep great.
How: By practicing yoga close to bedtime, children can do away with undue stress, allowing them to release tension and any negative emotions held physically in the body. Focused breathing helps calm their mind and nervous system, helping them fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
4. It Helps Manage Emotions
Young children are more influenced by their emotional thinking rather than logical thinking. One of the benefits of yoga is helping balance diverse emotions.
How: Kids can use Yoga poses to express emotions through their bodies. For instance, happiness (dog with a wagging tail) and frustration (crocodile with a snapping mouth). This is even more effective when combined with facial expressions. Allowing kids to identify their emotions is a great way to enable them to let go of them, too.
5. Helps Inculcate a Sense of Discipline
Having a hard time with discipline? Yoga for kids sure comes in handy. Among several other things, yoga’s importance lies in effectively cultivating a sense of discipline.
How: As children work on clearing their minds and perfecting their poses, that sense of impulsivity is tamed, and they get more disciplined.
6. . Helps Boost their Self-Confidence
One of the truly great benefits of yoga for kids lies in its ability to help them foster a healthy relationship with their bodies.
How:Through regular yoga practice, children learn to believe in themselves and feel a sense of pride and confidence when they master a new move.
7. It Helps bring a Sense of Body Awareness
Helping children become aware of their bodies at a tender age is certainly one of the more exemplary benefits of yoga.
How:Children who practice yoga can tune into their bodies as they move from posture to posture. Things like distinguishing between right and left and spatial ability can also be developed.
8. Boosts Relationship with Parents
Take bonding with your kids to another level by getting physically involved in their yoga practice.
How:Set up a weekly yoga practice and do those asanas with your kids in unison. Doing yoga together makes it even more fun for your kids and nurtures their drive to master those poses.
9. It Helps Improve Strength and Breath Control
Yoga for kids is good for their health for more reasons than one.
How:By focusing on their breath, your children will develop upper body strength, besides alleviating muscle tension. Of course, learning to breathe in the right manner will also do wonders for their sense of focus.
10. It Improves their Mood
Who wants happy children in the house?
How:One of the stellar benefits of yoga lies in its ability to release endorphins that foster feelings of calm and happiness. Goodbye, negative feelings!
It’s not easy being a kid. The good news is that yoga can help with all that overstimulation and peer pressure children are prone to in today’s world. By taming their minds, it can provide several benefits, as you have seen in this article.
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