Do you have young kids at home and are looking for a way to get them moving while stuck indoors? The Center for Disease Control recommends that parents help children to stay active, yet that can be challenging during this time of self-isolation.
Teresa Power, long time children’s yoga teacher and bestselling author of “The ABCs of Yoga for Kids” and “Little Mouse Adventures: Yoga at the Zoo,” has a solution that offers a new twist to physical activity… a mind-body one. She asserts that “yoga provides a way for kids to naturally unwind and obtain physical activity at the same time.”
The key to instilling a desire in our youth to take up yoga lies in making it fun for them. “For instance,” says Power, “kids love Telephone Pose, which is not only enjoyable but also good for them, as it both strengthens and stretches the hip flexors and opens up the hip area.”
Power suggests that parents play the telephone game with their kids while practicing this fun pose. In the telephone game, one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group.
To do this incorporating yoga, one child sits cross legged and pretends to call the person sitting next to him or her. That child gets in Telephone Pose and ’answers the phone’.” This scenario is reenacted from child to child as the message gets passed down the line. Keeping the tone light and intermixing games with the poses keeps children’s attention.
If kids enjoy their yoga practice, they will stay engaged with it and reap its many benefits: fitness, relaxation, concentration, and awareness. One way to maintain a child’s interest in yoga is to keep the exercises short and lively, thereby helping kids sustain their energy and focus.
Keeping families connected with their children during these uncertain times led Power to create a live online kids yoga storytime and workshop every Wednesday at 10 am PST, where she shares fun yoga poses and games for parents and kids to enjoy together.
Although children’s lives have been turned upside down by this pandemic, parents can use this as an opportunity to get creative and spend quality time with their family doing a healthy activity, such as yoga.
[Content taken from Web Wire Press Release, April 22nd, 2020]
