Yoga can help your child get stronger and more limber. But the emotional rewards of calmness and compassion may be even more valuable benefits of yoga. Children are often naturally flexible, which is why many yoga poses come easily to them. Yoga also builds strength and better body awareness, says Lauren Toolin, a yoga teacher and therapeutic yoga instructor, based in Massachusetts, who used to teach classes to children.
While you’re noticing the external changes, yoga is quietly improving your child’s circulation and respiration and digestive and immune systems, says Scott Blossom, a yoga instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area who taught children years ago in New York City.
Benefits Of Yoga for Children
When children practice yoga it increases their confidence, builds concentration and strengthens growing bodies. For children with behavioral issues, yoga can improve their impulses in a positive direction. It provides them with an outlet as a way to manage their behavior.
Physical Benefits Of Yoga
- Helps develop the right balance of muscle tone and strength throughout the body to support the joints.
- Builds core strength for good posture and overall physical fitness.
- Helps to maintain flexibility and mobility in all joints and muscles.
- Encourages the retention of calcium to help build strong bones through weight-bearing postures.
- Supports and strengthens the immune system by reducing stress and stimulating the lymph system (the body’s highway of white blood cells which fight viruses and infections).
- Improves balance, alignment and coordination with practice of postures.
- Helps children develop a positive image of their body and an awareness of how to look after it.
- Helps balance energy levels and calms the nervous system with twists that stimulate the spinal cord and regular practice of relaxation
- Develops sensory awareness – children learn to notice what’s going on in their body and mind while they’re in postures.
- Yoga can accommodate all body shapes and sizes and is not competitive, so it’s a good form of exercise for non-sporty children too.
- Keeps the heart and respiratory system fit and strong, encouraging better circulation by getting the heart pumping and using more of the space in the lungs with deeper breathing.
- Improves the digestive system with yoga asanas that get things moving in the gut and by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system during relaxation, triggering important acids in the stomach to be released for breaking down food.
- A reduced risk of injury in sports and games with better overall fitness and coordination gained through yoga practice and better flexibility in the joints.
Social, Emotional and Cognitive Benefits
- Increases attention span and improves concentration
- More oxygen circulates round the body and brain during yoga practice and breathing exercises, so improving memory retention and learning ability.
- Children get better at dealing with anxiety and stress because they learn to incorporate relaxation and breathing techniques into daily life.
- Improves relationships and social awareness through group and partner work.
- Encourages healthy sleep patterns with the practice of relaxing the body and lengthening the breath.
- Increases confidence with speech in interactive parts of the stories. It improves vocal ability as the voice is exercised in tandem with postures.
How Lions Calm Down
And though yoga may not turn your child into a peace-loving Buddha in a single class. Over time you may notice some subtle emotional shifts. She may be more accepting of herself, less reactive — and more able to concentrate, says Toolin. “Yoga builds present-moment awareness,” she says. The game playing and partner work also teaches kids to be compassionate and gentle with other kids. “In children’s yoga, there’s a lot of cheering other kids on,” says Toolin.
In Yogi Beans classes, a child-centered studio in New York City, founded and co-owned by Lauren Chaitoff, children are taught Lion’s Breath, an exercise that teaches them how breathing can change the way they feel. Here are the child-friendly instructions:
- Take a deep inhale
- Stick out your tongue
- On the exhale, release a deep roar
After a few roars, the students are asked to do it again but without having the lion make a sound. They learn that rather than yell or scream, they can take a deep lion’s breath, says Chaitoff, who suggests parents try this technique instead of a “time out” to help their child calm down.
For Blossom, yoga allows children to experience both success and failure without judgment. “Yoga is very open-ended,” he says. “Nothing is right or wrong. Children are given permission to feel things and there’s no shame around those feelings. A yoga class gives kids the space to go through experiences. Yoga guides them without squelching them.”
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