The Benefits of Yoga For Children’s Health and Behavior

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I am Dr. Nicole and today, and on today’s episode, we’re talking about how yoga can support children’s health and behavior. I’ve been a fan of yoga personally for many years, both as a form of physical activity as well as a stress-reducer and there are so many research studies coming out showing the benefits that yoga can have for people, everything from positive effects on blood pressure and heart disease to migraines, depression, anxiety, just a really powerful tool for people in lots of areas, and I find yoga to be really helpful for supporting children and teens in my practice and their parents and other family members too. 

So I’ve invited Julie Pate from YogaKids to join us on the show today to talk about her experiences with children and yoga and how yoga can benefit kids, both children who don’t have any challenging symptoms as well as those who have neurodevelopmental issues, mental health issues, those kinds of things. So, let me tell you a little bit about Julie. She’s a certified yoga therapist, and the event and sales manager for YogaKids International. Julie has been teaching yoga to children and adults since 1999. She’s currently pursuing a masters in counseling in National Louis University and plans to pursue a career merging traditional counseling with the healing tools of yoga. I love that. Julie lives in the Western Suburbs of Chicago with her husband and two teenage sons. Welcome to the show, Julie!

Julie Pate:

Thank you Nicole, I’m excited to be here and talk about one of my favorite topics.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Awesome, I love it. Such a great thing, let’s dive right in. I’d love to have you talk a bit about your journey. How did you find yoga and particularly, how did you come to be working with children and yoga?

Julie Pate:

Well, I was — My degree was in PE and I taught fitness back in the 90s and just loved the way it made me feel. It got rid of physical tension, mental tension, it helped me deal with any kind of stress that I had. It’s been a lifelong journey for me, and the first training I really did was with YogaKids. It was way back in the late 90s and I had my own kids at the time and they were two and four when I started the training. As a young parent with young kids, I just was so challenged with temper tantrums and so I was really interested in how yoga could help with that. So I kind of did it partly for ways to get tools to help my own kids and wasn’t sure if I would end up teaching kids, but I did. And I specifically loved teaching the younger kids, I teach preschoolers mostly and it’s just joyful. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love it. I love the merging of the professional and the personal too, which I find is for so many of us in our fields, it happens, we start looking at things professionally, and then we find that the benefits for our own lives — It’s one of the things I really love about yoga, is it’s for everybody. Yes it can benefit children, it can also benefit parents, it’s a type of thing that is really a family-oriented strategy we all can benefit from and so, I’d love to delve into some of the specifics of how yoga can positively impact kids in different areas. I think most people think of yoga as a form of movement, physical activity, so let’s start there. What are some of the benefits of yoga for children from a physical standpoint?

Julie Pate:

Yeah, well I love what you said, how everyone can do it. As long as you can breathe, you can do yoga. So we could teach yoga, I’ve had kids in my class on wheelchairs, so anybody can do it.

My kids come in when I teach preschool, I teach at like 3 o’clock, sometimes they’re super sluggish. A lot of them don’t nap. So we’ve got poses that will energize those kids. If the kids come in, several of my boys come in and they’re just so full of energy. So we have poses that are very introspective and can help kids calm down. 

We have a lot of poses that help kids balance physical balance, and that takes a lot of focus. You’re going to tip right over if you aren’t super focused on balance poses, so it teaches kids to focus and then it helps them focusing on other things in your life. We were sort of building on those skills. You know all the physical benefits of yoga from strength to flexibility. Like you said, helping with blood pressure and helps people with diabetes. There are a million benefits, but specifically for kids, I think what most of my parent comment on is the tools that they have for balancing their energies. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So important, and something that a lot of kids struggle with at home and school, and I think from the physical standpoint too. There are more and more kids that we’re seeing that are having issues with tone, particularly low tone in their bodies or problems with motor planning or physical balance and those kinds of things. And yoga can be such a nice, natural tool for working on those things, I think.

