Looking for the best vitamins for kids' immune system? Well, Not every vitamin supplement benefits both the mind and the body. Magnesium supplementation, however, benefits both, making it a powerful addition to a healthy food diet. While you may consider magnesium supplements for yourself, if you’re a parent, you might also wonder, is magnesium good for children?
Put simply, magnesium is a mineral that’s vital for both children and adults.
Wondering if is magnesium safe for kids? For kids who are growing and developing, magnesium intake is an essential component of a healthy food diet. This nutrient aids in a variety of functions, including memory, focus, mood, and muscle health. Let’s take a look at the four main magnesium benefits for kids.
#1 Memory and Focus
Little kids are not always known for their ability to focus for long periods of time. Usually, sustained attention is a skill that children develop over time and continue to perfect into adulthood. There are lots of tips and tricks out there to help your child focus and avoid hyperactivity, but magnesium supplementation is a scientifically-backed supplement that can also help.
Critical for brain health, supplemental magnesium promotes optimal nerve transmission, which can improve your child’s memory and focus. With these improvements, your child is prepared to absorb new information and take on any challenges at school.
By optimizing brain function, magnesium may also protect the brain from neurological disorders like:1
- Migraines
- Chronic pain
- Anxiety
- Depression
After taking a serving of a magnesium supplement, your child may feel relaxed. Many who benefit from supplemental magnesium report feeling this sensation of calmness and relaxation.2 This sensation, in turn, can help with focus by promoting stillness and the ability to do one thing at a time.
Not only is a relaxed state of mind a receptive starting point for learning, but it’s also excellent for balancing mood.
#2 Mood Balance
As much as we adore our little ones, sometimes, it can be difficult to ride the waves of their emotional ups and downs. This is because children have not yet learned how to regulate their moods and emotions. By promoting a relaxed or calm feeling, oral magnesium can reduce stress and anxiety and help to balance your child’s mood.2
In high-stress moments, a serving of magnesium rich foods can reduce sensations of anxiety. Over time, as magnesium builds in the body, it can help to lessen stress and anxiety throughout the day, as well as in these high-stress moments.
Perhaps your child finds their math homework particularly challenging or frustrating. Sometimes, frustration stands in the way of accomplishing a task with the best possible results. A little natural help through oral magnesium can make a huge difference by reducing stress, promoting calmness, and balancing mood.
How a Balanced Mood Can Improve Sleep
Dietary Magnesium can also help balance your child’s mood by improving their overall sleep quality. This is because sleep improves:
- Focus
- Memory
- Mood balance
Many of us know anecdotally that missing sleep, or suffering from lower quality sleep, can make us feel short-tempered and unfocused. If a lack of sleep can throw adults off their game, imagine how much more it affects kids whose brains are still developing.
Sleep is essential for children to grow and process everything they’ve learned throughout the day.3 And the younger a child is, the more sleep they need.
According to the American Pediatric Association, the recommended amount of sleep by age is:3
- Infants under 1 year – 12-16 hours
- Children 1-2 years old – 11-14 hours
- Children 3-5 years old – 10-13 hours
The hours of sleep here do not just mean time spent in bed—they mean hours of uninterrupted shut-eye. So, if your kid has a late-night flashlight reading habit, supplementing their diet with magnesium could help them wind down and become drowsy enough to fall right to sleep.
Imagine everything that your child can learn and take on when they can wake up feeling their best every day. By promoting full nights of restful sleep, magnesium makes it possible.
#3 Brain Power and Neuro-Protection
Another benefit of magnesium is that it protects synapses that communicate between brain cells.2 It can even protect kids from migraine headaches, as studies have found that those who suffer from migraines have less magnesium in their tissues.4
We’ve already covered ample information regarding the importance of sleep and the role that magnesium plays in deepening it, but it’s worth returning to that point. Anything that improves sleep is restorative, which means that magnesium’s promotion of sleep also delivers these important neurological benefits.3
#4 Bone and Muscle Health
We’ve looked at several mental benefits of magnesium, but how about the physical ones? Whether or not your child is an athlete, at the end of the day, all children benefit from the bone support and muscle support that magnesium provides.
