Yoga for Kids: Fun and Engaging Yoga Practices for Wellness

By Dennis Bluthardt, Namaste Studios

Yoga in schools and community programs has recently been a favorite activity among children. And what’s not to love? Yoga transcends the boundaries of a standard physical fitness activity by providing children with additional physical, mental, and overall developmental benefits. In terms of physical development alone, kids work to perfect their balance and coordination and enhance their flexibility and strength — four significant ways all kids should develop.

Yoga for kids taps into a child’s natural sense of play. Instructors may incorporate the animal kingdoms and other imaginative elements into confident kids’ classes. Stories inspired by imagination encourage kids to assume certain yoga poses. All this fun is pleasurable for kids and encourages them to develop, even indirectly, their strong relationship with their personal development and physical health and fitness. In other words, some kids may realize they love how they feel, thus forming a positive association that will encourage them to stay fit and healthy for life. Some kids will love those quiet moments they experience while fully engaged in the game of yoga.

Not to be overlooked are the fabulous mental health benefits of yoga that result from mindful practice and various breathing exercises that have been pre-tested and adapted for children. As a result, children will develop tools they can draw on for life to help them control and deal with stress. Similarly, children will acquire a newfound means of approaching the subject of mental health, in addition to finding support and ways of dealing with their own stress and natural anxiety.

The Importance of Yoga for Kids

Yoga has many incredible benefits for kids that can boost their health and well-being! Here’s a quick look at some of the most notable ones:

Physical Benefits: The most well-known benefit of yoga on this list, enhanced flexibility, comes from regularly coaxing your muscles and joints into lengthening and consistently practicing positions that require stretching into a normal-to-extended range of motion. Yoga reduces your child’s chance of injury (because their muscles will already BE somewhat flexible and are therefore less likely to strain, sprain, or tear).

But did you know that yoga also improves strength and flexibility? That’s right, yoga is also great for BUILDING STRENGTH! Many yoga poses require you to hold up your body weight, which gradually leads to improved muscle tone. The wonderful thing about combining increased flexibility with enhanced strength is that those two attributes often lead to improvements in other physical activities (better posture, improved technique, and a more remarkable ability to align one’s body, to name a few).

Mental & Emotional Benefits: Besides providing a healthy physical outlet for pent-up stress and anxiety, practicing yoga (or “doing it,” in kid-speak) forces one to slow down, relax, and breathe. Yoga is a great way to link the mind with the body and can serve as an invaluable form of stress relief for kids.

Sure, yoga is a classic contemplative practice that emphasizes improved body-mind connection. But yoga also requires a certain amount of focus – it’s an isolated activity done best when done mindfully. Daily yoga is an excellent way for your child to develop their ability to concentrate (an essential life skill), and it may also lead to improved cognitive ability and better academic performance in school!

When practicing yoga, it’s not uncommon for one to feel particularly introspective – and rightly so, as the practice beckons one to BE IN THE MOMENT. The practice sets you up quite nicely to engage in self-reflection and to be particularly present or mindful.

Fun Yoga Practices for Children

Kid-friendly yoga practices can be a great way to introduce kids to mindfulness and physical activity. You can take the staple Tree Pose, which has kids balance on one leg like a tree and sway with the imaginary wind, and turn it into a captivating story—it’s a forest, and every tree is different. Kids Yoga provides additional buy-in to the activity and a unique test of each student’s balance and focus.

The Cat-Cow Pose is another interesting pose that combines spine health with creative miming. While it may take a bit of finagling to get down, the premise for the pose is simple: You pretend to be a cat and a cow. Make mooo-ving noises and arch your back like a scaredy-cat. It’s the one day of the week when it’s perfectly okay to play the part of another person (or animal, in this case).

Downward Dog is an essential yoga pose that is easy to stick into any yoga routine and play along with. Kids are stretching dogs just waking up from their afternoon nap. Consider having your class pump their legs like they are stretching to make Downward Dog a more active pose.

Creating a Yoga Routine for Kids

Bringing yoga into your everyday life with your kids can be a wonderful and manageable experience. Sessions as short as 10-15 minutes once or twice a day are all you need. Short and sweet is the way to go. If practices are short and fun, kids are far more likely to get on board willingly. Be a “YES!” parent, not a “NO!” parent. On your end, the calm, relaxed attitude will come naturally, making the sessions all the more satisfying.

Short practices can also be scheduled, no problem, to start your kids’ morning times, to give them a quick and easy way to get their days started or to bring an end to another excellent day just when kids are ready to settle down in time for bed.

