Breathe quieter, learn better: What parents and teachers should know about how children breathe
Updated: Sep 25
"Take a deep breath" is probably the best-intentioned and worst-working sentence we say to children. Why that is, what their body actually needs instead, and one exercise you can try tonight.
Where it goes wrong
The sentence every child knows
Picture this: Monday morning, second lesson, maths. Third row, someone's chewing on a pencil, by the window there's whispering. And at some point it comes, the sentence: "Take a deep breath."
The boy obeys. Mouth open, shoulders up to his ears, and then he pumps air as if he had to blow up every balloon for the school fair all by himself. Afterwards he's exactly as fidgety as before.
I'm Dutch, so I'll just say it: the problem isn't the child. It's the sentence.
And I know what I'm talking about. For years I lived in permanent overdrive, always one gear too high. I took deep breaths all the time. It never helped. Only when I understood what my breath actually does did something change. And I'd rather pass that knowledge on to the people who get to use it the longest: kids.
Deep doesn't mean more
A stressed body is already breathing too fast and too much. Giving it even more air is like pouring water into a full glass. Calm works differently: quiet, slow, through the nose.
And deep? Sure, it can be deep, just not the way we all learned it. Deep means the movement happens low down. The diaphragm does the work, belly and lower ribs move gently, chest and shoulders get the day off. It has absolutely nothing to do with "as much air as possible".
"The problem isn't the child. It's the sentence."
The nose can do more than you think
We treat the nose like an accessory. Yet it warms the air, filters out particles and gets the humidity right before anything reaches the lungs. The mouth can't do any of that. On top of that, the sinuses produce large amounts of nitric oxide, which travels into the airways when you breathe through your nose.
And the nose slows things down. Breathe through it and you breathe more calmly, keeping the carbon dioxide level in your blood more stable. That's the real point: your body needs carbon dioxide so the blood can release its oxygen to your muscles and brain. In physiology that's called the Bohr effect. I call it: less air, more effect.
The open mouth nobody notices
Spend one day watching how the kids around you breathe. While reading, in front of the tablet, falling asleep. I bet you'll see an open mouth more often than you'd like. Mouth breathing in children is common and still gets overlooked all the time.
Night-time is especially worth a look. An open mouth during sleep is one of the typical signs of sleep-disordered breathing, along with snoring and pauses in breathing. The next day it often doesn't show up as tiredness, but as inattention, trouble concentrating and a bad mood. One long-term study followed more than 11,000 children: kids with these breathing symptoms showed 40 percent more behavioural difficulties at age 4 and 60 percent more at age 7.
Not every fidgety child has a breathing problem. The studies show connections, not causes, and sometimes the symptoms look so much like ADHD that they get mixed up. Which is exactly why it's worth a closer look.
What really helps
Feeling yourself is something you can learn
I see it in adults all the time. Many only notice they've been running on high voltage for hours when the body gets pretty unmistakable about it. Stiff neck. Headache at four in the afternoon. Jaw somewhere between "tense" and "concrete". I know that one well. I was one of them for a long time. And then there's my ADHD brain. When someone tells me to "just feel into yourself", I sometimes think: happy to. But who exactly is talking right now, my head, my gut or my heart?
So, I feel you. ;)
Science calls the ability to perceive signals from your own body interoception, and it's considered an important factor for mental health. The exciting part: this ability mainly matures during childhood and adolescence, and the adults around a child seem to play a central role in it.
So kids don't feel themselves better than we do.
They're learning it right now. And we're sitting at the same table.
Breath is the most direct tool we have for this. And the exhale seems to play the lead role: breathing in tends to turn attention outward, breathing out turns it inward. That's why I say the same sentence in every session until everyone can say it with me: relaxed exhale.
That breath training works for children is backed by research. In a randomised study, children with asthma showed clearly better asthma control and quality of life when they learned a nose-breathing technique on top of their normal treatment.
But: what works for a marathon runner doesn't belong in a child's bedroom one-to-one. For kids it has to be gentle, short and playful. You won't win over a class with a lecture on the diaphragm. With something they can touch and trace, you will.
the silent wave
On the sheet there's a single wavy line. Your child puts a finger on the start and goes, without lifting it. Up the wave: breathe in. Down the wave: breathe out. Always through the nose. From left to right the waves get smaller, and so do the breaths.
At the finish, your child breathes so quietly that nobody can hear it. A quiet "a little more air would be nice" is allowed to show up. That's exactly when you're doing it right.
Ages 5 to 8. The free hand rests on the belly, which rises a little while the shoulders stay down. The first time, your finger traces alongside your child's. Two to three minutes.
