Welcome to another guest post! This time on the blog, we have Amalia Liberman (wife, mum of two, novelist, and writer), sharing why meditating with your children can help you stay accountable to your meditation practice. Over to Amalia…
I believe that we have to teach children how to meditate early enough to grow up as happy, responsible, and productive human beings. Meditation with your child is a sound practice that equips them with tips and tricks of meditating the right way. Modern parents can use baby activity mats to promote mindfulness when meditation with their children.
Why Meditation With Your Child Is Critical
Research by Zero To Three Organization reveal that babies can feel stressed as early as 6 months. This is why parents should prioritise meditation with children to promote their emotional, psychological, and social well-being.
Social learning theory by Albert Bandura emphasises observational learning to model behavior. Children tend to learn fast, and they are likely to copy your day to day behavior, including your daily meditation routine.
Why Teach Your Child Meditation?
A lot of researchers give reasons why children should meditate. We encourage child meditation with a focus on the following impacts.
Stress Management
There is plenty of meditation with your child techniques, which most parents have adopted to guide children on meditation. meditation with your child hacks will help children relax and feel comfortable in their skins, which promotes mental health.
This has a great impact on how they manage stress during calamities, new situations, or even emergencies. As a parent, you have the responsibility to kickstart the habit in your kids.
Behaviour Modification
Some children might be hyper, and this is a concern for every parent. How do you calm them down? Most parents practice mental focus to let their children relax. There are plenty of meditation with your child tips that focus on modifying behaviour.
We recommend meditation for children’s behavior when they experience a hard time focusing, cry easily, or get overly excited. This will help them focus on the present moment, which eliminates unwanted behavior.
Healthy Living with Peers
Do you want to make peer pressure less of an issue? Teens often experience development anxieties through different developmental stages that include early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence.
Peer influence can make a child’s ideas to shift over time. This stage is where most parents seek for meditation with your child techniques. Peer pressure is less likely to influence your children if you help then to trust their inner wisdom through meditation.
Meditation For Sleep
Studies show that up to 50% of children experience a sleep problem. Meditation for children’s sleep will create the inner conditions needed for a truly restful night, which results in quality sleep.
Building Empathy And Happiness
Happy kids are likely to extend the same to peers. Through meditation, children learn how to share great love with others around them. They become more concerned about their friend’s wellness and learn to give, listen, and understand their peer’s problems.
What Promotes Quality Meditation In Children?
Most parents and caregivers are not sure how to meditate with children. Luckily, there are plenty of meditation with your child hacks available for you. We’ve shared a few tips below and how to take advantage of each trick to meditate correctly.
Meditation with Child Music
Children are likely to sleep faster if there is calming music for sleep. Soothing songs keep children focused on sleep, and within no time, they will be soundly asleep. An effective way of using calming music is by setting it up on a low volume with minimal distractions around.
The music offers a perfect quiet time, stimulating the sleep hormones to lead the child into a quick sleep. You can find such music through a simple Youtube search where you can access plenty of children’s meditation music.
Other than sleep, meditation music plays a role during yoga for kids. This keeps them concentrated on the practice of healthy living.
Meditation Children’s Books
There are plenty of helpful books you can use when meditating with your children. These books have the tricks and tips to guide you wit the kid for a meditation session that breed results. As if that is not enough, the books are cost-effective and won’t break your bank.
Tips For Meditating With Your Children
Before you initiate meditation, there are the do’s and don’ts. We’ve shared with you the few critical considerations for a fruitful session.
- It begins with you. Learn the process then teach your child. Meditation is likely to work if it has worked for you. You already know the tricks and tips, thus easy to guide your child.
- Meditation sessions should be short. Sometimes teaching kids how to medicate comes with challenges. Therefore, making the sessions brief is vital. Sessions between 5-20 minutes are enough.
- You should not force the child to meditate instead, get them to love the practice, and be curious about it.
- Breathing issues can be a hindrance to mediating. Cases of asthma might require a child to focus on another part of the body other than the breathing patterns.
- Medicating can happen anywhere, even when walking, and this eliminates the tendency of sitting still by bringing in additional practices.
Will you be meditating with your children?
We have covered critical sections of mindfulness with your children. We hope you have enough information about meditation with your child and the benefits. You can now practice meditation to realize the full potential of your child. Remember that mediating with your child holds you accountable. Share your results with us!
What are your thoughts about meditation with children? If you have questions on this topic, please let us know, and we promise to guide you through it.
Author’s Bio
Amalia Liberman is a wife and a mother of two as well as a novelist and writer, the author has been featured in Women’s Health magazine and also written different articles in lifestyle magazines. Her passions lead her to search out knowledge with all her searching and she doesn’t mind sharing her findings.