Forming regular habits must be considered. The best way to ensure that kids have a manageable yet powerful way to incorporate some of life’s most essential positive habits into their everyday lives is to form a regular schedule. From there, take it one day at a time!

With kids’ brains, if those practices are already engaging, fun, super-short, and low-stress, which they should be, kids can’t help but play along!

Yoga as a Tool for Wellness

Yoga offers children a unique opportunity to develop skills to help them deal with various issues. This holistic solution integrates the body (hardware) through physical postures, the nervous system (operating system) through breathing exercises, and the thinking mind (software) through the practice of mindfulness and offers insight into the subtler and deeper aspects of our emotions and experiences. It gives kids an interesting and captivating way to approach and create a healthy relationship with their bodies.

Under the guidance and practice of this type of yoga explicitly aimed at children (remember, they are not miniature adults, and many considerations are needed when teaching children), the heart, mind, and spirit will also be drawn into the purview of their understanding and notions of self-care, encouraging embodiment across the board. The basis for all of this is health and well-being centered around “self” within the broader experiences of life. Emotion regulation through applying practices (breathing exercises and meditation), focusing attention, and calming the mind. Many children with emotional challenges find these creative solutions helpful.

Attention regulation will also contribute to developing executive function and cognitive control of their emotions as the “fight or flight” response diminishes. Helping children learn about their bodies in this way and control the related processes and functionality will enable a new and unique perspective. Outlining what “normal” feels like often creates new opportunities for children to be creative and constructive in their downtime and engage more effectively in the “emotionally charged” moments of their lives. A reprieve from worry is helpful to everyone, particularly children. Expand a child’s summer toolbox this year with my meditation course for children, available below. Keep Reading!

Embedding discipline (not in your direction or someone else’s, but by their design) is good. Constructing routines, where their brains can subconsciously prepare for the “next thing” to come, may be helpful in regulation and serve their best interests in other areas of life. You may have created a new way to ready their brains for learning or other related activities. Children love routines and find great comfort in them; offering the brain and body this opportunity for growth and development is an interesting perspective. Exercise and self-care should be a part of everyone’s day – adults and children.

The distractions of life are just that: coming across our paths as a temporary disturbance and competing for our attention. By way of regular physical activity (stretching and movements), our defenses will be up, and we will be better equipped to recognize these distractions early on and make conscious decisions on how to handle them. I suspect that over time, the brain, body, and spirit will become more robust and less easy to cause a distraction to, rendering better health and well-being. As a practice, meditation has proven to prevent the “disease” of life. Engaging life from a fresh new perspective may lead us to a happy place and offer a creative and positive influence on our emotions.

Resources for Kids Yoga

There are numerous ways to introduce kids to yoga, including:

Books: Many books can provide the foundational knowledge necessary to teach yoga. Many of these books include kid-like games to break the ice when introducing yoga to children. Kids Yoga books: In many cases, such books include fun and light-hearted comic depictions of kids doing yoga. Other books include images of other motifs/influences relevant to yoga history,

Online Resources: There are even classes online, through YouTube videos and apps, which parents can introduce to little ones. These can aid children who may be shy or unsure in getting acquainted with yoga. Yoga with Adriene, for example, offers yoga sessions you can follow on YouTube. Adriene even offers a yoga session for children. Similarly, Cosmic Kids Yoga uses images, narrations, and stories—which cleverly imitate yoga poses—to get kids out of their seats and try some yoga poses, too.

Local Community: Another way to teach yoga is to attend yoga practices at a local community recreation center, gym, or yoga studio. Several locales offer a learning experience to help teach parents how to teach young types of yoga. Others offer workshops specifically designed for younger kids, too.

Parents might consider using a combination of books, online resources, and community classes to help teach their kids about yoga.

Yoga for kids has countless benefits. Simple to physically challenging yoga poses enhance not just flexibility but strength as well. This mindfulness and relaxing practice also gives children the tools and resources to cope with the daily stresses of primary school much earlier than the teenagers behind yoga.

As young adults, parents, educators, readers, writers, and a hardworking group of 20-somethings, all of the above have shared a similar experience when they met yoga. Conditioning the body to bend and stretch, feel fewer aches, become toned, love getting out of bed early, and feel excited to keep up with your daily physical practice. Because you’re just an overgrown child with bills, discover the importance of self-care and mindfulness adulting, right? Right.

Studios full of parents would network with their community. Perhaps the first five buddies will have yoga challenges, raffles, write together, and get fit. An environment of co-workers who would practice mindfulness min-max and increase their health? With this progressive blog and a little role of encouragement, I am creating and finding out possible chances to leave chants to happen.