Island Parent Resource Guide Vol 35

HEALTH
Mind-Body Connection for Kids
When children have a strong
awareness of how they move,
and how they feel in their bodies,
that’s when they are starting to embody
physical literacy. They’re feeling the
mind-body connection.
There’s a lot of talk in popular health
books and videos about connecting mind
and body. This is exactly what embodiment
is about. It means having conscious
awareness of how our bodies feel as we
move through the world. Not numb, not
sleepwalking, not oblivious to our physical
surroundings, our balance or the activity
of our arms and legs—but really feeling
connected to every instance of movement
or non-movement in our bodies.
The Importance of
Embodiment
All of us have a body and a mind, and
they are not separate things—they’re inextricably
woven together.
But it is possible to grow unconscious
or develop a “disconnect” between our
body and mind. This tends to happen
with busy modern lifestyles, as we train
our minds to deny or ignore what we’re
feeling in our bodies for the sake of getting
through the day.
For example, we study all night for an
exam and ignore our body’s demand for
sleep. We disassociate from our discomfort
in a cramped seat to endure a longdistance
flight. We compete with muscle
injury in a mini-triathlon because we
want to say we finished the race.
It might make sense or feel acceptable
to do these things in short instances, so
we can accomplish a particular shortterm
goal. We are choosing to make a
relatively small sacrifice. However, if we
make a habit out of ignoring our bodies
and stifling our feeling awareness on a
daily basis, we can slowly lose touch with
ourselves. We can lose touch with our
own embodiment.
Learning to Be Disconnected
Much of modern life in technological
society teaches us to be disconnected.
When it comes to children, we have many
cultural practices that teach them to ignore
the sensations in their bodies.
We train them to sit still in desks all
day long at school, even though their
bodies are screaming to move. We let
them watch videos or play on their
smartphones for hours at a time, where
they learn to ignore the need to eat or
go to the bathroom. We don’t give them
opportunities to explore movement and
active play from an early age, indoors
and outdoors, when so much of their
body-mind connection should be developing.
This is the opposite of how most
children grew and developed prior to
the twentieth century, or for that matter
through countless millennia of human
evolution. Prior to the advent of mass
industrialization and the increasing
migration to cities, most children were
outdoors and physically active on a daily
basis, often in natural environments
with trees to climb, hills to scale, forests
to explore and even lakes and rivers to
30 Island Parent Magazine IslandParent.ca