One of my favorite ways to relax is to do a progressive muscle relaxation. To do a progressive muscle relaxation, you go through each body part, tense it, and then feel the difference as you relax it. So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to teach kids how to do a progressive muscle relaxation. Here are my thoughts.

Mood Spread

First, I would find a progressive muscle relaxation routine (maybe a YouTube video or a recording, or even just some soothing music) that the ADULT enjoys doing. If an adult can make a routine of doing progressive muscle relaxation in the presence of their child, at minimum the end result should be some good mood spread or emotional contagion. The adult feels better, so the kid feels better.

Imitation

Next, we can bring in imitation. We can do something as simple as

pairing a gentle touch with our breathing to spread calm.
Take walks and smell all the flowers or blow the dandelion seeds (in places that feel respectful to do that).
You could also take turns blowing bubbles and noticing that when we take slower breaths, we tend to get bigger bubbles. When we take faster breaths, we get lots of bubbles but smaller ones.

Whole Body Relaxation

Then I would try a whole-body relaxation like this one.
You could also try doing a robot and noddle dance where one person calls out “robot” and then everyone dances with stiff tension, or they call out “noodle” and everyone dances with relaxed muscles.
You could push away against a wall.

Individual Body Parts

Then we can start to label body parts and practice tensing different body parts. I would suggest picking one body part at a time. After you’ve done that a few times, if your child knows their body parts, maybe you can let them choose which ones they want to do together!

Here are some examples to pick from: