By Anuradha Sundaram

Yoga is a form of exercise, meditation, and breathing practices with Indian roots designed to bring unity to the mind, body, and spirit. Adults have vouched for yoga for years, saying it makes them feel better physically, enhances their ability to concentrate, and brings tranquility to their lives. Now parents and yoga instructors are looking at the possible benefits of yoga for kids.

The main focus of a child yoga program is on fun. Often the children will pretend to be the animal for which the pose is named. For instance, when they are doing Cat Pose, they become the cat and may even meow. If they are doing Downward Facing Dog with their butts high in the air, they will often bark, as they become the dog.

The children are encouraged to fully participate in and enjoy the ‘game of yoga.’ Sometimes the instructor will create an entire story about the poses that the children are in so as to make the class interesting and to fully engage them. The children don’t realize how much they are benefiting from the practice; the only thing they know is that they are having a good time.

Some Common Benefits of Yoga for Kids

• Yoga enhances the stamina, ability and mental balance.
• It enables you teach the kids alphabets and numbers in a singing mode and they can learn about their body in a fun manner.
• The songs and the chants that they practice in yoga classes improve their speaking skills.
• Yoga strengthens the digestive system and helps get rid of various internal complexities like, gas and constipation.
• Children experience many of the same physical benefits adults do from practicing yoga. Yoga strengthens them and helps them become more flexible and coordinated.
• Yoga for kids also enhances self-awareness. Children who practice yoga learn early on to tune into their bodies. Self esteem is bolstered as the children gain control over their bodies and minds.
• Yoga for kids enhances imagination and empathy. Children are asked to strike poses from nature. They might assume the pose of a snake, or a tree, or a dog. Then they are asked to imagine what it would be like to be those life forms. In this way, children learn early on to connect with all the life on the planet and realize that similarities far outweigh differences.
• Yoga teaches children to have fun and move their bodies in a con-competitive environment. Yoga isn’t about being right or wrong, or being best or worst. It is about bringing unity to one’s own life. Children can work together to help each other reach this goal.
• Yoga for kids teaches self-discipline. As part of the practice of yoga, kids need to slow down, hold certain postures, breathe or think in a certain way. Yoga encourages children to master themselves rather than wait for an adult to control them.
• Yoga for kids can also be a way to strengthen families. Yoga is an exercise that parents and children and even grandparents can practice and talk about together. As children participate in yoga with their families, they feel closer to their loved ones.
• Through practicing yoga, children can learn ways to relax and get control of stress in their lives. A child worried about a test, for instance, might use the meditation or breathing techniques of yoga to help her calm down and focus.

Yoga for Special Needs Kids

By teaching self awareness, self control, and concentration, yoga can also help to manage children who have been diagnosed with ADHD – attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Yoga has also been used with some success to help children with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and autism. Yoga for kids has also been used to help kids with cancer cope with their diagnosis and with scary medical procedures.

• For Example, In A preliminary study of pediatric health benefits of yoga, published in 2008, finds motor skills and concentration improvements, on top of better posture and breathing.
• In a Research at Providence Hospital, yoga is integrated into strength-building exercises for children with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, who often lack muscle tone and breathe weakly.
• Yoga stretching and body alignment can create a better athlete, said Michigan State University strength coach Mike Vorkapich. Players use back and arm movements to improve strokes and pitches, he said.

The following are some of the Kids yoga poses:

Balloon Breathing (Pranayama)

Downward facing dog

Cat pose

Elephant pose

Fish and Frog pose,

Bow and Arrow pose

Warrior pose

Rocking horse

Bridge pose

These poses have a lot of benefits for kids like activating the various glands in the body like Thyroid, Pituitary, and parathyroid and pineal body glands.

Children today are under a lot of stress. Homework, pressure to compete with other children, endless after-school activities, over-scheduling — it all adds up. And just like their parents, kids today are turning to Yoga to help them relax. Everyday is stressed in some way.

Yoga teaches you how to deal with this stress. With different stages of yoga it will help anyone, beginner, intermediate or advanced. Since kids are stressed with school, peer pressure, sports, and all the other everyday stress that comes with life.

Yoga is an excellent way for a child to exercise and has many other benefits for a child’s health. Not every type of yoga can be used as yoga for Children though. It must be taken into consideration that children’s bodies are still growing and cannot cope with the strenuous exercises of intense yoga sessions.

Yoga is helping the kids become more in touch with their self. They learn how their body and mind reacts to everything and then they are taught to handle it in a very positive way.

When yogis developed the asanas many thousands of years ago, they still lived close to the natural world and used animals and plants for inspiration—the sting of a scorpion, the grace of a swan, the grounded stature of a tree. When children imitate the movements and sounds of nature, they have a chance to get inside another being and imagine taking on its qualities.

