Can Children Do Yoga?

[Scott]

Can Children Do Yoga?
by Scott Hughes

Many adults practice yoga to improve both their physical and mental health. Yoga not only improves flexibility, but also improves strength, stamina, concentration, blood circulation, balance, and more. If you do not already practice yoga, you may want to consider it. Whether you already practice yoga or not, you may consider letting your children practice yoga.

You may wonder if children can practice yoga safely. Of course they can! In fact, in many ways children may be more suitable for yoga than many adults. Children are often more flexible and physically active than adults. Additionally, children learn new things very easily, as learning is a natural part of growing up.

Yoga is generally safe for children, but before starting any new exercise program, you want to check with a doctor. Doctors can examine you and your children and make sure you do not have any special physical needs. Luckily, yoga is a relatively accessible exercise program, and has much less physical requirements than other more intense exercise routines. In fact, yoga is often used as physical therapy and a way to help treat various injuries.

When practicing yoga with children, there are some special issues you want to keep in mind.

For one, children like to have fun and sometimes have shorter attention spans than adults, so their yoga routines may benefit from a more upbeat and fast-paced workout. Additionally, you want to work games into their workouts and exercises if you can.

Children are also not as experienced or educated as adults, and are still learning. For that reason, they may not be able to comprehend complex spiritual teachings, and they may not be as interested as adults in trying to understand complex ideas. It may be wiser to offer children a simplified introduction to yoga, as opposed to the more advanced approaches that would be offered to experienced adults.

If teaching children who are not your own, it is often a good idea to avoid mixing strong religious messages or opinions with the yoga lessons. The children's parents may have different religious views than you, and thus may not want you teaching their children your views. Religion can be a very sensitive subject for some people. For the same reason, if you are sending your children to a yoga class or buying them some sort of yoga media, you may want to review it first and make sure you find its messages suitable.

If you decide to let your children do yoga, there are many ways to start them. You can find classes that offer yoga to kids. You can also find Yoga for kids videos, as well as other media. You can even do the yoga routines on the videos at home with your children. Good luck and have fun!

About the Author: Scott Hughes owns and operates Online Yoga Club and the Yoga Forums.

What do you think?
_________________
OnlineYogaClub.com ~ Please suggest ways to improve this website. I want it to be the best!

[Bonnie]

I teach childrens yoga and we do all kinds of fun things, one of which is to paint the bottems of our feet and push them as hard as we can down into paper below us. This help to teach children what it feels like to be grounded and connected to the earth.

Sometimes after teaching a childrens yoga Class I wish I could do the same things with my adults yoga classes.

I have been puttingtogether a web site which is full of ideas of yoga related things you can do with children to help parents and teachers gain some ideas and some inspiration

you can find it here www.resonateyoga.com.au/children

[NSUSA]

It must be so much fun teaching yoga to kids, Bonnie.

Is that your website?
_________________
I got Fiber35

[Bonnie]

Yes that is my web site, it is only in its baby stages at the moment. I am hopeing that it will eventually become a great bit resource for teachers parents and students.

Yeah I really do love teaching kids, though each and every group I teach comes with its own benifits

[squall]

Ofcourse they can
_________________
Yoga Poses

[jakarma11]

You can start them on easy moves early I think, but just be careful to make sure they do things properly.

[renich]

What a lovely topic.

Yes, I watched a news clip on CNN about yoga in US schools. It was very exciting to see that some US elemtary schools were bringing yoga into it. The children who were interviewed had positive results of better concentration and stress reduction.

I wish someone taught me how to relax and reduce stress when I was in elementary school.

On a sad note, there are some people fighting this form of exercise stating it has religious undertones. How sad to be so close minded.
_________________
Namaste,
Renee
Benefits of Yoga