I'll never forget the day I watched my kids' first "competitive" soccer game (read: it wasn't competitive at all). I laughed out loud as parents got visibly upset as their kids continued to lose. I was this close to screaming "LISA!!! THEY'RE 4!! THE GOAL IS TO HAVE FUN!"
Fast forward to a few summers ago when I read Alfie Kohn's book Unconditional Parenting. The book taught me to move away from controlling behaviour through reward and punishment. Instead, it suggested I should be supportive and love my child for who they are, not what they do. It stressed maintaining connection over demanding compliance, ensuring children feel loved regardless of their behaviour or performance. It opened my mind to the way our society is extrinsically motivated and how we suppress any intrinsic motivation from a young age.
I think about these concepts every time I have to extrinsically motivate my children to not watch tv and do their chores. Recently this got me thinking about yoga for kids and how it inherently supports intrinsic motivation.
Yoga is one of the few activities around today that is truly non-competitive at it's core. Non-competitive sports are hard to come by in our world, but incorporating them into your life will help release the pressure valve on your family.
Here's why non-competitive activities like yoga are critical for kids:
They reduce anxiety - Instead of the constant pressure and anxiety around performance, yoga is for the person who's doing it, not for anyone else to see.
They build greater self-awareness - Yoga begs us to go inside to notice feeling and what our body is saying. There's no way for this to be measured extrinsically, it's impossible!
They make embodiment possible - Embodiment is living through the sensory experience of the body. We can't practice embodiment when being told what to do. Yoga fuels embodiment because kids tune into themselves. They listen to and believe in their own bodies.
And finally, non-competitive activities keep intrinsic motivation intact. I want to raise children to do things because they want to do them, don't you? We don't want to raise our kids in a machine where everything they do is to avoid a punishment and gain a reward. This is in essence living lives that are divorced from their internal knowing and desires, and leads to a whole host of other struggles and issues down the road.
Being intrinsically motivated is linked to higher joy in life, longer-term satisfaction in the activity, and less burnout. But unfortunately, in our world today, kids don't have many spaces where this intrinsic motivation is fostered.
The next time you have a choice between signing your kid up for baseball, gymnastics, or curling, I hope you'll do it and also balance it out with an intrinsically motivated activity! Some of my favourites are yoga, martial arts, hiking and rock climbing.
If you're looking to get your kids into yoga, Appleseed is teaching FREE Yoga Storytime classes from now through the summer at Toronto Public Library branches across Toronto. It's a great way to get a taste of what we do.