When they assume the pose of the lion (Simhasana) for example, they experience not only the power and behavior of the lion, but also their own sense of power: when to be aggressive, when to retreat. The physical movements introduce kids to yoga’s true meaning: union, expression, and honor for oneself and one’s part in the delicate web of life.

Yoga with children offers many possibilities to exchange wisdom, share good times, and lay the foundation for a lifelong practice that will continue to deepen. All that’s needed is a little flexibility on the adult’s part because, as I quickly found out that yoga for children is quite different than yoga for adults. We have to honor the children’s innate intelligence and tune in to how they were instructing us to instruct them.

We can use the yoga asanas as a springboard for exploration of many other areas animal adaptations and behavior, music and playing instruments, storytelling, drawing and our time together will truly become a interdisciplinary approach to learning.

Together we can weave stories with our bodies and minds in a flow that could only happen in child’s play.

Yoga has a lot of Physical and mental health benefits for kids

Mental Health: A peaceful mind and relief from stress means children will be able to do regular day things longer. This could also mean concentrating more on homework rather than playing violent games. As children get the pleasure from peace, they will avoid violent games, and it will happen naturally. On top of that yoga also helps increase focus, which means when children who do yoga go to school, they will feel fresh and be ready to learn!

Physical fitness and health: Since yoga makes a person smarter in daily lives, children will realize that health must be prioritized before food.

They will tend to avoid fatty foods, or foods that cause discomfort while doing yoga, such as spicy burgers, or heavy cheese pizza.

Since fatty foods cause the stomach to be more acidic, children will get the burning feeling while doing yoga, and thus will start avoiding such foods before bed. These things happen naturally, because yoga keeps them mentally fit and alert and makes them worldly wise.

Breathing Longer: Many yoga exercises focus on breathing heavily, in and out, which means that children will learn to control their breathing at a very young age, thus making a heart attack less likely in the distant future. Control of breathing also helps in swimming, doing harder yoga exercises, and feeling fresh all the time. Breathing heavily has more benefits such as:

- Not feeling hungry right after a meal

- Not panicking

- Not getting frustrated

- Having control on anger

We all know that anger, frustration can lead to high blood pressure, but if children start doing yoga at a young age, they will be in a much better position to control their own mind and control breathing.

Body Benefits: The yoga poses for kids opens the hips, lengthens the hamstrings, gastrocnemius and soleus muscles of the leg.

Back/Neck/Leg/Arm Problems: As young children start participating in school sports events, they will have to put effort to make a sports team or to run longer which means that they will put pressure on the sensitive areas such as back, beck, head, and arms. But by doing yoga they will be much more flexible, meaning they will not get permanent neck injuries or develop back pain.

Back pain is not a significant problem in children, but by starting young they will get used to the benefits of yoga and it will be easier for them to continue doing yoga even when they reach adulthood, when many health problems can occur but since the child started yoga early they will be less likely to develop any of these problems.

Brain Balance: Crossing the midline of the body with certain Yoga movements like the bow and arrow pose stimulates the 300 million nerve cells of the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is known as the brain’s superhighway.

Yoga promotes balance on all levels. It raises awareness of the body, which in turn causes children to want to take better care of them. It raises energy levels, thus encouraging a desire to be more active. On the physical level, yoga builds strength and maintains flexibility.

Yoga elevates self-esteem, which helps to develop a positive body image. This can reduce or eliminate a tendency toward eating disorders in adolescents who might otherwise succumb to the belief that they are too fat. Likewise, yoga helps to stave off obesity, which, in children, is reaching epidemic proportions.

A relaxed child will sleep better. Proper rest is intrinsic to concentration and mental clarity. Yoga helps improve memory and cognitive skills and Studies are now showing that children who practice yoga on a regular basis are achieving higher grades in school. Yoga students handle problems better, too. Children who practice yoga are able to deal with difficulties creatively, sensibly and without resorting to violence or rebellion.

It seems hard to believe that a bit of stretching, twisting and balancing can change a life. Yet yoga can and does do exactly that. Yoga teaches acceptance while providing opportunity to improve. It gives kids the ability to overcome their limitations. Off the mat, yoga kids achieve remarkable things because they learn that health is not just a matter of being physically fit. They grow to understand that being physically fit enhances emotional and mental fitness as well.

Being a holistic practice, yoga approaches health in subtle ways. It is not uncommon for a student of yoga to suddenly experience emotional releases or gain unexpected insight into difficult problems. A burst of laughter or of tears during a yoga workout may initially be alarming, but what it means is that through the practice something that needs to be expressed is finally being expressed. Yoga helps to release these in healthy ways, preventing illnesses from manifesting over time.

Anuradha Sundaram teaches Yoga classes in Fort Wayne, Indiana.