Julie Pate:

Yeah, I agree. It’s interesting that you mention low tone, because I do have a student who has low tone and I have seen a lot of improvements. When he first came in, he couldn’t sit up tall. A lot of times you think kids are so flexible but not always. So he would be slouched over when sitting down, and I even sometimes would put a mat under him to lift him up a little bit but I’ve had him as a student for two years and I’ve seen incredible differences in his strength. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and I think that core strength too is something that we’re finding even in young kids coming in, but I think kids in general are much more sedentary in their lifestyle than they were certainly back when we were growing up, and so just the idea of getting more movement in them and just building some muscle strength and particularly some core strength because a lot of kids are not out there being as physically active as would really be helpful for them. 

Julie Pate:

Yeah, definitely, I agree with that and with those tablets and the computers, it’s really forcing kids to have this slouched posture, which really, the abdominal muscles then are relaxed and the back muscles are overstretched. So we focus a lot with the older kids, specifically preteens and teens, we focus a lot on back bends, a lot on getting the spine in a neutral alignment with the neck really in neutral alignment, there’s a lot of focus on the neck with the older kids because they are always flexing and that’s really — you could probably speak to this, is a depressive state. When you’re slouched forward like this, studies have been done that it really can affect your mood. So we work a lot with getting the arms up and opening the front of the throat, especially with the older kids, it’s so important. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, I love that you mentioned that because from the mental health standpoint for sure that constant sort of slump posture, our movements and the way we hold our body has an impact on our mind and on our emotions for sure. I was also thinking about — we see so many more, particularly older kids, preteens and teens into the young adults, dealing with a lot of complaints of muscle tension in the shoulders, the neck, pain, migraine and tension headaches, which I think also is connected to being in that posture of constantly looking down at a screen kind of hunched over. So I would think that the yoga and those postures of opening up can really help with those physical complaints too. 

Julie Pate:

Yeah, for sure, our muscles, our joints are meant to hold us up without effort. If we’re standing up in a really good posture, it doesn’t take a lot of effort for our muscles to hold us up and our joints are supported by those muscles, but once we get out of alignment and we’re in that slouched forward — we’re really hanging in our joints. Sometimes I think of it like when I’m opening my cabinet, sometimes I’ll lean on the cabinet as I’m trying to stand up and I’m like, oh, I don’t want to break the cabinet, it’s the same kind of thing with the joints. 

When the muscles aren’t in good alignment, it’s so much pressure on the joints and then the muscles become weak because they’re not being used in the manner that they’re supposed to, and so in yoga, we work so much on not only opening the chest and improving the posture, but just moving the spine. Moving the spine in six directions. We don’t even, speaks more to adults, but you know how we have the backup camera in the car now, we don’t need to twist the spine in order to back up anymore, we’re just getting into — where we are just kind of moving so robotically, what’s more of the great benefits of yoga is that it gets the spine to side bend and to flex and extend and to twist. That just feels good to move. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

It does, it does feel good to move and some kinds don’t know what that feels like and they do their first yoga poses or go to their first class, it’s like a new world for them to feel what that feels like to move their body in that way, so so many physical benefits that can come. Let’s delve a bit into the mental and emotional benefits. You mentioned with the teenagers how the posture can impact the mood, particularly issues like depression and those kinds of things but there’s more and more research coming out about the benefits of doing activities like yoga for mental health, so talk about what you see with that. 

Julie Pate:

So talking about anxiety, for instance, you can speak to this but when kids are anxious — anxiety is a good thing, I had a little bit of anxiety before I got on the call with you, I wanted the call to go well, so it got me energized. So same thing for kids, when they have to do a presentation, you want a little energy to get you moving, but the problem with anxiety is that the kids have too much energy, it’s more than they need or the problem is that the anxiety goes on for too long, right? So my son just had to do a presentation for English, and there was a child in the class that my son is in in high school, there was a child in his class that was so upset, she vomited. So she had so much anxiety, she experienced a lot of physical symptoms of that anxiety, right? 

And then, there was somebody who — let’s say I’m doing this presentation and I’m so anxious about it that several hours later I try to go to sleep and I can’t sleep, right?