Bone Support
There have been multiple studies that show that optimal magnesium intake can increase bone density. Not only does the mineral contribute to bone formation, but it also prevents osteoporosis and osteopenia—medical conditions where the bone density of an individual is lower than it should be.4
Lower bone density can increase the risk of bone injury for an individual. Especially if your child is a competitive athlete, bone density is an important factor in their longevity in their sport. Taking a magnesium supplement can help to increase bone mineral density and grow the strongest foundation possible.
The stronger your child’s bones are, the lower their risk of:
- Sustaining bone injuries
- Developing bone issues later in life
Ultimately, bone health is all about preventative measures. By taking a daily magnesium supplement, your child will reap the rewards of strong bones in the present, as well as later in life.
Muscle Support
Athletes who suffer from muscles strains or cramps are sometimes offered magnesium supplements to restore proper muscle function, as magnesium contributes to the contraction of muscles in the body.4 This means, for a strained or cramping muscle, magnesium can remind the muscle to relax, alleviating the pain.
Kids don’t always know when to stop and when to go. Sometimes, their enthusiasm can override their limits in sports and other activities. For long hours on the soccer field, in the dance studio, or even on the hiking trail, magnesium can support proper muscle function in active children.
Signs of Magnesium Deficiency
Magnesium is a mineral that’s abundant in the human body. 4 More than half of the magnesium in our bodies is stored in bones and the remaining in various tissues throughout the body. However, some people don’t have enough magnesium in their bodies and suffer from magnesium deficiency.
Given how common it is to not consume an optimal amount of this mineral, your child could be amongst those who would benefit from consuming more magnesium. But how can you know if this is the case?
Some of the symptoms of a magnesium deficiency in kids include:
- Fatigue
- Muscle cramps
- Nausea
- Poor sleep
- Irritability
The signs of magnesium deficiency show just how important it is. While noticing one of these symptoms alone may not indicate a deficiency, together, these symptoms may hint at a need for more magnesium.
Although the body can conserve how much magnesium it releases when stores are low, it’s very difficult to have too much magnesium, so erring on the side of more is a smart idea.2 Even if your child consumes enough magnesium, they can still thrive from the health boosts of a supplement.
How to Ensure Optimal Levels of Magnesium
From building strong bones to carrying out nerve functions, magnesium is important for healthy and optimal bodily function.
To help ensure your child is consuming enough magnesium, it’s important to incorporate magnesium-rich foods into their diet. At the grocery store, you can find the following magnesium-rich foods:
This list covers only some of the foods that contain magnesium. Despite the fact that the mineral is found in so many different foods, it can still be difficult to measure your intake.2 Given the variability of magnesium levels in whole foods, supplementation can take the guesswork out of the equation.
Especially if you are looking for a vegan source of magnesium, taking a supplement like Cymbiotika’s magnesium l-threonate may be the best way to meet your child’s nutritional needs.
Unlock the Potential of Magnesium with Cymbiotika
Magnesium is certainly beneficial for adults (all of the benefits you’ve read here apply to you, too), but it’s also beneficial for developing children. By improving focus, mood, brain function, and bone and muscle health, a daily intake of magensium can help your child feel their best everyday. And when your child is feeling their best, they’re ready to take on anything.
To ensure your child is consuming enough magnesium to reap its benefits, check out Cymbiotika’s two magnesium supplements—our Magnesium Oil Spray, which is topical, and our Magnesium L-Thereonate, which is consumed orally. Both the topical and oral supplements are organic, vegan, and kid-friendly. So don’t wait to help your child unlock their full potential. Looking for other ways to help supplement your child’s overall wellness? Check out our collection of liquid vitamins for kids. Or, perhaps you're planning another pregnancy. In that case, we recommend our liquid prenatal vitamins to support your health and your child’s development. Choose Cymbiotika today.
Sources:
- NCBI. The Role of Magnesium in Neurological Disorders. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024559/
- The Nutrition Source. Magnesium. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/magnesium/
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Johns Hopkins Medicine. The Importance of Sleep for Kids. https://www.hopkinsallchildrens.org/ACH-News/General-News/The-importance-of-sleep-for-kids
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NIH. Magnesium. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Magnesium-HealthProfessional/#h3
