When To Introduce Kids To Meditation And How To Help Them Meditate

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The best gift that you can give your child is the life skills required to live a successful and contented life. You child must know how to think rather than what to think. These life skills, help them in their development overall. They help in sailing through their milestones smoothly, especially in phases of adolescence, academics and the time of annual examinations. They can handle themselves without your supervision if they are taught what to do and how to do things on their own. Meditation opens up their mind to higher awareness and equip them to face world better with their new found confidence and knowledge about things. Meditation can be started at an age, when they are ready to take this on. Let us see what age is right to begin meditation practice for your precocious kid.

The Right Age For Meditation

1. It is relatively easier to make your grownups sit and practice meditation calmly. What about kids younger than that? So how early is too early to introduce meditation?
2. At around the age of 4-5 they develop a fully developed awareness of others' behaviour. At the age of 4 or 5 which is the best age to teach children to improve their learning and thinking process so that they become better learners and build their resilience to changes and challenges. Children, compared to adults, have freer minds that are less cluttered with thoughts. So, they can live in the present moment and retain a state of mind where there are not many thoughts. They can preserve this state of mind by introducing themselves to meditation so that it leads to excellent development of mental faculties.
3. However, children should be readied for meditation when they are ready mentally for it. As the learned and the experienced say, children can start at the age of five years, meditation for around five to ten minutes. But It should begin an activity loaded with fun and not forced on the child as a compulsory chore because the child may eventually lose interest in it.

Teaching Your Kid How To Meditate

1. For very young kids, you can try this method. Let them take a deep breath and utter OM aloud and exhale simultaneously. Surya namaskar poses followed by yoga nidra can achieve excellent results. Take them through a rigorous dance session or just through some junping jacks and then allow them to sit still for a few minutes.
2. Meditation starts with breath and ends with breath. While meditating, children can learn to notice the small things such as the sound of the breathing, the way it goes in through the throat, then the stomach and then comes out through the same channel in the same way. You can also have a peaceful musical track running in the background to help them focus better.
3. A session of yogasanas will certainly tire them enough to sit in one place ready to focus and meditate. If your kid is in the 8-to-12-year age group, pranayamas for just five minutes can be a good alternative to meditation as it is equally effective on kids.
4. Encourage your child to be consistent, stick to the same time, same place and same clothing on an everyday basis to achieve the best results. This will help them to be more mindful in their meditative pursuit.
5. Allow time for yourself and your child to get comfortable with the pursuit. With time it gets easier. Deep breathing at bedtime is the best thing they could consider doing before catching up with sleep.
6. If you have a teenager at home, you could make him sit in a group and carry on with the meditation exercise. However, your 8- to 12-year-olds, can play for around 30 minutes and then get ready for a 10-minute meditation session. If your kid is too tired to meditate after the play, encourage him or her to do the Yoganidra which is even more relaxing than normal sleep.
7. Advise your teenager to try the short-guided meditations for curbing his overthinking. The teenagers often ride the roller coasters when it comes to emotions and are overwhelmed by the changes in their bodies and the new situational challenges which they never had to encounter earlier. Through Guided meditation, these intense emotions can be curbed and stabilised.
8. Teens can try deep breathing before they begin a test or an exam or even a sports activity at school. Before and after timeouts they can try deep breathing.

Disclaimer: The information is based on assumptions and information available on the internet and the accuracy or reliability is not guaranteed. Boldsky does not confirm any inputs or information related to the article and our only purpose is to deliver information. Kindly consult the concerned expert before practising or implementing any information and assumption.