So what yoga really does for anxiety is it taps into the peaceful nervous system, parasympathetic or the rest and digest, we call it. And these are poses with long, slow exhales. So kids can experience tapping into this feeling that everything is fine, so when we have that long slow exhale, it calms the nervous system and it’s kind of like you’re building that muscle to be able to tap into those relaxed states. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

It’s so important because so many kids now experience higher levels of anxiety than ever before. It’s the fastest growing mental health symptom problem in kids and adults. There are a lot of reasons for that. Our society now is just so much driving us towards more anxious states, and many kids, while they may have situational anxiety, like what you mentioned with giving a presentation or taking a test, some kids and teens are going through their daily lives with just an amped up level of anxiety about everything all the time, which causes so many problems for them, and so I love that yoga helps people get more attuned to the here and now with what they’re experiencing and use that breathing, because I think we talk in psychology a lot about using the breath and using breathing to help calm our nervous system, help calm our mental state, but yoga really incorporates that. Could you talk a little bit about the kind of breathing that you teach kids that’s helpful for calming and anxiety reduction?

Julie Pate:

Well, in yoga in general, you’re very focused on the moment. So anxiety is really fear about something that might happen in the future. Depression is thinking about something that happened in the past and didn’t go the way you wanted it to. So that’s one main benefit is we’re focused on the moment. And how it’s different from, say, a video game or something is the focus is turned inward. So when you breathe, when you do breath work, you can focus on — if I want to calm down, I would focus specifically on the belly gently rising and falling. When focusing on the belly, I’m feeling that — it’s called body sensing, I’m feeling what’s going on in my body. I can’t really multitask and be worried about how I’m going to do on this test, or can I think, I should have done this assignment sooner or I could have done this better. I really can’t be focused on any of that because I’m only focused on the gentle rise and fall of the belly. So with little kids, a technique that we use is breathing buddies. So we put a little stuffed animal on their belly. I have things called Webkinz, they’re a little bit heavy. So the kids close their eyes and they feel the gentle rise and fall of their belly, they’re giving this baby a gentle ride. And I tell the kids you’ve got to be real quiet and still, otherwise you’re going to wake up the baby. So we play with games like that.

With older kids, we just lengthen the exhale. It’s really simple. We might even use counting.So let’s say we start out, we count our exhale, we see it’s three seconds or three counts. Let’s see if we can get it to four, let’s see if we can get it to five. Then we let the counting go and it’s a slow progression. The older kids love shivassana, which is the rest at the end of class, so we do a longer rest segment and it really helps them reduce stress.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

You mentioned earlier about how it really can help with mental focus as well, and I find that for kids who really struggle with knowing where their attention should be and they’re kind of all over the place and really inattentive, I find that an activity like yoga can be so helpful for mentally tuning in and having to focus on the one important thing at that time, which is hold this pose or keeping myself from falling over, focusing on my breathing, it can be really helpful for giving the brain practice with just staying focused on one thing. 

Julie Pate:

Right, that’s definitely the whole yoga concept. Actually, the text that we follow is called the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali and the very first yoga is Yoga Chitta Vritti Nirodhah, which means yoga is calming the roaming tendencies of the mind. So we know the mind will roam and when people say, “Oh I’m not good at meditating.”, I’m constantly thinking, well the mind is going to roam regardless, and you’re not a failure if you’re thinking while you’re supposed to be meditating, but we notice the thoughts and we bring the attention back in, so whether it was the breath or the physical sensations or maybe we’re repeating a mantra, maybe we’re repeating “om” or we’re repeating “I am fine” or whatever, we bring the attention back to that and then the thoughts go again to whatever, what I’m doing tonight, and then I notice that and I bring it gently back. And it’s not that we’re — so this way, kids don’t feel like they’re constantly failing, it’s a whole — it’s an observation. They’re just observing and in the experience. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I think that’s something for parents to think about too, because so often, adults will say to me, “As you said, I’m not good at meditating” or “I tried that” and we get so much in this failure mindset and it’s like no, this is a process. It’s called a practice for a reason, right? This is a process and we get better and better at being able to stay in the moment and I think when adults can realize that, that’s powerful in their lives as well. I was thinking that I have a certain segment of particularly teenagers and young adults I see who tend to be very, very reactive to any kind of, what I call, uncomfortable emotion and that can create a lot of difficulty in their lives, the second they start to feel distressed or embarrassed or anxious or angry or whatever it is, they just flare at it, it just takes them over, and I find that more than any other tool in my therapeutic toolbox, that some of the principles of yoga of just being there and experiencing that and breathing through it and letting those feelings come but not reacting to them is such a powerful initial step for some of these people to see that I can live through some moments of feeling those uncomfortable things without just completely overreacting to them. I wonder if you see that sometimes too with especially older kids that you deal with?

