Can my 18-month-old baby practice yoga?

Self-cultivation and cultivating nature are the two main reasons why yoga is popular in Shanghai, and "Golden Baby", an early childhood education institution in Shanghai, recently launched a new course called Infant Yoga. At the Gymboree Gubei Center, the reporter was the first to witness the new curriculum for children's yoga and found that there was a big difference between running, jumping and playing for children's yoga and the quiet adult yoga in his impression.

Tae Jun from South Korea, Yueyue from China and Pacific from the United States were the first three babies to experience the course yesterday. The theme of yesterday's course was pets. In order to attract the baby's attention, teacher Huang Lili continued to stimulate the child's interest by imitating animals. Cats, tigers, and butterflies all became the teacher's imitation objects. After stimulating the child's interest, some simple yoga movements were slowly introduced into the course. "Stretch your legs straight, stretch your arms as long as possible, imagine that your hand can touch the stars, pick off one star, another... see what color it is." Huang Lili demonstrated the movements while cooperating with a lively children's song. An action, a game, a story, and several projects are staged in succession, all in order to stimulate children's interest in the course.

The reporter noticed at the scene that the movements made by the baby usually cannot be maintained for a long time, and there are often some unexpected actions. Even when the teacher demonstrated a very basic movement in yoga-after the baby fell asleep, Pacific mischievously ran quickly to the teacher, patted the teacher gently, and then fell asleep on the ground, smiling happily.

"Children usually only maintain their attention for two to three minutes. One of the biggest effects of yoga for young children is to improve children's attention." Huang Lili told reporters this. At the same time, short attention time is also the nature of children, so getting children to get started will be a relatively long process. Because of this, every yoga class for children will have a theme, which may be animals, sunshine, fruits and flowers. All themes will have a core story and musical background. Through this multi-faceted cooperation, children's attention will be continuously stimulated., allowing children to carry out some yoga training in a relatively concentrated manner.

So, will children need to do some difficult yoga movements? When the reporter asked such a question, Huang Lili said that he would not do such movements either. Young children's yoga is different from adult yoga. It does not require too much action on children, but through yoga as a medium to improve children's attention, physical functions and other aspects. Therefore, unlike those professional children's yoga on the market, which require large age conditions, babies as young as 18 months can participate in children's yoga courses. (Internship Editor: Wu Jinyu)