Yoga for Children's Mental Health

Many studies have repeatedly shown that yoga for children can have numerous benefits. It can positively affect concentration, finger dexterity and the strength of hand grip. It can also improve your child’s performance when doing spatial memory tasks. Yoga for mental health is another good reason to encourage your child to practice yoga. It reduces mental stress and helps your child de-stress.

Why Should You Advocate Yoga for Children?

Today, life is fast paced. It hardly gives children any time to sit and be children. Throughout the day, you may have planned a litany of activities, including school, after-school activities, sports and maybe even part-time jobs. Once dinner is over, your child has to sit with their books and complete homework. As a result, they may not get enough rest, and the following morning the whole routine begins. This is the life of an average child day in and day out.

While this routine will help your child succeed in the rat race, it will be at the cost of their mental health. Your child could end up being highly stressed, or cope with obesity, depression and/or learning disability. Yoga can help your child improve their mental health without them even realizing it. In fact, once you understand the benefits of yoga for children, you will become a proponent of it.

Yoga to Cope with Stress

Childhood is the time when your child experiences a lot of physical, social, emotional as well as intellectual growth. This can stress out the body, causing the sympathetic nervous system to get activated. As a result, your child will suffer from elevated blood pressure and heart rate. When this happens persistently, it can result in depression, poor immunity, low self-esteem and social isolation.

Yoga for children, on the other hand, is a wonderful way to deal with stress that children go through due to demands and rigors of their lifestyle. There are yoga postures that are specifically designed for children and these postures allow them to relax when everything else is rushing past them.

Using physical postures, breathing techniques and relaxation methods, yoga can promote healthy spiritual, mental, intellectual and even physical growth. One of the main benefits of yoga for children is allowing them the opportunity to reconnect their minds and bodies and this helps to alleviate stress, aggression and behavioral issues.

Pranayama is often cited as the best yoga posture for mental health. It triggers the parasympathetic nervous system and will help your child’s body to slow down while helping the body and mind get into balance once again. If you teach pranayama to your child, they will be able to use the breathing technique in a stressful situation to stay calm and collected rather than reacting with anger or aggression.

Yoga for mental health can also foster restful sleep so that your child wakes up the following morning feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. Getting good quality sleep goes a long way in alleviating stress not just in children, but also in adults.

Yoga to Deal with Childhood Obesity

You may be surprised to learn that when a child is constantly placed in a stressful environment, it can result in childhood obesity.

Today, schools are not focusing as much as they used to on physical education. Also, kids spend more time going to school in buses or cars and when they come home, they are glued to the television or play video games on their handheld devices. Leading a sedentary life, coupled with unhealthy food choices has caused obesity to flare among school-going children.

Obesity can result in depression, anger, poor self-esteem and social isolation. As a result, your child could suffer without you even realizing it.

You may feel that yoga for children is passive activity. You are wrong. It is a physical activity, albeit a safe one. It also promotes your child to adopt healthy and balanced lifestyle habits. By encouraging your child to take up yoga for mental health, you will also be helping them physically. Yoga postures will actively engage your child and ensure they maintain a healthy weight even if they are leading a relatively sedentary life. Just make sure you combine yoga with healthy food choices for optimal results.

Yoga and Body Image

One of the benefits of yoga for children is making them self-aware. By regularly practicing yoga, your kid will begin listening to the needs of the body and their emotions. Yoga helps your child to focus on self-awareness and this, in turn, protects them from negative cultural and societal influences which can result in poor body image and low self-esteem.

Yoga for children helps them accept themselves for what they are rather than aspiring to be something or someone they are not. It fosters compassion for self and others while improving their concentration and focus.

Benefits of yoga for children should not be ignored. In fact, yoga can benefit children right from the age of four all the way into adulthood and beyond. Yoga facilitates total body movement and encourages gross motor skills development, and enhanced strength, endurance, agility and cooperation. You will be amazed how yoga for children can transform and make them into more self-aware, empathetic and focused kids, who are relaxed and do not let environment stressors get the better of them.

Bottom Line

Yoga forces your child to use their body and mind. You can use a range of intuitive, kinesthetic, musical and even naturalistic activities to help your child focus on their inner center and this, in turn, allows them to de-stress and calm themselves down when they are in stressful situations. It will also help them cope with day-to-day stress due to their hectic lifestyle.

Once your child learns yoga for children, they do not have to go to a studio or gym to practice it. They can perform the breathing exercises in any setting, including the classroom to calm themselves down and relax. It will improve their mental and physical health, effortless and you will end up with a happy, productive and confident child. Chikitsa gives you comprehensive knowledge about yoga for children and also helps you find a best Yoga Teachers in Hyderabad or Yoga Centers in Hyderabad.