Yoga for Children - Why

- Ashwini Surpur

“Children are essentially spiritual” - says Dr. Lisa Miller, Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University, Teachers College in her book Spiritual Child. 

She elaborates “There are many peer-reviewed scientific articles that show spirituality is the key to wellness in the child’s life. Biologically, neurologically, and psychologically, spirituality is part of our nature and is foundational to thriving”. 

She also opines “Spirituality is the central organizing principle of inner life in teenagers. It helps them to find meaning and purpose in life as they grow into adults. Awareness of spiritual development creates opportunities to prepare teens for their individuation, identity development, emotional resilience and healthy relationships”. We also have noted in our yoga circles that children who have grown up with some spiritual background and religious practices in the household are better at coping with difficulties in life;  better than children who have no religious background.

Dr. Miller further notes “Even a single powerful childhood experience of spiritual awareness can be a lasting source of guidance through adulthood”. For example, you may have recollected a dialogue or discussion with your grandma, your aunt or uncle, or even your parents during some difficult situations in your life. It may have helped you handle the situation better, or may have saved you from the trauma of misery. On the other hand, one of the family members or a teacher may have inspired you immensely in your childhood, which would remain as an unforgettable spiritual experience all your life. 

Dr. Miller elaborates on the concept of Personal spirituality. She defines personal spirituality as  “your relationship with a transcendent reality or higher Self”. This spiritual companionship is essential for children. We know that children live the story of a Disney movie or Harry Potter in the West as they grow up watching or reading these stories. In a similar manner, a child’s personal spiritual friend could be Lord Krishna as a boy with all his mischiefs from the story of Mahabharata; or Dhruva, a little boy from Hindu mythology who meditated to get a seat on his father’s lap.  The child develops a personal spiritual relationship with characters like Krishna or Dhruva as they grow up listening to such stories. Personal spirituality becomes the inner life of the child, constantly guiding and lifting their spirit. Dr. Miller says “Personal spirituality  is the most potent form of protection against suffering in adolescence. It reduces the risk of depression, substance abuse, aggression, and high-risk behaviors, including physical risk taking and a sexuality devoid of emotional intimacy”.

Dr. Miller brings the importance of spiritual awakening as the child grows into an adolescent. “This developmental phenomenon is seen in every culture, and research shows clinical and genetic evidence for this adolescent surge of spiritual awakening. Parents and children share a parallel developmental arc in which a child’s need and yearning for spiritual exploration coincides with a similar ‘quest’ phase in adult life. For parent and child, meaning and connection often lead to spiritual self-discovery.” 

What is Spirituality?

To quote Dr. Miller again: “ Spirituality is an inner sense of relationship to a higher power that is loving and guiding. The word we give to this higher power might be God, nature, spirit, the universe, the creator, or other words that represent a divine presence. But the important point is that spirituality encompasses our relationship and dialogue with this higher presence. Spirituality helps us to listen to the heartbeat of the living universe and to be in rhythm with the universe”.

Religion includes spirituality. Dr. Miller says, “It’s through the beliefs and practice of their own religion that they build and foster a relationship with God. Rigid adherence to creed without a sacred personal relationship is very different from natural spirituality”.  

Spirituality brings optimism; teaches children to handle setbacks, gives them confidence. The lifestyle of spiritual contemplation gives them an eternal friend during social isolation. As per Dr. Lisa Miller, “Optimism has been shown to be teachable, not just inborn. For adolescents who develop a strong spiritual compass within a religious tradition or outside of it, spirituality manifests itself as an inner awareness or a sense of relationship with a higher power”

For generations, parents directly or indirectly conveyed some sense of spirituality to their children through their culture wherein God, or a transcendental entity was the central theme of every activity, celebrations, or ceremonies of grief. Today, we may not have the bandwidth or societal setup to build an elaborate spiritual theme in our life. But even simple daily rituals such as lighting a lamp or a prayer at the dinner table can go a long way in bringing spiritual awareness to children.

Paradise Lost

These days, more than ever, Children have very less attention span due to stimulations that the child is subjected to from a very young age. 

A 2013 Gallup poll of 500,000 students in grades five through 12 found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students were “engaged” with school, that is, attentive, inquisitive, and generally optimistic. By high school, the number dropped to four in 10. A 2015 follow-up study found that less than a third of 11th-graders felt engaged. When Gallup asked teens in 2004 to select the top three words that describe how they feel in school from a list of 14 adjectives, “bored” was chosen most often, by half the students. “Tired” was second, at 42 percent. Only 2 percent said they were never bored. Source: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/01/bored-out-their-minds

Just a few decades ago, if one could visit an Indian village or in the countryside America, children seemed to have a slower and relaxed childhood and with that, they have an opportunity to practice patience and self-centeredness on their own. For example, children in rural areas of India can sit and wait for a bus or a train without doing much. They can sit for a pooja or a ritual without having a toy in their hand. But children in modern settings are not trained to do so.

