Teach Your Kids to Meditate
By: Wendy Miller
Tags: Children, Self Care, Self, Mindfulness, Meditation

Teach Your Kids to Meditate

Meditation can offer a sense of stability when life gets messy and even chaotic. Give your kids the gift of meditation.

Meditation can feel like a very grownup activity. There’s patience, sitting still, and doing nothing — and let’s face it, kids aren’t known for any of those things.

But kids can definitely benefit from meditation. It can be a source of stability and consistency when life is full of turmoil. It gives them a safe space to go even when they can’t go anywhere else. And if they can learn to do it as a child, they can be reaping the benefits long before adulthood, potentially changing their relationship with stress before it begins.

Many people aren’t sure where to begin, though. How do you get a child who is always on the go and gets bored in the time it takes to pee to sit down, close their eyes, and meditate? How do you teach them what meditation is and how it works?

There are a few things you can do.

Don’t focus on teaching them all the details

Kids don’t necessarily need to understand what meditation is, how it works, or why they should do it. Depending on their age, they may not be able to understand any of those things. But even very small children (around age three) can begin meditating. It won’t necessarily look like an adult’s meditation, but it can be done.

The important thing is that you don’t get bogged down with all the details. If you get too invested in trying to make your child understand meditation’s purpose, methods, or benefits, your kid’s going to get bored before you even begin. They won’t even want to try.

Instead, try just telling them there’s something you want them to try. Tell them meditation is something interesting that you think they’d enjoy and invite them to sit down and try it with you.

Be their example

Kids don’t always mimic everything we do. But you can be certain if we don’t do something, they won’t be eager to give it a try themselves.

Set the example for your kids by practicing your own meditation regularly. Be open about it. Even if you go in another room to meditate, let them know that’s what you’re doing.

The more your kids see you engaging in meditation, and the way it makes you feel, the more they’ll be interested in trying it.

Don’t forget to mention how it helps you too. Mention things like, “Today has been so stressful. I’m so glad I meditated this morning. It really helped me deal with everything that happened.”

Start with a meditation that will feel familiar

Do you, or did you when they were smaller, read bedtime stories to your kids? Maybe they tell you wild, fanciful stories? You might even encourage them to draw pictures of the tales they tell you or that you read to them.

These are all forms of visualization. The use of imagination to create a picture in your mind of what you’re reading or thinking about serves you well when you’re reading and it’s also an excellent meditation.

Because it will be familiar to your kids, it’s great place to start. You can even begin with reading a book with them and then encourage them to close their eyes and continue to visualize the story after the book ends, or their own version of what happens in the book.

From there, you can suggest other things for them to visualize.

Image by Pezibear from Pixabay

Keep it short

You may enjoy meditating for 30 minutes or an hour, but kids have short attention spans. If you want them to truly learn to love meditation, keep it short.

Start with a single minute. Ease up to two, three, or more. Depending on your child’s age, don’t go longer than 10 minutes unless they ask for more. In fact, I recommend timing for meditation like timing for a timeout: one minute per year of age.

If you try to force them to sit for longer periods, they’ll get fidgety and bored, and won’t be inclined to come back and try it again.

Give them a visual of their breath

Focusing on the breath is often a big part of meditating. But we can’t see the breath, and that can make it difficult for kids to focus on it. This is especially true for littler kiddos.

So give them something visual to symbolize their breath. A few ideas are:

· Draw a blue line with a crayon when inhaling; draw a green line when exhaling

· Pick up a toy dinosaur when inhaling; put it down when exhaling

· Draw a heart when inhaling; draw a circle when exhaling

· Hold a marble in left hand when inhaling; switch marble to right hand when exhaling

Remember that perfection isn’t the goal here. If they mix things up or miss a few, that’s okay. The purpose is to give them a visual focus, something they can see, to help them remain focused on their breath.

Teach them to count breaths

For an older child who perhaps doesn’t need a visual but still needs a little help focusing on the breath, try breath counting.

This can be done in a couple of ways:

· Count 1 on inhale, 2 on exhale, 3 on inhale, 4 on exhale, and so on

· Count a breath as one full inhale and one full exhale. Count 1 for the first inhale and exhale, 2 for the second, and so on

Most people count to 10, then start over. This is recommended because as you continue counting higher, you may lose track of where you are.

If your child does lose count before 10, tell them that’s okay. They can just start over at one again.

Encourage them to listen to body and mind

Meditation is a heightened awareness, and it helps strengthen the connection between body and mind. For many kids, this connection is already pretty strong. But many kids can find negative or intense feelings scary, so they push them away and try to ignore them.

But these negative or intense feelings can create physical sensations that don’t always go away just because you try to ignore them and pretend they don’t exist. So teach your child to listen to their body and mind.

Teach them to explore and embrace how they feel. When they’re not sure what a feeling is, explore it and try to identify it. When a feeling scares them, sit with it and explore why it scares them. Ask them to try to find ways they can overcome their fear of the feeling.

Teach them they may notice the physical sensations before they realize they’re feeling something. Help them learn how to sit down and use that sensation to determine what they’re feeling and what they might be able to do about it.

Make it fun

Photo by Taisiia Shestopal on Unsplash

As a confessed chocoholic, one of my favorite fun meditations is a chocolate meditation. You simply take a small piece of chocolate and explore it thoroughly.

You inhale the fragrance, noting the nuances of the cocoa, and any milk, nuts, or other ingredients. You look at the piece of chocolate, noting the color. You feel the texture between your fingers, perhaps noting the solidity softening and changing as it begins to melt from your body temperature.

Then you place the chocolate on your tongue. You allow it to soften and melt, tasting the flavors on your tongue and feeling the texture change. If it’s pure chocolate, with no nuts or other bits, you allow the chocolate to melt completely before you swallow. If it has nuts, after a few moments, you can slowly chew, noting the texture changes between the soft, melted chocolate and the hard crunchy nuts or chewy dried fruit.

It’s fun and also delicious! Kids will love this meditation.

And this article offers a few other great ideas for simple meditations based on your child’s age.

Use apps to make it more like a game

There are a ton of apps specifically about meditation for kids. These apps have meditations designed just for kids, as well as offering other kid-friendly things like cartoon backgrounds and funny voices.

Some even turn it into a game. Their progress-tracking looks more like a gameboard than just a number of days. They offer game-like options that help your child learn to identify and handle their emotions, improve sleep, and much more.

These apps can make meditation fun and motivate your child to keep going. While you may want your munchkin to enjoy meditation for its own sake, sometimes it helps to incentivize them first.

You might have to try a few meditation apps before you find one your kid really enjoys, but when you find the right one, it can really get your kid excited about meditating.

Meditation should be pleasant

Don’t try to force your kid to keep meditating if they don’t seem interested. Leave the door open for them to come back and try again whenever they like, but don’t pressure them.

Meditation should be a pleasant activity. If they don’t enjoy it, it’ll be a chore. And it will be a chore they give up as soon as they’re able to.

Impart your wisdom and if they aren’t interested, let it go. You may be surprised at how and when they come back to it on their own because of your early teachings.