Breathing exercises for children are as useful as they are beneficial, not only do they help you better control your emotions, but also improve your attention span and concentration, feel more relaxed because they better understand your body and even improve your pronunciation and the way they communicate.
At first glance, many may call them absurd. Don’t children come into the world knowing how to breathe? The biomechanics of breathing is an automatic process that we all do and that no one has had to teach at any time, however, the question that should lead us to a simple reflection is this: do we all know how to breathe, correctly?
- Breathing exercises optimize children’s brain development to improve their attention and reduce the effect of stress.
- Daniel Goleman?.
The answer is no! We do not always breathe well, for starters, a more than obvious fact is that we do not take advantage of all our lung capacity, we forget that we also have diaphragm and that it can wonderfully optimize the whole process. , on average, we breathe very fast, we take very little air with each breath and this forces us to do it several times and without rhythm.
All this results in a greater feeling of tiredness, frequent headaches and a greater impact of stress and anxiety on our body. Now, in the case of babies, there is a curious fact to keep in mind. the world breathes well, does it deeply and uses the diaphragm. However, as they grow, either because of their posture or lifestyle, they lose that natural ability.
Therefore, teaching them with the game how to breathe will allow them to regain that forgotten ability to gain quality of life.
Daniel Goleman explained in an article how breathing exercises for children can be beneficial. He set the example of a small school in Harlem, New York, and how a teacher had introduced the dynamic of “breathing friends” into his classrooms.
Every morning, before classes begin, all 5- to 6-year-olds are lying on mattresses with a teddy bear on their belly, needed to breathe fresh air for 3 seconds and watch their favorite teddy bear rise, then they passed deep and started again.
This match lasted just over 5 minutes, however, what Daniel Goleman could see was that its effects were very beneficial, this exercise strengthened children’s brain circuits to improve the processes of attention and emotional management, for example, the students who had been doing these morning Breathing sessions for more than 2 years had fewer attention problems and hyperactivity , as well as a greater willingness to study and learn.
As we can see, something as simple as taking a short break a day to this series of breathing exercises can have a very positive impact on your development and skills, it’s worth a try. Now let’s look at some of these techniques.
Simple, fun and effective. The snake game is one of the children’s favorite games and includes the following:
The second of the breathing exercises for children is just as fun, for him we will follow these steps.
In this exercise children (like adults) tend to suck air through their mouths, in fact, that’s what everyone does when they inflate a balloon, so you have to correct it and tell it that the air should be sucked through your nose. while the abdomen fills up, and then you have to exhale pinching your lips as if the giant colored ball was in your mouth.
This breathing game is a favorite of children!The guidelines we will follow are:
The latest breathing exercise for children is a little more complex, but just as fun and effective at introducing them to diaphragmatic breathing.
You should do this exercise slowly so that you understand these processes in your body.
In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that there are many breathing exercises at our disposal to apply with children, just find the ones they prefer and do each step the right way to turn them into a daily routine, only then will they learn to breathe. better, only then will we improve its development and quality of life a little more.