Yoga classes for childrenBy Cathy StovellWhen Latoya Bridgewater’s son was three years old she became pregnant with her second child.Concerned that her attention would have to be divided once the baby was born, she looked for ways to make their time together more special for him.“I found that I was drawn to a book called ‘A Child’s Garden of Yoga’, so I bought it and began doing yoga with him,” she said.Mrs Bridgewater said her son enjoyed the practice and so did she. Three children later, she’s a certified yoga instructor and still doing it with them.“The girls grew up seeing me do yoga so it has been very natural for them,” she said.When friends saw photos of her girls 11-year-old Makeda, nine-year-old Nazarah and six-year-old Moriah in yoga poses, they were intrigued and asked if their children could join in the practice.The time became so popular that Ms Bridgewater added a special yoga class for children to her offerings.“I don’t do the same thing I do with adults because naturally their focus is different,” she said.She believes that play and enjoyment are integral to a child’s optimal development and said she doesn’t want children to be forced to attend her classes.For this reason, she’s happy for children to come intermittently and offers the option for parents to pay per class instead of per month.“I don’t think children should be made to do anything that they don’t enjoy unless it’s life-threatening.“I want them to express what is inside of them and if a child is uncomfortable with that, they should not be forced to do it,” she said.“Yoga is good if you understand and appreciate it. If children can enjoy it and have fun they will want to do it.“For young children the centre of their lives is about learning and having fun it’s not all in the playground. School should be fun too.”In the first classes she’ll be teaching the children about their breath.“We’ll try to move a ball around by breathing through a straw and if we have a window or a mirror we may breathe on it,” she said.In addition to being fun, she said yoga brings physical, mental and emotional benefits for children.“Children experience stress just as adults do. It’s just that they express it differently,” she said. “So yoga practice brings stress release for children.“Although we do a lot of play, yoga requires some focus. You develop your ability to focus when you get into a pose.“You have to focus in order to do it. And children also learn to challenge themselves. They persevere at attempting a pose until they achieve it.“When my son started and we did tree pose, he fell a few times but he really wanted to be able to stand in the pose and he focused and persevered until he did.”And she noted that yoga helps children increase or maintain their flexibility.“With my children I see the younger they are the more flexible they are. By the time children reach their teens they start to loose flexibility.“Sometimes when I practise with my now 15-year-old son, he’ll say ‘no mom my body just can’t bend back like that!’ and we’ll laugh,” she said.But she said the poses he cannot do at 15 are ones he easily did when he was very young.“By the time they reach their teens they start to lose flexibility, even children who are actively engaged in sports because they are not using all their muscles in the sports they do,” she said. “Yoga works the full body.”So how old should children be to start yoga? Mrs Bridgewater said her children started at three.“I found that when I tried it with the girls at one or two years old they were not interested. They had a better understanding of what we were trying to do when they were three,” she added.But she doesn’t plan to take such young children in her class. She said she’d accept boys and girls from five to ten years old.Mrs Bridgewater’s children’s kemetic yoga class is on Mondays from 5 to 6pm at Lotus Studio on Victoria Street. Call her on 595-4105 for more information.