The Benefits of Yoga in Children
Social-Emotional Learning
What advice would you give yourself at the age of 10? Personally, I would invite my younger self to try to squeeze in at least one intentional moment of self-love per day. Essentially, this kind of ‘letter-to-the-self’ exercise is useful because we have more self-awareness now than we did as tots. As a child, your body changes at a rapid rate, including your brain which results in all these emerging skills and understanding of the world. It makes sense that children have a hard time regulating their emotions when they’re just learning that they exist. Yoga, even for children, can help us to identify, understand, and respond to emotions in healthy ways.
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) lays out 5 core competencies for Social and Emotional Learning:
Self-awareness
Self-management
Social Awareness
Relationship Skills
Responsible decision making
In yoga classes with children, we can include a variety of tools to address all aspects of SEL, while accommodating individual students’ needs. Let’s look at each core competency and how it is applied.
Self-Awareness: Group discussions often include questions and answers to invite children to reflect on and express their state of being. Breathing and postural exercises provide further opportunity for self-reflection. We always come back to the question, ‘how do you feel?’ We give students the opportunity to answer these questions before and after class so that they can determine for themselves whether these practices are working, and whether they will integrate it into their life off the yoga mat.
Self-Management: It’s hard to manage yourself when you’re not fully aware of how you’re being. That’s why we act as a mirror for children, bringing attention to how they might be feeling. For example, asking a child if they’re feeling angry can give that child to acknowledge their own feeling, or even express themselves if they’re feeling a different way. From that point, we can practice various breathing exercises to regulate the mood. By democratically creating rules for our safe space, children to respect personal space, and have a framework to refer back to which they agreed on at the beginning of class. They feel a part of the system and motivated to self-manage in order to align.
Social Awareness: Our partner poses, games, and group discussions create dynamic environments where each child’s voice and feelings are validated. This presents children with the opportunity to learn another person’s perspective. Through their own practice of self-awareness, children learn what they need in order to feel well, centred, and calm, and they can appreciate what it takes for a friend to that others may need something similar.
Relationship Skills: All yoga practices promote a strong relationship with the self. Yoga is a non-competitive activity, so each class encourages students to focus on how they feel inside, rather than how they look or how others perceive them. When children are free from competition, they can relate to each other humanely. Partner poses, games, and group discussions foster trust in peer groups.
Responsible Decision Making: In yoga class, we give options for children to modify the practices in ways that make them feel good. This develops a crucial skill in determining what is healthy for the body, and what makes them feel good. When they learn what feels good, they can carry that understanding into all other activities, and nutrition.
Physical Benefits
Skeletal System: Babies have nearly 300 bones, but adults have about 206. During development, these bones fuse together. Yoga provides ample weight-bearing exercises to promote bone density and growth.
Balance: Children have a constantly changing centre of gravity as their height and weight fluctuates. Yoga postures support children in developing balance, which further helps them to walk, run, play, and engage in normal daily activities safely.
Muscular System: Yoga strengthens and stretches muscles across the body, which can prevent injury, increase flexibility, improve posture, and relieve pressure on joints.
Digestive System: Yoga can improve digestion by stimulating the digestive system. The stomach and intestines are stretched and compressed, which creates movement.
Cardiovascular System: Our heart rates vary depending on our environmental stimuli. Their ability to increase in case of danger and decrease in times of ease are fundamental to our healthy physiology. The measurement for this fluctuation is called Heart Rate Variability (HRV). When something excites us, our heart rate increases. How long does it take to return to its resting state? People who are exposed to chronic stress may have a harder time returning their heart rate to its rest mode. Yoga promotes healthy HRV by toning the vagus nerve (essential to the HRV) in postures, and introducing challenging exercises and concepts which are followed up by relaxation.
I believe that yoga is a powerful toolkit because it can be adapted to any person. In fact, many of the tools used in yoga come from within. My job as a yoga teacher is to show children how to use the tools so that they can become more self-sufficient, more compassionate toward themselves and others, and more capable of handling stressful situations.
Yoga is truly my passion, and I am happy to share it. Would you like to introduce a yoga teacher training program to your school? Are you curious about yoga for your children? Drop me a line!
Namaste