Yoga Can Do Wonders for Kids

Yoga can have a transformational effect on your well-being, and not just in adults. In fact, it can empower kids with very valuable life skills and mental tools that will help them thrive in the world.

A growing body of research has already shown that yoga and mindfulness improve both physical and mental health in school-age children. Yoga not only improves balance, strength, endurance, and aerobic capacity in children, but also provides psychological benefits for kids. Practicing yoga can help with improving focus, memory, self-esteem, academic performance, and classroom behavior, and can even reduce anxiety and stress in children.

What makes yoga so effective, especially for children, is that it’s a tangible practice. Learning how to stay still and breathe while in different physical postures builds focus, patience, confidence, and strength. It also creates a mind-body connection that is key in developing self-awareness about physical and mental feelings.

Kids who do yoga are more likely to naturally gain confidence, learn self-love and appreciation, and develop self-awareness beyond the yoga mat and the classroom. Through practicing yoga poses, kids get to know their own bodies and start to realize and recognize that they are strong and capable.

Here are some of the key beneficial effects of yoga on children

Yoga invites children to go on a self-explorational journey and helps them become more aware of their bodies and minds. Moving through a variety of yoga poses helps kids learn about physical anatomy, their own movements and capabilities, and how focus and breathing are connected with the way our bodies move and feel.

Yoga helps children to get to know different emotions and regulate their feelings. Another beautiful benefit of yoga for kids is that it shows them how to be in the present moment and how to enjoy it, while also relaxing and calming the mind. Practicing yoga ultimately improves the ways they handle emotions, and how they can self-soothe and self-regulate.

Yoga teaches discipline and reduces impulsivity in the long term. By being such a calming physical outlet for self-expression, yoga can help kids with sorting out challenging behaviors. Through practice and play, it also teaches children about discipline as they work on clearing their minds and mastering poses.

Yoga enhances children’s concentration, focus, and memory. The different types of moves in this practice require children to focus and work on their memorization skills, both of which can translate over into their academic performance and general quality of life.

Yoga expands children’s strength and flexibility. It helps strengthen children’s growing bodies and helps them get more flexible, which can reduce their chance of injuries in the future, especially in sports. Also, there is a very special correlation between physical strength and flexibility and mental strength and flexibility.

Through yoga and breathing, children can learn how to manage anxiety. The breathing exercises and relaxation techniques learned from practicing yoga are priceless in helping children with stress management. These techniques are also widely recommended by psychologists. Teaching children from a young age how to reduce stress in a healthy way is an important and lifelong gift that will help them through their adulthood.

Yoga nourishes self-love and boosts self-esteem. Perfecting a pose or improving their balance and flexibility can give young children a sense of personal empowerment.

Last but not least: A kind reminder that kids love to imitate their parents. If you want to invite and encourage them to start doing yoga from a young age, lead by example. By practicing yoga at home, at the beach, or in the park, parents can transform their own lives and the well-being of the whole family.

Wondering where to start?

Check out Squish the Fish - Cosmic Kids’ underwater yoga adventure, yoga for kids with animals, and aquatic animals yoga poses! Also, we highly recommend these two very educational Headspace videos on children’s emotions and focus.