Practicing Mindfulness with Little Ones (Ages 2-5)
Mindfulness is the practice of being present in the environment around you, without overreacting or getting overwhelmed by stimuli.
Mindfulness might seem out of reach for children aged 2-5, but it’s actually a great age to begin teaching mindfulness practices! These practices can be taught through toy play, body movements, and listening to sounds carefully. These practices can assist children as they grow by helping them to focus their attention and regulate emotions.
Skills needed for success in this practice include:
Mindful Breathing: Teaching breath work and its importance for connecting the body and brain.
Self-Awareness: Helping children express their needs in words instead of tantrums.
Movement: Connecting their little bodies to movement helps create mindful connections between themselves and their world.
Practicing mindfulness will not instantly eliminate tantrums, but over time it can help give children the awareness of how they feel emotions and connect with these feelings.
When teaching mindfulness, the most important part is making the process fun and engaging. Stay in the moment! Consider your child’s attention span, language and communication skills, as well as their social and emotional development. Children as young as two can begin to build mindfulness practices by working on breathing exercises and exploring facial expressions and body language.
By working on breathing exercises and exploring facial expressions and body language.
Caregivers can support children in these practices through co-regulation. Co-regulation is a warm and responsive connection with our children that helps foster understanding of emotions while teaching expression of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Children need adults to model these skills so they can learn to manage their experiences. Modeling behavior can help young children learn about strategies. For example, sharing with your child, “I feel mad, I’m going to take a couple of slow breaths,” can show the child how to label the emotion, express it, and cope with the big feeling.
Many of the strategies we use ourselves as adults can be modified for young children.
Breathing
Using a strategy like box breathing as an adult can be quite effective. An example of a modification for a child could be candle breathing. See the video below for an idea of how it could work:
Blowing bubbles is a great way to encourage deep breaths in a fun and natural way for kids.
Mindful Movement
Animal Moves - having your child think of an animal and acting out how that animal might move can help the child connect with their body in a mindful way.
Here’s a video example:
Another mindful movement example could be practicing the Blast Off exercise.
Steps:
Explain to your child that you are going to have them use their body energy to blast off like a rocket!
Have your child create their rocket ship with their arms down by their sides. They will shrug their shoulders up and down while counting 3-2-1.
Have your child shoot their arms up like the tip of the rocket ship above their head three times.
Have them squat down, touch the ground, then pop straight up lifting their arms to the sky while saying blast off, three times!
Put it all together. Shrug, reach, squat and blast off three more times!
There are many other strategies to help implement mindfulness based practices with little ones. Want to begin practicing mindfulness with your little ones but not sure where to start? Check this out!
Children as young as 2 years old can begin practicing mindfulness. These practices can be taught through toy play, body movements and carefully listening to sounds. The skills needed for success in mindfulness are mindful breathing, self awareness and movement. Practicing mindfulness will not instantly eliminate tantrums but in time it can help to give the child the awareness of how they feel emotions and connect with these feelings.
We can try so many different breathing techniques. These are some of my favourites:
Race car breaths - have a toy car, or use your imagination, drive it around the track. When you round the corners you have to slow down and take a deep breath, then you speed down the straight away and breathe out. Repeat for a few laps!
Candle breaths - imagine you have a candle in front of you, you are trying to make the flame dance not blow it out completely. Gentle smooth exhales will do the trick!
Bubble breaths - use real bubbles to practice then switch to using the imagination. Blow bubbles, big inhales and the big exhales help make the bubbles!
Marissa Parker is a Registered Psychotherapist who offers individual counselling, family therapy, and parent coaching. Marissa sees children, youth, and adults for appointments both online and in person. When she’s not working, she enjoys exploring Ontario’s provincial parks, swimming, or snuggling up to watch a movie with her children and pug.
