Fostering Physical and Mental Well-being for Children: A Holistic Approach for Parents & Teachers

In today's world, children face unprecedented mental health challenges, with alarming statistics showing that 50% of teenagers (ages 12-18) will attempt suicide at least once. To combat this crisis, it's essential to foster both physical and mental well-being in children. Movement, particularly through yoga, is crucial for releasing stress and promoting happiness.

How to foster physical and mental well-being in children as parents?

There is a mental health crises all over the world now. New statistics say that 50%, one in every 2, teenagers (kids ages 12-18) will attempt suicide at least once at that that age. That is a lot and a big risk for our children and our students!

First, physical and mental well-being are interconnected… Movement is life; when we stop moving we send messages to our brain that we don’t want to live.

Lack of movement, such as caused by long hours of schooling and use of technology, causes depression. Movement, and especially yoga, releases physical stress and causes the body to secrete all of the happy hormones.

Movement is as natural to humans as eating and sleeping; every little bit counts. We want to create a habit of moving more and of enjoying and wanting to move more, so it's best if we can make moving fun!

In yoga for children, we make moving fun so children want to do more of it! Play is a great way to move while also connecting to each other at the same time. Connection is a big element in mental health!

As a family, we don’t need to do a whole yoga class… A few stretches in the morning to wake up, some more in the afternoon to prepare for a sport, maybe a fun yoga game to connect when we get back home, and a bit more before bed to chill out can all work.

Also negotiating screen time in exchange for movement works well; move for half an hour and you can have screen time for half an hour.

In yoga, we also address the mind directly and learn to treat it like a garden. Taking out the weeds and making our minds beautiful and fertile is so important for our mental health. Wherever we go and whatever we do, we take our minds with us so our mental state affects everything that we do and all of our relationships with the people around us.

Cultivating an open and positive state of mind is essential for our mental health and we can do this, one thought at a time.

What can help to develop children's attention, focus and learning skills through yoga?

Developing focus and attention is like developing a stronger muscle. If you want a strong muscle you will need to lift weights again and again. To develop focus you will need to train your mind by bringing it to focus again and again.

Yoga guides us to focus on our body and our breath and mindfulness helps us to guide our mind to the present moment, again and again. In Rainbow Yoga, we find fun, creative and engaging ways to do all of that and quickly we develop better focus.

There are other ways yoga and mindfulness help us develop focus as well. Stress inhibits our ability to focus and to learn, especially prolonged stress. By calming our minds and activating the parasympathetic nervous system, yoga helps us create a state of mind where focus and learning are easier.

We live in a very fast-paced and stimulating world which often demands more than our brain can handle. It is important to help kids find moments to foster calming and slowing down to ground and re-balance themselves daily so that they can face the world with an inner strength that will allow them to be the best person they can be.

Why yoga and mindfulness are helpful to enhance children's emotional wellbeing?

We are so busy and children are too. Sometimes we are too busy to even notice how we are feeling. But when we don’t know what we are feeling we also don’t understand why we shout at our parent/kids this morning over something really small or why our friend or teacher are annoying us so much today.

When we are aware of our feelings, we understand our reactions and we can take control over our lives. We stop being on an automated pilot and be so reactive and instead, we can choose, again and again, to be the person that we really want to be.

Mindfulness teaches us to get in touch with our inner world and become our own best friend. This enhances our ability to trust ourselves and increases self-confidence.

We are the one person who is there wherever we go and whatever we do, and if that one person, us, is balanced and happy it reflects on everything in a positive way.

How to become an inspiring educator (or parent) facing the new generation?

First, the world needs you. Families and young people need you now more than ever.

Life is hard and we don’t often get enough support or learn the right tools to handle the load.

Yoga and mindfulness can really help. You can help.

Yes… Times are changing quickly and with it also the way we need to relate to young people. There are a few elements in becoming someone who can inspire and influence young people now… The days of “because I said so” are over because young people don’t see us as big authorities anymore and they have access to knowledge and fact-checking at their fingertips.

The way to inspire them is first to treat them as equals. Children are often treated as 2nd-degree citizens in our society; this immediately creates a disconnect between teachers/parents and young people. We must treat them with the same respect we accept to receive from them. We need to value their opinions and accept their ways of being and doing. We need to listen to them at least in equal amounts to what we want to be heard by them.

A new concept in education that is very valuable is CONNECT before CONTENT. We can’t just show up to class and dump the information on the students and expect them to retain it or make it a part of their lives. They are overloaded with information already. To make an impact, to inspire, we must first take the time to connect with our students.

So we come to class before and we stay after, we show interest in the kids and in their likes and dislikes, we build class themes around topics that they value and that they are interested in and all of this helps them feel that we care and that what we have to share with them is of benefit to them.

And of course, words are empty if they are not backed up by practice. So it is best if we teach from our own experiences. And that’s not hard because life is challenging for us too and if we have made an effort to overcome the obstacles in our paths, if we took the time to cultivate peace and kindness in our hearts and our families despite how hard it is, then we have something to teach. Then we can really be an inspiration 

 

Want to learn how to share yoga and mindfulness with your children at home or with your students at school?

