Can a 3-Year-Old Do Yoga?

There is a generation coming up – that of yoga children. Kids are learning yoga in playschools, through parents who practice, and with friends.

However, it is only natural to wonder if a young kid three years old can do yoga.

Kids can be introduced to yoga at any age, including when they are three years old. How yoga is introduced and taught to kids can vary depending upon their age. Yoga must be adapted to age, so kids find it engaging. However, it is never too early for kids to start yoga.

In this article, we make you more familiar with yoga for kids by talking about its benefits for toddlers, how you can do yoga with a toddler, and how you can explain yoga to a child.

Let us start by looking at the benefits of yoga for toddlers.

Benefits of yoga for toddlers and in early childhood

The benefits of yoga are as relevant and as enormous for toddlers as they are for adults.

Here are some ways in which yoga is beneficial for toddlers:

1. Establishes a stronger connection with your toddler

Yoga with a toddler is a shared experience.

A certain degree of physical contact happens while doing yoga with a toddler, which helps create a deeper bonding.

It also helps toddlers engage with a parent or a caregiver more playfully and intimately.

2. Creates awareness of the body

A 3-year-old is still discovering their body.

Yoga helps toddlers gain an understanding and awareness of how they can work with their bodies.

It helps them get a better sense of possible movements, sensations, and abilities.

3. Promotes development of motor skills

The repetition of postures and movement in yoga can help toddlers with brain development.

Also, working with both the left and the right side of the body along with crossing the body’s midline helps stimulate the brain and improve cognition and sensorimotor integration.

The next obvious question is – how do you do yoga with a toddler?

Here are our constructive tips.

How to do yoga with a toddler

Yoga with a toddler is very different from how yoga is taught to adults.

It varies in the way a class is sequenced, structured, and taught.

Here are some ways in which you can make yoga for toddlers engaging:

1. Keep it fun

To make yoga more exciting and relatable to toddlers, add some games to the practice.

One such game is to ask kids to make sounds like the corresponding animals in yoga postures like cat-cow pose, cobra pose, or downward-facing dog.

As a parent, you can also make yoga playful for toddlers by doing it with them and helping them with their movement, like in a baby massage.

A long sequence of poses can be boring for kids. You can make it more engaging by inserting frequent breaks of songs and stories.

2. Repetition is important

Kids learn through repetition, and mastering a pose can give them a sense of achievement.

Repetition also gives kids a sense of safety as they feel they know what to expect.

3. Include affirmations

Yoga can help toddlers develop a strong and positive sense of self, which can be enabled by including affirmations with poses.

For example, while in mountain pose, kids can be encouraged to feel strong, grounded, and safe using affirmations like “I am strong” or “I am confident.”

4. Introduce meditation

Meditation and mindfulness can be made accessible for toddlers, though it can be practiced in a very different way, sometimes even in the form of a smile.

Stories are a great way to help kids connect with feelings and valuable messages.

Kids can learn about kindness, gratitude, happiness, and sadness; there can be laughing games; bumblebee humming can bring focus to the breath.

5. Practice patience

When teaching yoga to kids, it is essential to adapt the practice accordingly.

Kids can feel very different energetically from one moment to the next.

They can be in one of their moods of being grumpy, or they could be tired or hungry.

Not being too rigid and keeping patience and compassion at all times is key to ensuring that the innate curiosity and creativity of kids can manifest.

And now, if you are having trouble explaining yoga to a child, we make that simple for you.

Explaining yoga to a child

It can feel daunting to explain yoga to a child in a way that they can understand.

We can help with these helpful tips:

1. Use language that is easy to understand

You can drop a couple of Sanskrit words now and then, but for the most part, yoga has to be introduced to children in a language that they understand.

The less jargon in your language, the quicker kids will grasp what you are trying to teach them.

2. Adopt a flexible approach to teaching techniques

The nuances of alignment, anatomy, and breathing are best left to adults.

With kids, it is more important that they feel confident in the posture than making sure that the body is perfectly aligned or that they understand technicalities.

This is also applicable to activities like meditation and breathing.

For kids to understand and benefit, making appropriate changes and being flexible with how things are done is vital.

3. Take the help of tools like stories and posters

Storytelling comes to the rescue for most things.

With the aid of a good story, the history of yoga, its purpose, and its various concepts can be simplified so children can easily understand.

Drawing also helps kids visualize stories and even postures.

It is also more engaging and will help kids with learning faster.

4. Relate yoga poses to real-life objects

The best part is that the names of most yoga poses come from things we see around us, which is excellent for helping kids connect with what they are doing.

So, instead of using a term like Badhakonasana, the butterfly pose can make the asana more relatable for kids.

That’s how you can do it for almost every pose – cats and cows, camel, tabletop, chair, cobra, and the likes.

Conclusion

Kids learn a lot from observation.

When you commit to your own yoga practice, you will find that that itself becomes a learning resource to the child.

The sooner children are introduced to a practice of yoga, the more they will be able to integrate yoga into their lives, which is not just the physical practice of yoga but more a way of life.

Need some inspiration for yoga for kids? This is an excellent article by Harvard Health with some fun and straightforward yoga exercises.