by Annie Jones
The art of doing yoga has been in existence for more than a thousand years now. Many people dedicate some time of their day attending yoga classes or doing yoga exercises on their own. Millions of adults are known to have been benefitted by yoga.
However, in recent times the practice of doing yoga with the children (even toddlers) is on a rise. The most evident question that comes up after this is that why do you yoga with your toddler? They are too young to be facing the issues which are the causes that push people towards yoga classes.
Well, if you come to know about the various benefits that your children can enjoy doing yoga with you, it would be a matter of minutes before you start chasing your little one to join you in the next session of yoga.
Broadly speaking, regular yoga practice helps toddlers to get sleepy faster, keep their cool and calm down and improves their mood as well. Apart from this, there are many other benefits if your little one does yoga with you.
1. It is Fun for Them
Forget everything and just remember that the little kids would enjoy taking those poses as they see their mom or dad doing them. It is a common character of toddlers that they tend to imitate what the elders, especially the parents do.
As you do yoga with your baby, he would love the idea of being able to emulate your actions and that would not only give him a boost in self-confidence but would make those moments fun-filled and memorable for him as well.
2. It is Bait for the Baby to Do Yoga Regularly
If a baby is asked to learn and do yoga postures, he or she would be too reluctant to do that. For them, there are more important things in life (like playing or watching cartoon) than doing yoga.
However, if you want to ensure that your baby does yoga every day you would have to join them.
Only when they see their parents doing yoga (for them it could be just throwing hands and legs or breathing differently), they will give some importance to it and do yoga themselves.
3. Enhances Concentration Power
Just like it does for the adults, yoga brings similar results for toddlers as well. It helps the young ones increase their ability to concentrate and keep their focus on something for long. Lack of focus is the most common problem seen in the millennial kids, thanks to the many distractions that surround the kids all throughout the day and night.
Be it studies or be it sports, keeping the focus on something for a decent time period is almost missing today. That is where yoga will help your baby in his growing years. As the kids get into the habit of focusing on the body alignment to master the poses, it increases their overall ability to focus and stay that way.
4. Yoga will Calm Down your Little One
If you find your kid showing tantrums or crying more frequently, it is most likely because she is frustrated. Anything that doesn’t work their way frustrates them and their only way to manifest that is by crying or throwing tantrums.
With the healthy breathing techniques that your toddler would be learning while doing yoga with you, they would able to have better control over their minds and reactions and would behave in a better way as a child and even when they grow up.
Yoga also teaches the young ones to be tolerant towards other living beings. This education at the very early stage of life would prove to be very crucial as that would help these young ones grow into people with high levels of tolerance and be peaceful by nature.
5. Brings Self-awareness in Children
As the little children start learning about various yoga postures and how to guide the body to perform those postures, they become aware of their body very well. At the same time, they become aware of their abilities and that triggers self-confidence in their little minds.
As they grow up, the outside world would keep them reminding about their inadequacies and incapability of doing certain things. Being aware of their own self and knowing their limits, these children will not get affected by those thoughts and actions. They would know what they are and what they can do.
6. It Will Enhance Their Athletic Abilities
Being able to stretch the arms and legs and performing various yoga exercises is not a very easy task. At least for the adults, it takes quite some time to master them. However, for toddlers, the story is different.
As their bodies are agile at this early stage, they would be able to perform the most difficult exercise easily. By doing so, they would be making themselves fit as they grow up.
7. It is a Good Medication for Health Issues
It might sound surprising, but studies claim that one-third of kids aged less than 17 years face symptoms of stress which are stomach aches and headaches. This stress could be caused by so many reasons.
Violence in the family, forced to live without parents, being ignored by parents and much more. Being bullied in class or playgrounds is also one strong reason to feel stressed out.
Yoga can help relieve that stress and serve as a good medication for improving mental strength, focus, and determination.
8. Fosters Bonding Between the Toddler and the Parent
If nothing else, doing yoga together with the child would let you spend some good time with him. In your busy schedule, you may not have all the time in the world to see him memorizing those nursery rhymes, but by doing yoga together you would definitely be able to discover your baby and his interests.
It is true that irrespective of being more flexible than adults, children would not be able to perform all the poses of yoga as like in adults. To keep them engaged and to fuel their interest in doing yoga with you, it is important that you take various steps.
These steps could include doing yoga while playing games or getting him yoga books for children that have lots of images. Keep encouraging your little one to do yoga with you as that will help them grow up to be good and fit human beings.
(Annie Jones is the founder of BoostBodyfit. She is a huge fan of healthy eating and living! She created the blog purely to share her experiences and expertise on health, nutrition, exercise and everything else between. She is also a mother of two where she balances between her passion and biggest joy in life.)
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