Most swimming lessons have an important flaw that isn’t obvious. It’s something that you can easily avoid when you’re teaching your own kids to swim. It has everything to do with the school’s convenience and your convenience and nothing to do with the best way for kids to learn to swim. It can make the difference between your kids being willing to hop into the pool with big, goofy smiles and their whining at the mention of a lesson.

What Is This Disastrous Flaw?

Simple as it might sound, commercial swimming lessons are too long. I’ve never found one shorter than half an hour, and most are forty-five minutes or even an hour long. That’s way too long for kids.

How Long Swimming Lessons Should Last and Why

Each lesson should last fifteen to twenty minutes. If your kids seem happy to keep going and look comfortable in the water—not too cold or tired—you can spend as long as half an hour on your lesson, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Here are the problems with longer lessons:

Kids get cold. It’s one thing if they’re driving their own agenda. If they’re engaged in a rousing game of Marco Polo, they might not care that their lips have turned blue, but if you’re trying to teach them to swim, their discomfort will make it hard for your kids to have fun and retain new information.
Kids get tired. It’s exhausting to practice a new physical skill. It taxes the body and the mind. A kid who might run around the park at top speed for a couple of hours in a row is using muscles in new and different ways when he’s learning to swim. He’s also having to focus on each move his body makes.

Ideally, you should work on teaching your kids to swim in short, frequent bursts. A few lessons a day at fifteen minutes each works great if you have your own pool and a wide open summer with nothing but time.

Even if that ideal isn’t practical for you, keeping lessons short and frequent—fitting in a few a week if possible—will benefit you and your kids. Your kids will learn as much in fifteen minutes as they would in a half an hour or longer, and you and your kids will all be much happier.