om family
Belly breathing for children is an essential skill that we should be
teaching our young, writes Sarah Tucker
“C
lose your eyes. No peeking. And
place your hands on your tummy.
Your left hand. And then your right
hand on top of your left hand.
Sit up straight, shoulders back.
Eyes closed. No peeking. Now take a deep breath. Now
breathe out. Now take another deep breath in. And
breathe out. Now listen to your breath as though it’s a
whisper you are trying to understand.”This is how I start my yoga class, teaching a group of 30
four-year-olds how to breathe each Thursday morning.
It is wonderful. Okay, not quite bliss, but close. They are
sitting up, lifting from the base of their spine (although
they have to ask what a ‘spine’ is) and their shoulders
are back, neck long, chin up. Their mouths are closed
(this is the difficult bit) and their eyes are closed (the
easy bit) and they are listening to the music I play every
week. The teachers are nearly in tears because their
class sound and look like angels. For those few minutes
anyway. Welcome to the world of teaching children how
to breathe.
I started to teach children how to breathe properly
as part of the process of introducing yoga into
schools. Yoga is, after all, about listening to the breath,
something that is often forgotten in the gymnastics of
the asanas. Currently teaching in Surrey and south-west
London, I’m hoping to get more funding for schools
under the mental health issue. And yoga - with its ability
to help children focus and manage stress, anger and
loneliness - plays a proactive role when everything
else in the education system seems to be designed to
aggravate stress or whittle away self esteem.
This is something which is not lost on the teachers
and head teachers who have enlisted my support.
That includes Sir Anthony Seldon, a supporter of yoga
and mindfulness in schools. “We understand much of the
way children are taught means they are put under a lot
of pressure, with increasing levels of testing, re-testing,
culminating in SATs or Common Entrance, and the
testing and judgement persists until they leave school,
college or university. And then of course they enter the
workplace where everything is about judgement,”
he says.
“Listening to the breath and learning how to breathe
properly is the vital element of any yoga practice. Not
only yoga practice, but in maintaining a happy, healthy
lifestyle and sense of wellbeing in later life as well. It is
one of the life skills children should all learn, and grown-
ups should all remember.”Learning to breathe
So how do you teach your children to breathe properly?
In my experience and asking around other yoga
instructors, children understand and pick up the skills
of how and why to breathe properly much more quickly
than grown-ups. Grown-ups question why they needto breathe properly and over analyse. They also have
more baggage to get rid of, and are more settled in their
heads. They have been taught to value their thoughts
and intellect above their instinct and they have to
unlearn what they have been taught since childhood.
The children of this generation have not bought into
this illusion yet, although they are able to find plenty of
judgement and analysis in social media if they so wish.
However, from my own experience and again talking
to other yoga instructors who teach in schools, this
generation are definitely more aware of the importance
of being self aware and not self conscious.
“This generation of children identify more closely
with how emotion impacts on their body,” says child
psychologist Dr Rachel Andrews. “Yes they have been
brought up with social media, but they have also
identified clearly the importance of trusting in their own
instincts. Yoga, mindfulness and meditation has also
seeped into schools and even if they don’t see their
parents reflect behaviour which is particularly zen, they
are able to at least get a taste of it at school. Yoga will
teach them how to deal with the emotions before they
become trapped in the body and cause physical dis-
ease. The children haven’t had time to become detached
from their body yet. They are very much in their body
and listen to their body. It is just the education system
which teaches them to objectify and mistrust and
ultimately dislike their body. So they become aware
much more quickly how slowing down the breath,
breathing from the belly and not the chest, both calms
them and also helps to re-energise as well – although
in general, to be fair, children don’t usually need re-
energising until they have to take SATs, by which time
they are usually emotionally and mentally exhausted.”Observe, don’t judge
From personal experience, I have found toddlers
through to teenagers all benefit from learning to breathe
properly. Children tend to lose flexibility around the
age of seven to eight, and become more challenged
with concentration issues from ages 10 to 12 as they
literally become overloaded with extraneous facts. This,
of course, nicely coincides with the heaviest period of
testing for SATs and Common Entrance exams, so the
ability to focus, hold onto and apply facts is now judged.
As yoga is all about non-judgement and observation, the
philosophy of yoga is the antithesis of how we educate
our children. Observe, don’t judge – while education, it
strikes me, is largely about ‘judge’ don’t ‘observe’.
For those parents and teachers who wish to teach
their children how to breathe, the key is to learn how
to do it properly yourself. Children learn by show, not tell.
You will be able to show them the exercises but
they will question why they have to do it properly and
you do not.Turn page for all the breathing techniques >>