Yoga’s popularity can be connected to its basic benefits such as stretching and improving awareness of the body. Yoga helps to develop a deep mind-body connection. In this way, yoga can be very beneficial for children. Children encounter emotional, social, and physical challenges. Yoga can be used to ease kids through these challenges by giving them breathing techniques, behavioral guidelines, and physical postures. These benefits continue even after the kids get off their mats. Kids can use what they learn during their yoga practices to practice breathing and concentration in all aspects of their life. This allows children to take new situations and conflicts head on and deal with them in a healthy way.

Yoga incorporates all muscles in the body which does not only promote kids’ physical strength but also teaches them about what their body is capable of doing. No matter if a pose is taken standing, sitting, or lying down, each pose challenges a different group of muscles and shows different ways that these muscles function.

Balance is an important aspect of yoga. Balancing poses are used to promote both mental and physical clarity and stability. Even if a child falls while trying to achieve a balancing pose, they learn to stay calm and get back up to try it again. Once they achieve these balancing poses they are filled with a sense of accomplishment which is very important to children’s mental health.

Concentration is a universal problem for children. Practicing yoga poses encourages kids to clear their mind and focus all of their attention on achieving various poses. This concentration and focus learned during yoga practice can easily transfer over into school and improve grades.

Confidence and self-esteem can be boosted by the practice of yoga. Yoga helps to instill confidence into young children. It helps children connect more with themselves and promotes them to try new and different things in the future. They learn to persevere, be patient, and work toward their goals on and off the mat. Yoga can provide crucial building blocks to raising a confident and successful child.

Yoga is beneficial to children of all ages, but has found to be specifically beneficial to children with special needs such as autism and ADHD. Yoga has shown to reduce children’s aggressive behavior, social withdrawal, and hyperactivity. Yoga practice seems to play to the strengths of autistic children which not only boosts their confidence but reduces their stress.

Many adults use yoga to promote mental and physical well-being in their everyday lives. This same practice can help children develop a stable mental and physical well-being as well. Children face a lot of challenges in their lives, not only physical but emotional. By incorporating yoga into a child’s everyday routine they become more self-aware and are better able to cope and respond healthily to everyday struggles. Children practicing yoga is not only beneficial to the child, but also the parent! A happy child leads to a happy parent.