What is Baby + Kids Yoga?
Baby Yoga is a set of practices to enhance playful interaction and communication between parent/carer and baby, and to promote their healthy development. Baby Yoga perfectly complements Baby Massage and expands the benefits of touch with those of movement and relaxation.
Baby Yoga is focused primarily on babies themselves; it is not simply a mums-and-bubs yoga class. Baby yoga offers quality physical stimulation that has become essential in a predominantly urban sedentary lifestyle. For every hour that babies spend strapped in car seats, capsules or home seats, 5 minutes of Baby Yoga will help provide a balance, and a start to a healthy active lifestyle. Baby Yoga can be practised instantly anywhere at anytime and always generates a joyful interaction.
Baby yoga helps you to attune to your baby’s needs, and to calm or stimulate them as appropriate, with a sense of security and wellbeing. It is beneficial for all babies – you don’t need to practice yoga or even know anything about yoga to get started with your baby. From birth, babies respond positively to the stimulation of movement and touch together. Baby Yoga includes a wide range of different practices that can be combined to suit the needs of each baby or toddler through their individual development:
- Yoga moves / poses adapted to babies – mini twists, mini stretches, mini- inversions, upper and lower limb and spinal movements. (These moves have been transmitted though generations in India for at least 2000 years.)
- Gentle body strokes
- Postnatal yoga for new mothers
- Playful moves with rhymes and songs
- Transitional practices (head control, rolling, sitting, crawling, standing, early steps, first jumps and balances)
“Under the rubric of Birthlight Baby Yoga we offer a comprehensive stimulation of the senses together with movement and rhythm that babies need in order to best integrate experience and learn. Birthlight Baby Yoga offers an all-in-one practice for parents and babies, including massage, holds, stretching, singing and rhymes, game-playing and relaxation. Birthlight Babies learn lots of shortcuts to ease their transition to developmental milestones (rolling, sitting, crawling, standing, walking), but mostly because this is done through loving interaction and fun, it helps their brain to grow lots of happy neuron networks at the time of most intense growth in human life.” (Francoise Barbira Freedman)
Birthlight Baby Yoga comes with a debt of gratitude to the people who have taught Françoise Barbira Freedman (the pioneer of Baby Yoga in the West) their traditional forms of closeness with babies around the world, most particularly grandmothers from India and South America.(Acknowledgements to Birthlight)
Wild Child Kids & Family Yoga
Yoga helps kids develop:
- body awareness & posture
- flexibility & mobility
- strength, control & coordination
- self-confidence & self-esteem
- emotional self-regulation
- relaxation skills
- concentration & focus
- social skills & teamwork
- so many other physical and mental health benefits!
Classes & workshops include yoga poses adapted into kids’ themes, story-telling, music, yoga games, partner yoga, and exercises focussing on breathing, visualisation, relaxation and guided meditation. Family classes allow family members to enjoy yoga together – all family members are welcome, with any level of fitness or ability.
Yoga adventures are a wonderful opportunity for kids and their families to spend quality time together – connecting, playing, laughing, and engaging in fun and healthy activity, which fosters creativity, expressiveness, non-competitiveness, respect and awareness of themselves and others.
{Parents are sometimes concerned that their children won’t “sit still”… This is not a requirement of kids yoga! It is all about FUN, JOY and CREATIVITY through movement.}
All class are taught by fully certified Yoga Teachers with additional qualifications in Kids & Family Yoga.
Vicki is also a Specialist Physiotherapist and IAYT-Certified Yoga Therapist, so can adapt yoga for anyone of any ability. (The same can’t be said for all forms of exercise, but yoga is different… It’s not just exercise…) If your child has different abilities or medical conditions, contact Vicki about your needs. Kids are encouraged to join classes (after an initial Physio assessment, if required); otherwise individual Home Programmes can be designed.