The benefits of yoga for adults are well known, but why not let it help your children as well? Find out the way yoga can help your children.

Getting older is extremely stressful for adults, but our stressful way of life reflects on our children as well. School, their social life, sports, extra curricular activities, norms, and expectations can be great sources of stress from a very young age. Like for adults, yoga can help children relax, gain better self-control, become more in touch with their bodies, gain better flexibility and receive the help they need to be able to deal with the daily pressure.

Yoga is a great help with hyper-active children as well. Yoga helps channel their excess energy and builds a strong power of concentration, determination, and increases motivation. While some kids thrive on external stimulation and motivation, children who practice yoga learn to find that in themselves.

The yoga postures that seem to work best for children are the warrior and the tree. These poses help children relax, keep a good balance and stimulate their self confidence. Visualization is very important in getting the kids to collaborate and you will see that once you ask the children to imagine themselves as the poses they are trying to do. The warrior pose, for instance, will help the child gain confidence, courage and energy. When they imagine themselves as warriors, they will show the same characteristics warriors have: strength, courage and confidence.

Other characteristics and personality traits that yoga helps stimulate are the ability to work in a team, collaboration and trust in their teammates, some attributes that will benefit them greatly in later years, considering that most school activities, sports or projects within work places are realized as either part of a team of as the leader of one.

In the beginning, most kids won't be able to keep their eyes closed or keep poses for extended periods of time. In order to help them achieve that, teach them to visualize. Also teach them breathing techniques and help discover the relaxing properties of music.

Children have very vivid imaginations, and this works in two ways. On one hand, it makes the visualization process a lot easier for them. On the other hand though, it's very easy for them to stray away from the visualization line, and thus lose concentration. In order to avoid that happening, you have to guide their imagination in one direction by drawing some simple, but strong guidelines. Give them a few characteristics of the environment you are trying to get them to visualize and then leave the rest to their imagination.

The benefits for children to take up yoga are countless. All you have to do is give your child the chance to expand their horizon and gain a better knowledge of their inner self, to lead a happier, richer life.