Julie Pate:

Right. It’s talking about non-judgement. So you’re experiencing whatever it is you’re experiencing and you have two choices. You can either accept it or you can fight it. And if you’re fighting it, it just makes it so much worse. I experienced this myself when I was at the dentist, because I had a problem with this tooth and I already had a ton of work on it. So I was so nervous about what the dentist was going to find out. And I just started and I could feel like my pulse going up and I was getting warm, and I was just like, I’m just going to notice this. So I just noticed it, I sat in the dentist’s chair and I noticed my heart rate was up, I noticed I was getting warmer and it made the experience much better for me instead of sitting there, just fighting with myself. Because the outcome was going to be what it was going to be regardless of whether or not I suffered physically and emotionally and mentally or not. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, I love it. So many benefits, mentally, emotionally, physically. Let’s dive into specifically with YogaKids because this is a process that I really love that the tools that you come up with and have found it so helpful in my own practice, but let’s talk about how YogaKids really makes yoga kid-friendly, because especially for the adults who are listening, they may think, “Oh I’ve been to yoga class myself. I could never get my 4 year-old or my hyper active 8 year-old or my teenager to do that, but you guys really have developed some great approaches to making this doable for kids, and I’d love to have you talk about that. 

Julie Pate:

So when I tell people that I teach yoga to preschoolers, I always get a lot of confused looks. This is like a 5000 year old practice and when you go to an adult yoga class, you’re quiet, you’re sitting really still, there’s a huge disconnect there. So YogaKids was created by Marsha Wenig and she started in the 1980s teaching yoga in the LA public schools in a creative writing class. And then she had her own kids and started teaching them in Montessori and stuff, and she developed this whole program of making it fun. So for instance, probably one of the most recognized yoga poses is downward facing dog, but when we teach that to kids, we might include a story about a dog. We have a book called Bark George. And every time in the book we say, “Arf, arf”, we get into the yoga pose. So we’re incorporating into reading. We might share fun facts about dogs. We might tell kids that half of all American presidents have had dogs. So we bring a little bit of history in there. Or we have an element called ‘Laughing language’ where we teach kids about language and communication. So we might have a rhyme going with it: “Donald doggy digs down for dinosaur bones.” And we’re saying this while we’re doing it. Or we might make it a partner pose where one child puts his feet up on the other one’s tailbone or we might have the kids crawl underneath somebody and down dog, that’s the way I do with when I have mom and tot classes. Or we might have an art project where we draw pictures of dogs or something, and we incorporate math and science and ecology and compassion and learning about the world and animals. We weave in all these different elements into a class. Makes it fun and also educational and safe. Very child-friendly.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I find really helping the kids to be able to visually see and physically understand what they need to be doing with their bodies — because a lot of kids may not have good body awareness, but the modeling of that and the using of the stories and things and making it child-friendly in a way that they can get comfortable in their body and understand actually what they’re supposed to be doing with their body, I think that’s important too.

Julie Pate:

Yeah, we as teachers of kids, we always do all the poses. A lot of times you go to an adult class and the teacher is not doing any of the poses, that wouldn’t work in a kids’ class at all because they’re very visual, so we have to do all the poses with them, which is a good thing. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, so you have certified teachers who lead these classes all over, but then you also have resources and things that parents or teachers or people can get to be able to use with their own kids or their own classes, right?

Julie Pate:

Yeah, so YogaKids teaches adults to teach yoga to kids and we also have a store with all kinds of games, interactive mats, videos, we have the original book that Marsha wrote and lots of great resources for parents. We have webinars and videos for parents and we have, The Bendy Blog, where we have all kinds of great articles and research and resources for parents and teachers as well. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So many great things. Talk about some specific tool — we were focusing on anxiety earlier, and I think that’s one of the things that yoga is just so powerful for reducing anxiety in general for kids. What’s a specific tool or a couple of tools that Yoga Kids has specifically for kids who are experiencing anxiety?

