Why Today’s Kids Need Yoga
Yoga isn’t just beneficial for adults – it’s also great for kids! Here are just a few reasons why children today need yoga more than ever before…
We adults often think of childhood as an innocent and carefree age, but in today’s world, kids face almost as many pressures as adults. Modern children are faced with an extremely busy life, filled with school activities, social activities, homework, competitive sports, and busy parents who rush around all day and often impart the same harried attitude to their children. It is a rare occasion when today’s kids get to slow down and just be kids.
Unfortunately, this constant busyness doesn’t give children the time and space they need to explore their creativity and develop their imaginations. This is just one reason why yoga can be so helpful for kids.
Yoga can provide children with helpful techniques for self-care, relaxation, creative release, and fulfillment. It also helps to encourage self-esteem and body awareness, while providing physical exercise in a non-competitive environment that fosters cooperation and compassion instead of rivalry.
Here are a few more reasons why today’s kids need yoga:
Children derive enormous benefits from yoga. Physically, it enhances their flexibility, strength, coordination, and body awareness. In addition, their concentration and sense of calmness and relaxation improves. Doing yoga, children exercise, play, connect more deeply with the inner self, and develop an intimate relationship with the natural world that surrounds them. Yoga brings that marvelous inner light that all children have to the surface.
…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.
