Why you should do yoga with children

If you’ve been following our Instagram for a while, you likely will have seen a few photos of beautiful mummas practicing yoga with their babies. And while there’s no doubt they make for fabulous photos, it seems there may be a bit more to children’s yoga than meets the eye. Science is showing that yoga is not only beneficial for adults, but can have a profound impact on children.

Recently, Goop ran a brilliant article on how yoga is changing schools, and we thought we’d share a few highlights.

“For the better part of three decades, Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa has been studying the effects of yoga on health. Khalsa believes—and has proven repeatedly—that focusing on the mind/body connection can have measurably positive results on insomnia, chronic stress, PTSD, and anxiety disorders. And preemptively treating these conditions can have a profound effect on the development of disease. While Khalsa believes that yoga is an effective treatment, he believes its true power is in the preventative, and so most of his research in recent years has been on the effect of yoga and meditation on school kids—after all, according to Khalsa, studies indicate that 80% of kids will have some sort of mental health issue. Yep, 80%. He’s run a series of studies on students where half of the kids do traditional P.E., while the other half do yoga—the children track and report on their mood and other key factors throughout. The results have been pretty staggeringly pro-yoga: Almost all kids reported feeling increasingly resilient, focused, and better able to emotionally handle and deal with stress—a toolset that might have a profound affect on their ability to handle the complexities of life in an ongoing way.”

“I like to think that the benefits come from three major angles. The first is the improvement in focus and control of ATTENTION: whether it’s on the body in terms of perceiving sensations, or on the flow of thoughts and emotions. The meditative component of yoga helps engage the mind through practicing attention control, and thereby reduces excessive ruminating and mind wandering. Over time, this leads to an improvement in the ability to hold the attention, an improvement in mind/body awareness and mindfulness, and ultimately, concentration, cognition, and executive functioning.”

“Second is improvement in SELF-REGULATION, particularly when it comes to stress and emotion. The practice of yoga—specifically around meditation, breathing techniques, postures, exercises, and deep relaxation—helps kids learn strategies to cope more effectively with stress and emotion. They become more stress-hardy and resilient. They also become more emotionally stable and less reactive, which is important for kids, particularly teens who are going through enormous changes. Improving their stress response prevents them from developing chronic stress, which is a major factor for psychological conditions—depression, anxiety, substance abuse—these are all major problems for kids. It’s essential that they learn how to calm down and self-regulate their internal state.”

“The third area is just improvement in overall PHYSICAL FITNESS. Learning how to hold and move their bodies with more flexibility and balance. Yoga also improves breath regulation and breathing patterns as well as the ability to physically relax.”

What do you think? Have you involved your children in your yoga practice? Would you like to see child-friendly videos in our online studio?

Read more on Goop here, and please tell us what you think in your comments below.