Brianne Feinour, the camp director at Camp NAC, located at the Newtown Athletic Club, shares an approach to kid’s wellness and mindfulness.
What does wellness look like to you? At the Newtown Athletic Club in Newtown, Pennsylvania, we are continuing to offer innovative experiences in wellness and mindfulness to develop a healthy lifestyle in children.
Our second six-week Kid’s Wellness Series, running from November 8 through December 13, focuses on strategies that encourages a healthy body and healthy mind while teaching children tools they can utilize for the duration of their lifetime.
Below is our approach to service mindfully engaged children and shift their perspective:
Building Positive Mindsets
- Engage children and encourage self-discovery through open discussion on what wellness looks like to them. Create vision boards to encourage goal setting, focus and motivation.
- Healthy minds enable children to form positive relationships and conquer life’s challenges. As a result, children have the ability to reach their full potential and enable them to enjoy and appreciate other people, day-to-day life and most importantly, learn to love themselves.
Healthy Body, Healthy Mind
- Teach children the importance of physical activity, stretching and discuss the importance of pre and post-workout fuel.
- Learning to maintain health – both physical and mental – is one of the most important things you can teach your child. Overall fitness affects everything from a child’s behavior to their ability to focus on tasks.
Engage in Action and Help the Earth
- Create valuable, tangible goods like hygiene kits for the homeless to promote a sense of purpose and compassion.
- We chose the mindset “plant your seed and watch it grow,” thus creating an environment where the children’s ideas are planted as seeds and blossom into reality.
Fuel Your Body, Feed Your Soul
- Hands-on nutrition class with a registered dietitian inspires children to have a greater interest in food in a safe, fun and confidence-building environment.
- Our focus is on seasonal healthy snacks and super foods.
- Nutrition is important at any age and can help children establish a foundation for healthy eating habits and nutritional knowledge they can apply throughout life.
Importance of Balance and Breath
- Mat Pilates is a modality that focuses on controlled breathing as you perform body weight-resisted movement to build a stronger core.
- This practice also focuses on bringing awareness to breath and links the understanding between breathing and emotional well-being, which is very important. Breathing techniques can help a child’s body and relax their mind.
- We also add reiki to the end of our practice as a holistic approach for reducing stress and instilling a sense of balance.
The Power of Meditation and Relaxed Mind
- Chakra balance yoga helps unite a child’s mind, body and spirit by teaching breathing practices, proper postures and deep relaxation.
- Chakras are seven energy centers in the body that affect physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. With certain yoga postures, children begin to awaken and balance their chakras. The energy begins to move in the right direction bringing positivity, peace, clarity, high energy, balance and success.
- Meditation is a strategy for reducing stress and promoting mental wellness.
Teaching children at a young age about mindfulness, wellness and compassion is essential for their well-being, and becomes a foundation in which they carry into their daily lives. Our innovative approach is a model that harnesses the power of feel good, do good. Each experience we offer is carefully crafted to help each child have a meaningful and positive experience that aligns with the overall importance of creating their own concept of a healthy body, healthy mind.