I once visited a Vyasanga Kendra in Bangalore where the teacher asked the children to fold their hands, close their eyes and chant. They chanted in such a beautiful synchrony. After that, the teacher started talking to us and forgot to tell them to open their eyes. We looked at them after a good 3-4 mins and the children were still sitting without opening their eyes until the teacher asked them to open their eyes. This kind of training is necessary for our children.

We ask our children to focus and learn. We all grew up being told to focus in the same way. By just telling us to focus we cannot focus. As Swami Sarvapriyananda (Ramakrishna Order) says, we need to practice concentration to get better at it. One needs a culture and lifestyle of focusing. Our ancient societies had ways to bring this focus and mindfulness (slowness)  into our lives through religious worship and rituals in which every member of the family somehow got involved without asking too many questions, rather without rebelling too much during our childhood. When religion lost to rationalism, along with it, we also lost ways to calm our minds. 

Hence, we can say that most of us have some attention deficit in the sense that we cannot focus or give attention to one thing for long. If a lesson or a video is too slow, we get bored, if it is too fast, we get lost and again lose interest, even if we have approached the subject with interest in the beginning. Modern educators are cashing in on this as well and launching videos such as “2-minute Neuroscience”. What to talk about a child who has not approached the school out of his/her own interest, but parents make the child go through it all? Take an example where someone forces you to sit through an online video lecture day after day with your video on, and watching you to make sure you don’t move away from the screen, won’t it be a torture? Such is the state for the tender growing up minds of our children. It is a grave mistake to put the burden of learning and focusing on our children when they are not given time to slow down and learn mindfulness. Spirituality alone can help them take on the onerous task of sitting through hours of class time without feeling burdened. 

However, the sad state is that most parents think that spirituality is for the old and miserable ones, not children. Dr. Lisa Miller says “A significant number of adults from 25-50 years olds in the West  today have been raised with no spiritual structure, no spiritual community, no spiritual conversation or teaching, and often no spiritual practice. One-third of young adults (18-25) in America report ‘no religion’ “

Since, as adults, we have no knowledge of the philosophical meaning behind our rituals and practices, we decide to not teach our children. In the beginning, when we are raising our children, avoiding all spirituality and rituals attached to it may seem like a small deviance from our parents and grandparents' style of raising the children, but it actually can derail an important developmental process in our children and can have lifelong implications for children.

Dr. Lisa says “Research in medicine and psychology has found that people with a developed spirituality get sick less, are happier, and feel more connected and less isolated. In the context of illness, people with a developed spirituality show positive effects for resilience and healing.” We have ignored our children in more ways than we can imagine. Apart from our own apathy towards spirituality, there are other contributing factors for children’s lack of spiritual foundation:

  • Nuclear Families: A generation or two ago, families were large with grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles living under the same roof or in the same town with a close knit relationship and perhaps sharing a common business, agriculture or other occupation. This provided children with a go-to person when they had trouble with one or both parents or were facing a personal trauma that they cannot share with their parents. This support is missing today.

  • Parents are too busy for their children owing to necessities of modern comforts and rising education and healthcare costs. Apart from this, parents themselves are in the rat race of making more money or building a career. Children are stuck with TV, Smart Phone, internet, video games, and social media as their babysitting facilities.

  • Children are also under a distressing social isolation with or without COVID pandemic. There was a time when children met in the neighborhood and played games on the streets or nearby parks. But in the urban and cosmopolitan setting where most children grow up, meeting with friends needs to be arranged as a playdate by the parents. Otherwise, the child is alone or with just a sibling. Apart from this, the ills of Cyberbullying, and peer-pressure of various kinds such as to own gadgets, and to perform better in school haunt our children day and night.

  • General culture of hankering for money, empty fame, material success and cynicism have become toxic dominant values that children are osmotically corrupted with.

Stress and Mental Illness

Young children are under stress – Severe sleep deprivation and intense stimulation are the features of early childhood these days. Apart from this, negative reinforcement by way of comparison with siblings, peers and criticism by parents and teachers alike adds to their trauma early in their life. Some of the examples of criticism are when parents call their children lazy if the child is a habitual late sleeper. Little do they know that humans can be genetically either night owls or morning larks. Children with ADHD also have low muscle tone. Instead of helping the child develop physical strength, parents and family members may criticize them as lazy. These insensitive remarks, however subtle, only harm children’s self-esteem.

Dr. Lisa Miller discusses the topic of research on Depressed mothers in her book “Spiritual Child”. She says “depression is one of the most potent risk factors for child and adolescent depression (half of the children can develop depression by age 20) (https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/313689)”

Parent‘s and Teacher‘s Role

If a child grows up with Positive reinforcement, they have the potential to become healthy and happy adults. This does not mean that children should be pampered and spoilt. Being firm is not being mean. Educating and making the child understand that there are consequences for their misdeeds is a perfect way to parent. It however requires patience to be able to discipline them with compassion. If parents are themselves discontent and unhappy, their patience wears out quickly and they will develop knee-jerk reactions towards children.  Some parents tend to be over-lenient so children can be off their backs. “Get them what they ask so I can go about my way” may lead to spoiling them. Yelling at them and punishing them may lead to discontent and unhealthy relationships and closed communication channels between parents and children. 