Ages 8 to 12. Two rounds. In round one the free hand rests on the side of the ribs, in round two one finger sits under the nose and by the end feels only a whisper of air. About two minutes in total.
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In everyday life
In the classroom
The 60-second reset. Draw a wave on the board with waves that get smaller. All fingers in the air, everyone traces along, through the nose, at snail's pace, two or three rounds. After break, before a test, when the mood is about to tip.
I once did a round of breath training with a whole class. Afterwards it was a different room. The kids were visibly calmer, and the best part: so were the teachers. For the first time that day they weren't in their heads, they were in their bodies.
At home
At bedtime. Teeth brushed, lights dimmed, two minutes of wave. Practise in calm moments, not only when things are already falling apart. An exercise a child hears for the first time in the middle of a meltdown bounces right off. One they already know, they'll reach for on their own at some point.
Showing beats explaining. If you breathe quietly through your nose while your child is raging in front of you, that calm often lands faster than any good advice. I have four kids. Trust me, I've tested this plenty.
And mouth tape? On social media, adults tape their mouths completely shut at night. I don't think much of that for kids, and neither does the research: a systematic review warns of risks, especially when the nose isn't clear.
But there's a difference a lot of people don't know about. There are mouth tapes for kids that don't go over the mouth but around the lips, leaving the middle open. Your child can open their mouth anytime but gets a gentle nudge to keep it closed. I think a lot of this approach, because the night is eight hours of practice time that would otherwise go unused.
The order matters, though. These tapes are only meant for kids aged four and up, and the manufacturer itself recommends talking to a doctor before using them during sleep. Kids also get used to them best during the day, for example while reading or playing. And if your child snores or has breathing pauses at night, the first stop is the paediatrician or an ENT, not the pharmacy.
When to get medical advice
Does your child snore regularly, stop breathing briefly at night, almost always sleep with their mouth open or seem constantly tired during the day? Then it's time for the paediatrician or an ENT. Sometimes the cause is very physical, like enlarged tonsils. And then no exercise in the world will fix it on its own.
Less is more
After breath sessions like these I see the same thing again and again: the kids listen, they're present, they fidget less. And some teenagers actually fall asleep. That says something too, about how rarely their body really gets to switch off during the day.
Kids don't need complicated techniques. They need a nose that gets used, a breath that's allowed to be quiet, and adults who show them how.
Breathtraining for schools
II come into classrooms, staff rooms and parent evenings. The kids learn, in a playful way, to use their breath as a tool. The teachers take away exercises that work without any preparation and experience for themselves how quickly a room can change. Every workshop is tailored to the age and the class.
Big hug, Sanne
Sources
Bohr C, Hasselbalch K, Krogh A. Über einen in biologischer Beziehung wichtigen Einfluss, den die Kohlensäurespannung des Blutes auf dessen Sauerstoffbindung übt. Skandinavisches Archiv für Physiologie 1904.Bonuck K et al. Sleep-Disordered Breathing in a Population-Based Cohort: Behavioral Outcomes at 4 and 7 Years. Pediatrics 2012.Çelik H, Yürük E. The effect of the Buteyko breathing technique on asthma control and quality of life in children with asthma aged 7–12 years. PeerJ 2025;13:e19467.Kalaskar R et al. Sleep Difficulties and Symptoms of ADHD in Children with Mouth Breathing. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent2021;14(5):604–609.Weitzberg E, Lundberg JO. Humming greatly increases nasal nitric oxide. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2002;166(2):144–145.Weng HY et al. Interventions and Manipulations of Interoception. Trends in Neurosciences 2021;44(1):52–62.Interoceptive accuracy in children aged 8 to 13 and their parents: implications for mental health. Cogent Psychology2024.Action Understanding Promoted by Interoception in Children: A Developmental Model. Frontiers in Psychology 2022.Interoceptive training impacts the neural circuit of the anterior insula cortex. NCBI PMC11116496.Understanding Mind–Body Experience from the Perspective of Interoceptive Awareness. NCBI PMC13023601.Sleep-Disordered Breathing and Behavioral Symptoms in Pediatric Orthodontic Patients. 2026.Behavioral Patterns in Preschool and School-Aged Children with Snoring and Sleep-Disordered Breathing: A Scoping Review. 2025.Cognitive and Behavioral Consequences of Sleep Disordered Breathing in Children. NCBI PMC5753659.Investigation on mouth breathing behavior of school-age children. BMC Oral Health 2026.Deep learning for sleep analysis on children with sleep-disordered breathing: Automatic detection of mouth breathing events. NCBI PMC12713969.
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