Integrating Connected Parenting Strategies into Family Yoga

Family yoga can be a great way to foster attachment and bonding with your adopted child. Many of its principles and practices complement connected and trauma-informed parenting approaches. It can also be used as a vehicle for integrating these parenting approaches into your everyday family life.

In her 2015 interview with Dawn Davenport of Creating a Family; the late Dr. Karyn Purvis, founder of Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) and author of The Connected Child, discussed six basic ways to cultivate attachment in your adopted child: 1) Meet their needs; 2) Say yes; 3) Make eye contact; 4) Encourage touch; 5) Mirror them; and 6) Follow their lead. All these strategies can be integrated into your family yoga practice.

Meet your child's needs: Consistently striving to meet your child's needs shows her that she can count on you and that her needs matter to you. In the context of yoga, for example, focus on poses and activities that your child wants to do and skip the ones that she resists or that make her feel uncomfortable. Instead of insisting that she do poses in a particular way or hold them for a certain length of time. support her as she figures out what feels good for her body. You might also rethink your assumptions about what a family yoga session looks like. Perhaps you want to do yoga with your child for fifteen minutes a day, but she can only handle five minutes. You would like to put together a lovely practice corner in your family room, but your child feels calmer doing yoga in her bedroom. You may want to do partner poses with your child, but she prefers doing individual poses, with each of you on your own mat. Or maybe she prefers to watch you do yoga on your own. Ultimately, meeting your child's needs during yoga requires attunement, flexibility, and the ability to start where she is, in the spirit of Pema Chodron, and not where you want her to be or think she should be.

Say yes: Saying yes to your child is another way to show him that his needs are worth meeting and that you are there for him. From a neurobiological perspective, saying yes helps to calm the fear center of your child's brain and foster an embodied sense of connection, calm, and "felt safety." In many ways, saying yes during yoga can overlap with meeting your child's needs; affirm the poses and activities that your child wants to do, and allow him to do the poses in ways that feel comfortable to him. Just as importantly, it means finding affirming ways to set boundaries for your child during yoga--which you will likely need to do, especially with younger children. For example, your child wants to sit on your back while you do cat pose, but him doing so would cause you pain. Instead of telling him, "You can't climb on my back because it would hurt me," you might say, "I can do that pose with you next week when my back is feeling better. Today, why don't you climb underneath me instead?" Or suppose he wants to do tree pose on top of your desk, which would be unsafe for him and the desk. Instead of saying, "No, you can't do tree pose on the desk because it's unsafe," you could respond with, "I would love for you to do tree pose safely, so let's do it on the floor or the couch instead."

Make eye contact: Making eye contact is one of the most basic strategies for cultivating connection with your adopted child,

and yoga provides many opportunities for doing so. For example, consider doing poses while facing one another and looking into each other's eyes. Mirroring poses, which I discuss below, are particularly good for cultivating eye contact in this way. You can also play peekaboo with a Hoberman sphere, make eye contact as you pass a mindfulness bell to one another, or simply sit close to one another at eye level. If you child finds eye contact difficult, start slow. The peekaboo game with the Hoberman sphere may be especially helpful in this situation, as the sphere serves as a physical barrier between your faces. Doing poses side-by-side (instead of face-to-face) and taking quick glances at one another from time to time is another strategy. Or perhaps you can occasionally look up at one another as you watch an electric changing-color tea light together and discuss what color makes you feel the most calm (or peaceful, happy, strong, etc.).

Touch: Family yoga provides many opportunities for touch, which is another foundational strategy for creating attachment in

your child. Teamwork poses, for instance, require you and your child to create a joint pose, such as boat pose (see photo). Helping poses, on the other hand, encourage each of you to physically support the other person as they do the pose individually. Physical contact can occur casually as well, such as touching each other's hands when passing a meditation chime back and forth or reading a yoga storybook together. If your child is uncomfortable with certain forms or even all forms of touch, don't force it. You can still do yoga together without it. Most poses and activities can be done without making physical contact, and you can also modify many partner poses to focus on the types of touch that your child prefers. For example, your child may not like holding hands with you while doing tree pose, but perhaps he feels comfortable doing it with you back-to-back.

Mirror your child: In the context of bonding and attachment, mirroring you child can be a good way to demonstrate that you

see her and that you are attuned to her feelings, words, and actions. Mirroring during yoga, which I describe in more detail in this post, encourages you to do poses with your child face-to-face. As you do each pose together, strive to make eye contact and match her pace, movements, and other embodied cues (see photo).

Follow your child's lead: Encouraging your child to take the lead, especially in the context of play, helps to strengthen his sense of power, agency, and voice--all of which may have been compromised due to early trauma. One way to do this during family yoga is to take turns choosing which poses to do. You can also take this approach a step further by encouraging your child to lead a portion of your practice or even the entire practice. For example, set a timer for five to ten minutes and tell your child that he can decide what poses and activities to do and how to do them. Then simply follow his lead. Perhaps he will want both of you to do certain poses together, or maybe he will want you to watch him do some poses. Alternatively, he may ask you to do certain poses and then crawl underneath or on top of you. It doesn't matter how he leads the practice, just that he gets a chance to do so. This approach also allows you to meet his needs and say yes to him.

There are many other connected parenting principles and strategies you can integrate into your family yoga practice, which I will discuss in future posts! Namaste.

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