Hence patient and positive reinforcement is the apt technique. However, it is a learned technique for most of the adults as they may have had their own childhood models set by their parents or their community which they may need to let go, unlearn and take up the new and healthy parenting style.  

Rewards versus goal setting - Some parents use rewards as the way to make children follow the rules of the home, to do home chores or to study. However, recent studies have shown that goal setting and not rewards work better in bringing up responsible children. 

Spirituality is the founding principle which both parent and child have to foster together. Dr. Lisa Miller further writes “How we parent our children for spirituality from birth through adolescence can open this developmental pathway for them—or shut it down. We often speak of a “moral compass” that guides us to choose right over wrong. That moral compass is built upon the spiritual compass, which finds direction from the higher self guided by the transcendent relationship.”

Shared spiritual experience is important for children - passing on good values for example doing a sewa activity or simply forgiveness, compassion.  Our children need us to support their quest for meaning in life at all ages.

Dr. Lisa proves the protective effect of shared spirituality on children in her book Spiritual Child — ”Study showed that if the mother and her child reported the same personal relationship with a religion (shared spirituality) the incidence of depression reduces by 80 percent. The protective effect in the grandchildren was even greater than in the previous generation: now it was 90 percent”

Hence spirituality is not a nice to have feature but a must for both Parents and Teachers. Children emulate their parents and teachers. They may not follow what parents tell them, but can be inspired by the parents and teachers’ good conduct, character, integrity, and rituals that lead to spiritual experience. It is not what we teach that makes a difference for children, but how we teach matters. It is how we bring them up — through positive rituals, lifestyle, habits that we as adults follow.

Paradise Regained - Yoga for Excellence

In a given cohort of Children, most of the children are average in their personalities, learning, and cognitive abilities while some 5-10% would be above average and perhaps a similar percentage of children would be below average. Most of the education is delivered in a factory-like setting teaching everyone the same way.  But the special groups on either end of the spectrum, the above average gifted and talented and the below average children with learning problems, or focus issues are left out in this equation. 

Yoga helps everyone. It helps the overachievers and the underachievers for their overall development. Yoga teaches patience and tolerance to those high achievers who might need to be in a class which is slower than their pace. Similarly, Yoga teaches will power, confidence, and concentration to those who are struggling. Sometimes, children get overwhelmed when they don’t understand some concepts. Instead of moving on and focusing on what the teacher is teaching next, they would be stuck in the past moment trying to understand what was said. If they learn to let go of the tough concepts and grasp whatever they can in the class, they probably can come back home and learn what they missed in the class. Staying in the present moment is the way to develop focus and that alone brings them learning skills. Mental awareness during their studies helps develop memory retention and finally relaxing after every learning session helps them develop associative memory where they develop the ability to think deeper, associate concepts with real life situations, and develop intuition. 

Techniques for Children

Gazing helps children to improve their focus and attention. In fact, one of the tests that is done for children to measure their attention span is by asking them to gaze on objects as instructed. An observed characteristic of some ADHD individuals is their inability to follow simple instructions related to focusing visually on two objects in succession. When asked to look at a red pencil and then at a green pencil and back to a red pencil, they often look at the other pencil before instructed to do so. A test for ADHD - Pencil test

Classic Vrkshasana (Tree Pose) makes them gaze at one point as they stand on one leg. If they don’t gaze at one point, they could lose their balance. With repeated practice, they will learn to stand still, gaze fixed and focus on a point. 

Balancing practices help children develop focus as well. Again Vrkshasana (Tree Pose) or Veerabhadrasana (Warrior Pose) helps them to stand balancing their body along with giving them physical strength in the legs and the core. 

Chanting - Sound is the other way to calm down the mind, since the mind thinks in terms of chatter. Simple chants of Aum help them calm down the inner chatter.  Chanting Bhramari in shashankasana (Child Pose) is shown to help with ADHD. Children can begin their homework with this practice.

Challenging yoga poses - Yoga poses help them *play* with their body. Practicing yoga helps children strengthen their body and mind. Strong body makes a strong mind. Strengthening the body can also help children focus and learn better because their overall physical and mental health improves. Challenging them to practice yoga poses and attempting to bring their head to the knee in a seated forward bend, or hands to the ground in standing forward bending can be a game along with building motivation, and self-confidence. When they regularly practice yoga in schools as a weekly regimen, their awareness improves. It also sets the stage towards a healthy lifestyle as adults. A benchmark of health and happiness once tasted, will always be a thing to look forward to as they grow up.

Acknowledgements



Ashwini Surpur

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