Yoga at an early age encourages self-esteem and body awareness with a non-competitive physical activity.
Like adults, kids have to deal with their own stress in life. Moving house, starting a new school, preparing for a new sibling – these are all stressful events that affect kids. Kids need a way to manage stress and anxiety and one form of practice is teaching children yoga.
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:
1. Yoga Improves Memory and Cognitive Functioning
Yoga helps to improve memory and cognitive function by creating focus within. Practicing yoga requires concentration of both the mind and the body. When kids practice yoga, they are essentially practicing their ability to focus on the task at hand.
In their day-to-day lives, this translates to better focus and cognitive functioning to improved academic achievement.
2. Yoga Increases Childers’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.
3. Yoga Teaches Discipline and Reduces Impulsivity
Yoga can reduce challenging behaviors 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.
4. Yoga Improves Social Relationships
For kids, the entire yoga practice is a social one. Yoga for kids typically includes songs, games, and other fun activities that get kids moving together and learning from one another, particularly with partner yoga poses. Yoga also helps to cultivate increased self-esteem, self-confidence, and empathy within kids, which translates to more positive relationships with others by reflecting their positive attitude toward themselves onto others.
This creates a positive, engaging environment in which kids can have fun and learn to trust one another.
5. Yoga Improves Strength and Breath Control
When we breathe harshly or quickly, we increase muscle tension, reduce focus, and heighten our fight-or-flight response, all of which have detrimental effects on our minds and bodies.
Teaching proper breathing techniques, and building physical and mental strength from a young age, helps to reduce the chances of obesity, depression, and depressive symptoms, as well as increases self-esteem, self-confidence, and improves overall wellbeing.
6. Yoga Improves Sleep
We tend to think that kids “have it easy,” and that they don’t feel stressed, but this simply isn’t true. Kids aren’t stressed about finances or getting to work on time, but they are stressed out by their schoolwork and peer relationships.
Practicing yoga helps kids to relieve stress by using their breathing to calm the mind and the nervous system. The physical practice of yoga also helps to relieve tension and release negative emotions held physically in the body, helping them to fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
7. Yoga Improves Independence and Coping Skills
By increasing independence in practice, we are also helping kids to develop their coping skills. As kids, they will have the support of their family and the comfort of familiarity. But this changes as they grow into adolescence and adulthood – peer pressure, graduating high school, going to college, and getting their first “real” job.
Kids must learn how to be independent and cope on their own while they have support and guidance from those around them. Otherwise, they will be left with no coping tools under their belt when the time comes for them to be on their own.
8. Yoga Improves Self-Regulation
By paying attention to our minds and bodies, we look inward to better understand our thoughts and feelings. Practicing yoga helps kids to understand and manage their emotions based on the situation.
For example, if a child is frustrated at school, they are less likely to be paying attention to any new material.
Therefore, not retaining any of that information and falling behind in class.
But, by learning to reflect inward and recognize what they need in certain situations, kids can learn to manage their emotions and handle the situation effectively and appropriately.
9. Yoga Reduces Stress and Anxiety
For kids, we must teach them the balance between negative and positive emotions. When we are ready to let go of all of that negativity, practicing yoga helps to reduce stress and anxiety by relieving tension throughout the body, literally releasing the built-up negativity kids have stored within their bodies.
10. Yoga Improves Mood
Like any physical exercise, practicing yoga helps kids to release their negative thoughts and feelings, bring about mental clarity, and feel better about themselves. When we do something physical, such as yoga, we release endorphins, creating feelings of calm and happiness.
Yoga is a fun activity in which kids learning about themselves!
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