Julie Pate:

Well, with breathing, we have something called Peace Breath, so let’s do it together, so you close your eyes and you take a long, slow inhale, and then when you exhale you say the word ‘peace’. The little kids really like that. The teenagers might find that a little bit corny. And then we have the Take 5 breath, it’s just a technique to lengthen the breath. So we inhale five, we’re moving our fingers and then we exhale five. And then we have any kind of introspective pose will really help kids with anxiety. 

So child’s pose, most people know, you’re sitting down, your forehead is resting, you can’t see any of the other kids, you don’t know what you’re doing, so we’ve eliminated the visual stimuli and then they just feel the energy of their own breath. For younger kids, we have this pose called polar bear. You make a little circle on your hand and you rest your nose on there when you’re in child’s pose and you’re the polar bear warming up his little nose and it’s the same thing. Your visual stimuli is gone, and you’re just feeling physical sensations of the poses and the breath. 

So any kind of forward fold, sun salutations where you’re folding forward and tickling your toes, introspective poses like that. We also have poses that engage the senses. We have something called eyes around on the clock, so kids will go to 12 o’clock and will go to 3 o’clock, will go to 9 o’clock, and that’s something where the kids really have to focus and any kind of visual stimuli will really calm the nervous system. We use something in yoga called a drishti, which is a focus point. So we might take that little stuffed animal and we might set it down on the floor in front of their mat, and the kids have to really focus on that — looking at that animal while they’re doing a challenging pose. All these techniques really help with focus and anxiety.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Fantastic. How about some specific tools that you guys use in YogaKids for kids with maybe mood issues, depression, those types of things?

Julie Pate:

Depression, we would really want to get back into a lot of backbends. So we have a pose called  Dromedary Delight, where the whole spine — dromedary has one hump, so the whole spine is extended. We have S’s for Snake which is on the belly, it’s a cobra pose. So anything like we talked about earlier, anything, where we’re opening up, is really going to help kids with depression. And then, we bring in — we have an element called Bridge of Diamonds, where we teach the kids about ecology, we teach the kids about animals and nature. And it helps kids not focus too much on themselves, maybe their negative feelings about whatever is going on in their life, and they get a sense of wonder about the world. 

Then we have poses where kids connect with each other. We have games we call it ‘We All Win’ because we have interactive games where there is not a loser or a winner. So then kids can connect to each other because you can speak to how important relationships are in finding happiness and joy in life. So kids can hold hands and do partner poses, make friends and make connections with each other. These are things that are really important for kids that are depressed. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I agree because so often, especially in children and teenagers, one of the driving forces behind depressions or a depressed mood or low self-esteem is a feeling of a lack of connectedness. A feeling of isolation, loneliness, not being connected or not feeling part of the group, and so that’s such a powerful thing that the partnerships, the group kinds of things, and especially in an accepting context like a yoga class, where we don’t have winners and losers, we’re all here working on ourselves, that type of connection socially and emotionally can be so powerful for those kids from a mood and just an emotional standpoint. That’s great. 

Julie Pate:

Yeah, Marsha has this tagline. It says, “I am you, you are me, I am part of all I see.”, which is a song where she sings that and it makes you feel connected to the people in the class, to the people in your town, to the people in your world and not just the people, but the animals and the trees and nature as well.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love it. Julie, such great information and hopefully, this has given our listeners a curiosity about yoga and using Yoga with their kids if they haven’t done it before, if they are, it spurs them to keep going and definitely some tools to start with. I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more about you and YogaKids and what you have to offer. Where should they go online for that? 

Julie Pate:

It’s www.yogakids.com. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Fantastic, you’ve got so many resources there. Great, as you mentioned, blog posts and audios and workbooks and all kinds of amazing things, so I highly encourage all of you to go check that out and see what they’ve got available there. Julie, can’t thank you enough for being on the show today and sharing your experience and all of this wonderful information with us, thank you so much. 

Julie Pate:

Thank you, Nicole, it was so much fun!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And to all of you listening, thanks for being with us today and we’ll see you next time for our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.