You know it has come to something when your daughter tries the latest fitness trends before you. Particularly when your daughter is six, and the trend is yoga, the ancient Indian mind and body regime favoured by celebrities such as Sting, Geri Halliwell, and just about anybody who graces the pages of gossip magazines.
Yoga for children had been highly recommended by a good friend, but both my daughter and I were cautious. From her point of view, yoga sounded like one of those dull things adults do, like drinking coffee and reading newspapers. I thought “kids’ yoga” sounded like the last word in hyper-parenting, the kind of thing to which cash-rich, time-poor grown-ups drag their offspring in order to manufacture mini-versions of themselves.
Take Madonna, whose eight-year-old daughter Lourdes practises sun salutations every morning. All very well in the rarefied air of Marylebone in London, though it is some way from being the talk of the steamie in Edinburgh. But I was prepared to be convinced.
With children’s yoga, the emphasis is on fun — not spiritual enlightenment — with traditional postures (asanas) simplified and given colourful names, or “disguised” within imaginative stories and creative play.
Advocates stress many benefits. Not only does it distract young minds from television and computer games while getting little bodies moving, it is also thought to aid concentration and sleep, boost the appetite and immune system, maintain flexibility, develop cognitive skills and even help to control childhood asthma.
The best bit is that yoga youngsters are blissfully unaware of quite how much good they are doing themselves. Looking out over her first class of the new term in Edinburgh, the instructor Karen Breneman has no doubts. “They’re stretching and lengthening their body muscularly, so circulation will improve,” explains Breneman, an experienced teacher of Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga (the sweat-inducing form known as “power yoga”).
“Their skeletal range of motion is improving. When we do inverted postures, meaning we’ll turn upside-down, their nervous system is stimulated with all the bloodflow to the brain. The spine becomes more toned and healthy. The metabolism is also improved.”
All of this certainly sounds like it should be very good for them, and there is also growing evidence to show that children’s yoga, with its emphasis on relaxation, breathing, and balancing right- and left-brain activity, can help those with behavioural problems. In the US, positive results have been reported among autistic children, those with Down’s syndrome, and children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for whom medication is normally the only answer.
Its apparent effect on ADHD is of particular interest in Scotland, where a recent report from the NHS watchdog Quality Improvement Scotland (QIS) revealed that prescriptions of the controversial drug Ritalin, which is used to treat ADHD, have risen tenfold in the past eight years. Rates are particularly high in Fife, where 1,299 in 10,000 youngsters are prescribed the drug dubbed a “chemical cosh”.
So, it seems that children’s yoga is more than just another celebrity fad. And when I tell six-year-old Caitlin — who spends most of her time hanging upside-down from the couch or rolling around on the floor — she will get to be a butterfly or possibly a hissing snake at the yoga class, she pricks up her ears. “A butterfly? Really? Coo-ooll!” According to Breneman, her programme for young people (she teaches both teenagers and under-10s) came about as a result of requests from youngsters, rather than pushy parents cramming the latest extra-curricular activities into their timetables. Some of Breneman’s teenage students were in the process of giving up hobbies such as gymnastics and dancing but were looking for something else to keep them healthy and trim. Yoga was the obvious choice.
The children’s yoga course is now in its second term and is gaining in popularity, and it is immediately obvious that the studio is child-friendly. Colourful blue, purple and green yoga mats lie in lines on the wooden floor and the little ones are playing with giant gym balls strewn across the room.
Breneman begins with the basics, asking the youngsters questions about the exercises, and fishing to see if they can name the poses. Unlike YogaBugs, the UK-wide programme for children between the ages of two-and-a-half and seven, which has a handful of accredited teachers in Scotland, Breneman’s class does not use creative stories to teach the yoga. Instead, she emphasises the imaginative and animal-inspired names of the exercises. Pretty soon the class are wrapping their naturally bendy bodies around postures such as the downward-facing dog, the warrior, the mountain pose, the angry cat and — best of all — the mooing cow, complete with farmyard noises.
There is no butterfly pose, as I had rather foolishly promised. But no matter, my daughter is on all fours, back arched like a hammock, mooing like there is no tomorrow. She is flanked by two other six-year-old heifers, both mooing equally enthusiastically. She looks as happy as, well, a cow in a muddy byre.
It looks like too much fun to be beneficial. But, according to Breneman, you can’t get too serious about yoga with young people. “If you tell them to sit there, close their eyes and breathe they think they are being punished,” she says.
Breneman has sympathy with those who are sceptical about children’s yoga. “A lot of yoga people can be very pious and make it into this esoteric or intimidating thing where you have to go in and take your shoes off and chant,” she says. “That can really put people off.”
Thankfully there is more mooing than chanting in Breneman’s class, and it doesn’t seem to have deterred anybody. Rachael Maguire, 6, has taken part in dancing, swimming and judo, but likes yoga best. What does she like about it? “Everything,” she says, grinning. Annie McLean — a 6-year-old inspired to start yoga after seeing her mum doing head-stands in the living room — thinks yoga is “cool” and relaxing. When she tells friends about her unusual hobby she says they want to try it themselves.
Annie’s mother, Jan Tennant, says her daughter has become braver in her movement. “She is more willing to try things than before,” she says. “It’s a discipline for life, and kids who start it young may well keep it up, or certainly get back into it later on.”
As with many, Tennant started out as a sceptic. “At first, yoga for children sounded a bit ridiculous,” she admits. But so convinced is she of the benefits — particularly for those with behavioural problems — that she is now training to be a YogaBugs instructor and considering trading in a high-flying career in environmental law.
And what of my own junior yogi? She is smitten. When we get home she gets down on all fours and proudly demonstrates the “mooing cow” to her Dad. “She wants to take up yoga,” I say by way of explanation. He looks at me askance. “Clearly,” he says, “that would be money well spent.”
Well you can’t expect everybody to understand the higher state of consciousness that can be reached by mooing like a cow.
Karen Breneman’s children’s yoga class is at 5pm every Monday at Total Body Approach, 5 Alva Street, Edinburgh, 0131 220 3838, www.totalbodyapproach.co.uk Breneman can be contacted at www.ashtangaedinburgh.com
YogaBugs, 0208 772 1800, www.yogabugs.com
