I can sum this story in one word: fear.
I have been teaching children to swim for more than 25 years. I began this journey into teaching swimming and simply by having to. I had two very young children and a 20-by-40-foot pool in my backyard. For safety sake, they had to learn, quick.
A friend suggested I have an instructor from the YMCA come out, and I did. She was a lovely lady and came a few days. But my children were not swimming. I needed my children to be safe in the deep end of the pool, and that was not being addressed.
I’d always loved to swim. I decided that I would do it my way. I had to get them to float, which means they had to go under the water. That being accomplished without too much resistance, down to the deep end we went.
My son did it easy. My daughter? Well. You could hear her down the street, screaming, “No! I can’t do it!” My husband was watching out the window, shaking his head.
But I knew that was the moment, and I had to grasp it. I knew she was frightened, but she had to be convinced that I was right next to her, holding her hand. And once she did it, she would get to feel that wonderful moment early in her life, when she did it! She jumped into the deep water and didn’t sink!
The fear most parents have, which they extend to the children, is the inability to ‘breathe,’ and of course, automatically thinking that when they jump in, they will not come up. But I can still see the smile of satisfaction in my daughter’s eyes as she happily jumped in again and again.
From that moment on, we continued to stay in the deep end, extending their distance from the edge a little at a time and watching the confidence rising, and the fear becoming less and less. Within three or four days, they were jumping off the diving board, jumping in and swimming to the ladder without me being right next to them.
They became very confident swimmers in less that two weeks. Soon after that, I became the lady that taught all of their little friends in the neighborhood. Today, I am teaching their children.
Which brings me to the importance of teaching your child to swim early. It is really not about learning to swim — they are born to swim. It is about eliminating the fear. From the time children are infants, parents keep water out of their faces, bathe them carefully while keeping as much water as possible from their faces and eyes. But children love to shower with a parent, love the feeling of warm water running over their heads and the physical closeness. By making an issue about water getting on their faces, unknowingly, parents instill fear into their children.
It has been my experience that when you put your little ones under the water, they might be a bit startled for the first time, but as you continue to expose them to that experience, they open their little eyes and begin to move gently. They are not as fearful as you are.
Once a child has been taught to fear going under water, the problem becomes compounded. Before you know it, the children is 5 or 6, pools are everywhere, and parents expect the children to somehow overcome their fear, take swimming lessons, and enjoy the water. It rarely happens that way.
Parents send their children to swimming lessons once a week, and are disappointed when the summer is over and they can barely swim. I have listened sadly to many parents who themselves never overcame their fear of the water when they were children.
I created the Mommy/Me Underwater class as a result of seeing too many children in my private classes afraid to go under the water. When a child is first introduced to the underwater experience, I require that a parent accompany them into the pool. Carefully, the children are placed under the water and floated to the parent. This is done for the entire hour of the class, followed the next day by extracting ‘toys’ under the water. The children become more comfortable, and at the end of that day, the parents begin to drop them into deeper water and eventually, what follows is swimming to the ladder… and much more.
Once it is proven to both parent and child that it is possible to breathe when their faces are in the water by gently blowing bubbles, and also, that when the children are dropped into the water they do not sink, then swimming is no longer a problem.
As the saying goes, the fears we don’t face become our limits. A parent can face this problem and overcome the fear by introducing children as early as possible to the experience of being under water and teaching them the skills they need to know. After working with thousands of children, I can tell you this works — 200 percent.
Patty Blackwell’s website is babyswimbootcamp.com.
