Posture and Mindset

Teaching kids early about posture is a great idea – you can save them a lot of suffering later. Kids who do ballet, gymnastics or physical culture can benefit from greater postural awareness. Curiously enough though, despite girls participating in these things more often they tend to get deviated spines (scoliosis) much more frequently than boys do, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Young women do tend to be proportionately over represented with corrective spinal surgery. Some of the reasons may be psychological. Girls who are unusually tall and/or large-breasted do tend to stoop and hold their shoulders forward to feel less conspicuous, particularly around boys.

If slouching becomes a habit, it is not something that a child or teenager will grow out of.
Poor posture can change the shape of bones. It is much easier sorting these things out early than
correcting them later. As a parent, examine your own posture with a critical eye, as kids often mirror
parental examples.

Posture and body language are closely related. Even if you claim to have no specific knowledge of body language, it is nevertheless easy to make casual and correct observations about it when you see it.
Women in particular are good at recognizing and using it, some say up to 6 times better than men do.

Frederick Alexander was an Australian actor who noticed the physical cause and effect behind posture through playing different roles and exploring how they made him feel. So much so that he developed the Alexander Technique, an interesting and useful postural health training.

Good posture not only makes people more attractive and helps make them physically fitter, it is also
a form of communication. There are many other good reasons to have good posture, even if just to avoid having unpleasant spinal surgery later. Prevention however is much cheaper and easier than surgery.

If you cannot physically train yourself to better posture, you might need extra help with this.
The older you get, the greater the consequences of poor posture.