Meditation
Meditation can be a powerful tool for children's overall well-being. By allowing the mind, body, and spirit to rest, meditation can lead to mental, physical, and spiritual benefits.
Shelli Hanson
Early Childhood Teacher @ Clarence Street
Meditation can be a powerful tool for children’s overall well-being. By allowing the mind, body, and spirit to rest, meditation can lead to mental, physical, and spiritual benefits.
For kids, mindfulness meditation has been shown to improve attention and behavior, and research suggests that it can help with conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.
Other types of meditation practices such as movement-based meditation and cultivating positive emotions like gratitude and compassion can be beneficial for children.
By incorporating meditation into their daily routine, kids can experience a range of benefits that can help them in school, at home, and other aspects of their lives.
You May Need
You can try this on your own or by using a meditation app such as:
- Headspace for Kids – The popular mindfulness app now has a kids’ series with breathing exercises, visualizations, and meditations. It is divided into five categories: kindness, focus, sleep, calm, and wake-up. Available for ages 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. Families can also sign up for a full plan.
- Mindful Meditation on Alexa – A skill set from Amazon that offers 5 different meditation types and lengths, from 3-minute breathwork-focused meditation to longer 10 and 20-minute tracks. Also includes a “power down” feature for nights when kids can’t sleep. Suitable for ages 4+.
- Smiling Mind – An evidence-based app that provides mindfulness sessions for both children and adults. It starts with a series of questions to focus the mind and offers easy-to-follow meditation exercises. Suitable for ages 4+.
- Sound Mind – This app provides music therapy, audio and visual therapy, journaling and mood tracking, affirmations and wellness tasks, and brain training games. It also features a custom character to be the user’s “mental health buddy.” Suitable for ages 4+.
- Calm – The Calm app includes a Kids section with meditations to help children learn calming techniques like belly breaths and loving kindness. It also offers sleep stories for kids 3+. Some content is suitable for children as young as 3, but parents may need to assist younger kids in using the app.
Method/Steps
If you don’t want to use an app here is one you can try:
This guided meditation brings a visual component to a very simple deep breathing exercise. You can do this standing or seated.
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- Begin by relaxing your body and taking deep breaths in and out through your nose.
- Inhale slowly and deeply, filling your belly with air as though you’re inflating a balloon. Expand your belly as much as possible.
- Exhale slowly through your nose, imagining that you’re slowly letting the air out of the balloon.
- Encourage your children to feel their entire body relax with each exhale, as if the air being released from the balloon is carrying away all of their tension. You can even make a “hissing” noise to encourage them to exhale slowly.
- Repeat these steps for several minutes, taking slow, deep breaths and focusing on the relaxing sensation in your body with each exhale.
To keep younger children engaged while teaching them the breathing exercise, you can add some extra details and make it more fun. Children under the age of 6 tend to enjoy extra movement when learning to focus on their breath. To get them started, have them stand up in a relaxed way and follow these steps:
- Ask your child to think of their favourite colour and imagine a giant balloon in that colour in their mind.
- Next, have them take a slow, deep breath in through their nose and imagine filling their belly with air, as if they’re trying to blow up the giant balloon. For added effect, they can stretch their arms overhead to represent the balloon expanding.
- Once the balloon is full, have them hold their breath at the top and then pretend to pop the balloon by gently poking their belly. As they exhale, they can let themselves fall down, as if the air is slowly releasing from the balloon.
Tips
- The length of time and frequency of meditating can vary for different practices and ages. But, pediatricians typically recommend that kids before and during preschool year practice a few minutes per day.
- Try incorporating deep breathing into your children’s daily bedtime routine—it can help them wind down for the night and make meditation easier to do when other situations arise.
- As young children learn to manage strong emotions, deep breathing can be part of the process—especially before and after time outs.
- There are multiple ways to learn different practices of meditation. There are books, audio recordings, videos, online training, websites, and even smartphone apps to help children meditate. Choose and practice the one that works the best for you and your child, and enjoy a calmer body, mind and spirit.
Updated 8 May, 2024
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