We try to make our kids' childhood as happy as possible filled with beautiful memories, life long healthy routines, and inner belief.
We'd like to think childhood is one Birthday party after the next, a rent-free paradise where money is not even understood, net alone an issue. Relationships are guaranteed, and the only major worries kids have are deciding on the fifty presents to ask Santa for that year.
Nevertheless, it can be a jungle out there and kids are affected by many issues. It's not easy being a little person. Whether you're young or old, life has a barrel load of confusion, angst, stress, worry, and issues all stored up and waiting for you. For kids, it may range from anxiety, depression, sleep, behavioral problems, eating disorders, school performance, and attention deficit disorder, or ADHD.
While children are not worrying about their mortgages and careers, they do have plenty of worries and concerns that you, as an adult, don't.
Right from being babies, children can suffer from separation anxiety, and when a parent leaves them, it can feel like the end of the world. Young children can become deeply fearful of ghosts, monsters, and the dark, e.t.c. that adults thankfully have left behind. School tests are another thing for kids to worry about. Academic performance is often an onslaught of comparison, and if your child is not so academic, continually 'not getting things' is highly frustrating and upsetting. Children can also be incredibly cruel and tease and bully each other ruthlessly.
It's a proven fact that children who meditate have increased focus, and better emotional regulation, coping strategies, relationships, and self-control.
So here's a few of the many benefits of meditation for kids that can help them to overcome various problems.
Meditation can help your child sleep better
Meditating before bed can calm the mind and relax both kids and adults alike. It calms the mind and reduces stress so that kids can sleep better without being worried about having bad dreams and being scared of monsters or ghosts. A well-rested child has an easier and more productive time at school, with better performance and relationships
Meditation allows children to focus better
Meditation has been shown to improve focus. That helps kids with learning and developing the focus to problem-solve more easily. With more focus on schoolwork, kids can perform better and be happier.
Meditation helps kids deal with stress
With comparison being the name of the game at schools, kids are under pressure to do better than their peers, But for one to do better, another must do worse, it's simple logic and a rat race, even for kids. Meditation can help kids to handle stress better so that when they have exams and tests, they can better hit their own peak performance whatever that happens to be. Meditation allows children to free themselves of tension, and they can thus function at their own peak.
Meditation supports emotional development
Emotional development is key to a child's happiness. Children worry about losing loved ones, and not being enough. When they are continually running on fear-based emotions, this can have debilitating long term repercussions on a person's mental health. Benefits of meditation for kids include helping them to develop wisdom, better accept and face their fears, learn how to problem-solve, and self soothe.
Meditation can help your child develop empathy
Indeed, meditation can even make your child kinder. Children often don't have well-developed levels of empathy and compassion. Kids these days are plagued by cyberbullying, and it's all too easy for kids to gang up on one another. It's terrible to find out your child is being bullied. But it's also highly unpleasant to find out your child is engaging in bullying. One trick with cyberbullies is to make the child say the words out loud; they have been gleefully texting or posting about another pupil. But it's better that they don't become a bully, period.
Meditation helps your child to connect and develop a sense of empathy that can mean they don't become a bully in the first place. Not only that, but it can also even make a child stand up to bullies when they can see it is causing another child to suffer.
Meditation allows your child to improve their self-esteem and love themselves
It's such a shame that so many of us are crippled with low self-esteem and inability to love ourselves. One whopping dose of self-love can virtually save you from anything life throws at you. Sadly many of us as children are learning how to hate ourselves. We are too slow, ugly, spotty, weak, uncool, or traumatized by a situation that wasn't our fault. As kids, we are a sponge to pick up bad stuff that we can carry around with us for the rest of our lives.
If you're not the best at games and other kids can jump higher and run faster, meditation is the superhero for all negativity. It can be especially helpful in childhood to counter taunts from bullies, helping them to cope better with their present situation. It also propels us into adulthood, like a stick of dynamite. Those with less self-doubt and better self-esteem have better careers, relationships, health, and, quite frankly, lives.
So with all these benefits of meditation for kids, it makes you want to jump in Doc Brown's DeLorean and head back to your childhood to meditate. With that not being possible, it's certainly worth a few minutes a day to guide your child in meditation until they develop the mastery to meditate themselves.