One day, Amelia noticed my wife’s yoga mat sitting out and asked if we could do some yoga. I figured there had to be some for kids on Youtube, so we did a quick search.
Wow. There are A LOT of yoga videos aimed at children.
I never thought I would be sitting on our carpet doing children’s yoga. But here we are…and my daughter loves it.
Everyone is looking for new ways to keep their kids busy, and come Fall might be looking for ways to fulfill that gym requirement, especially on rainy days when they can’t play outside. Whatever your child’s age or grade, when school is open they get some form of exercise. Now that WE are the teachers, physical activity can be overlooked.
According to the CDC, “Regular physical activity can help children and adolescents improve cardiorespiratory fitness, build strong bones and muscles, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, and reduce the risk of developing health conditions.”
Marlynn Wei, MD, JD of Harvard Health Blog agrees. “Yoga and mindfulness offer psychological benefits for children as well. A growing body of research has already shown that yoga can improve focus, memory, self-esteem, academic performance, and classroom behavior, and can even reduce anxiety and stress in children.”
Those are some great reasons to make sure our kids are exercising daily, especially in the days of Switches, iPads and online learning. But another key focus in our current situation is anxiety and depression. We can’t always tell when our children are feeling these things, so daily exercise is a good idea.
That’s where children’s yoga comes in. There are plenty of instructors and youtubers creating yoga content just for children. And they are all as simple as heading to YouTube.
As I went through the choices, Amelia yelled “Cosmic Kids Yoga!” After a quick Q & A session it turns out she had been doing it in Pre-K all along. So I started on and she sat right down into a meditation pose.
After a moment, she asked me for oranges. Apparently, in school they always had fruit while doing yoga, and I wasn’t going to argue against healthy eating. So I left the room to slice some oranges for her, and when I came back, she was totally into the lesson.
This particular yoga instructor, Jaime, does a great job reaching children. Each episode has a theme, such as Frozen, Trolls, Minecraft and Spider-man. Then there are other topics, such as the episode “What is Mindfulness and How to do it.”
The Cosmic Kids Yoga website even offers lesson plans and handouts for sale, and a blog where they share ideas and advice. There definitely other channels of yoga for kids, but this is our go-to channel. The video length and themes seem perfect to us.
One of the more recent blog posts is about dealing with anxiety in children during the pandemic. We watched this one together, and then had a chat about how she was feeling about all of these changes in our life.
These days, I have added yoga to our regular weekly lessons, and sometimes she even requests it. Even in the evening she will ask my wife if they can do it.
The beauty of yoga is that it can be a solitary or group event if you have multiple children or a pod.
It’s helping. My daughter is much more calm and relaxed than she was a few weeks ago, and it gives me a chance to get some work done while she poses, stretches and meditates. As long as I remember to bring her those orange slices.
Pod of One 