Join one of our Rainbow Kids Yoga Teacher Trainings today! Click here to sign up!

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MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE WITH YOGA AND MINDFULNESS

Rainbow Yoga trained more than 30,000 Kids Yoga Teachers since 2007. We make yoga fun for children and young people of all age groups and for the whole family too! Our yoga consists of many poses and stretches that have different physical benefits for our health and well-being, breathing, relaxation, meditation and mindfulness exercises for our minds, and social interaction, playfulness, meaning, deep life lessons and fun for our spirit.

Thinking about the impact of all those amazing certified yoga teachers, educators, parents and therapists we have trained to teach yoga to children and yoga for teens; we are making a huge difference for the next generation bringing peace, love, kindness and resilience into their lives. Education departments, schools, health programs and individuals in many countries have adopted yoga as a form of exercise and a method to decrees stress and increase wellbeing. We are the biggest and most-loved kid’s yoga teacher training in the world and we are here tp provide you with everything you will need to teach successful, exciting, meaningful, engaging and fun yoga to children, teenagers and families.

THE BEST ONLINE YOGA TEACHER TRAINING – LEARN TOOLS TO HELP KIDS AND FAMILIES FIND CONNECTION, RELEASE STRESS, INCREASE RESILIENCE AND BRING ON A SENSE OF WELL BEING AND MENTAL BALANCE

Rainbow Kids Yoga offers the most comprehensive, practical, and engaging children yoga teacher training certification in the world! Our course will enable you to deliver children yoga classes that will connects your students to themselves, each other, and the environment. Through unique and engaging practices of mindfulness and yoga your students and community will be able to find connections, enhance well-being and thrive as grounded, integrated and well balanced individuals.

At our training, all while having fun, you will become a children yoga instructor through a lot of experiential practice, insightful theory, yoga poses and sequences, mindfulness practices and relaxation. You will learn how to build fun, engaging, and fitness-level-appropriate children yoga classes for all ages, from toddlers to teenagers. At our kid’s yoga teacher training you will find over 300 videos presenting how to make yoga poses accessible and fun! Believe it or not, yoga can be extremely boring for children and for adults too… In Rainbow Yoga, we make yoga in a fun so that children learn easily and want to do more of it. Yoga is so good for you, but for children to want to want to do yoga you will need to learn to spice it all up and this is what our kid’s yoga online teacher training is for!

This is the perfect resource for yoga teachers, parents, educators and therapists to find and discover hundreds of yoga poses, yoga games and mindfulness practices for children in a way that makes it is easy to learn and easy to enjoy.

Yoga poses for kids: Yoga encourages a positive and healthy lifestyle for the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of children as it helps in the development of strength, stamina, and endurance, high levels of positive energy, resilience, focus, self-awareness, and awareness of our environment.

Yoga for children empowers them with increased concentration, calm, peace, and contentment at a mental level leading to inner and outer peace and harmony. The Rainbow Kids Yoga Teacher Training includes a digital manual (a hard copy that can be purchased) as part of the course. This is specialized online yoga teacher training. Here we will focus on how to teach yoga to children and teens, and how to help them release stress, relax, stretch, energize – All in creative and fun ways while taking into consideration their unique needs, whether they are physical, social, mental, or emotional. 

You will learn to teach the youngest yogis and those with emotional and mental challenges techniques to assist them with impulse control and self-regulation. Our courses provide a platform and a foundation to promote the healthy development of the hearts, bodies, and minds of young individuals.

The Rainbow Kids Yoga Training is the largest and most well-regarded Kids Yoga Teacher Training in the world. Our graduates teach everywhere using our diploma including schools, kindergartens, daycare centers, early learning centers, Yoga studios, gyms, fitness centers, birthday parties, private and group classes and more.

 

AFFORDABLE LEARNING AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

Join our Yoga Revolution and become a kids’ yoga teacher today through our online yoga teacher training or in-person yoga certification courses. You will be left with a smile on your face, a wealth of knowledge and an ignited spirit to spread the love and joy of yoga.

For our online training, you can allow 24 hours to receive your access and for physical products such as the Rainbow Kids Yoga Book, you can allow 2-4 weeks to receive it by mail. The books are printed on demand before being shipped, but it is worth the wait 😊

HISTORY OF RAINBOW YOGA

Rainbow Yoga is a fun and constantly evolving family mission and lovingly born in 2007, to give people the tools to teach fun, engaging, and creative in=person and online yoga classes for kids, teens, families, partners, and communities. Rainbow Yoga is interactive and social and all about connection; we touch, hug, move, breathe and co-create together our yoga magically and playfully.

Rainbow Yoga offers a variety of unique and comprehensive teacher training certification courses all over the world offering a well-rounded, in-depth learning experience through a combination of play, practical theory, and fun.The Rainbow Yoga Teacher training is renowned for being captivating, dynamic, loving, and life changing. It is condensed with a lifetime of knowledge and hands-on experience from the Founders of Rainbow Yoga, Gopala, and Angel Yaffa. Delivered by world-class faculty around the world.