Raising healthy, happy children is the goal of all parents. The path is unmapped and difficult to navigate. Parents face an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to their children’s activities, and the pressure most feel to choose just the right balance is enormous.

Many of us want our children to gain the benefits of the wonderful wealth of information that has come to us from the East. That there are now options such as kids’ yoga in schools, kindergartens and after-school-care centres shows just how deeply Eastern philosophies have been absorbed into our everyday lives in the West. The likelihood of children exploring them is more a question of time than opportunity.

There is, however, a great deal of misinformation about yoga in general, particularly about children’s yoga, which can provide so much of what parents are looking for in their offspring’s activities. Below are the five most common myths:

Myth 1: Kids’ yoga is an adult class taught to children

Children have very high energy levels, short attention spans and completely different learning styles compared with those of adults. Therefore, teaching yoga to children means the classes need to be specially designed to keep them interested and physically challenged, and to engage their imagination and creativity. Children are constantly in motion, so their yoga, too, should be dynamic.

Attention span is the biggest challenge, especially with young children, so it’s important to make yoga exciting. Teaching children an adult yoga class will work for about five minutes and then they will be bored stiff. The contemplative and focused approached to yoga that adults find enriching is precisely what makes children restless and bored. This is why at a kids’ yoga class you will see games, stories, music, singing, toys, books and any number of age-appropriate props integrated into the class to keep the children interested and further stimulate their insatiable minds.

Many traditional yoga poses imitate nature. Poses with names like downward dog, cobra, cat, mountain and tree make it easy to get children to explore yoga, as they imitate and embody each pose. Naturally, children will bark like dogs as they lift their puppy dog tails coming into downward dog. When coming into cobra pose, almost by instinct they will hiss like snakes. And, while flexing their spines in cat pose, they will meow and purr excitedly.

This doesn’t mean kids’ yoga is always wild and exciting or that the classes are unstructured. The dynamic moving activities will be balanced with stillness and silence, but always in a child-friendly way. This is easy to achieve with many of the traditional poses, too: coming into child’s pose (aka mouse pose), for example, children will hold the pose, all the while being “as quiet as a mouse”.

The classes begin and end just like any adult class, first moving through a series of poses and concluding with a relaxation practice. Many of the classes also include a breathing exercise whereby children discover the joy of taking a deep breath. They may blow on feathers or bubble blowers and have fun while exploring the breath.

Although taught playfully, the basic principles of yoga are still the same, but presented in a way children can relate to and understand, all within the context of having fun and being lighthearted.