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The Hidden Flaw in Most Kids’ Swimming Lessons

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

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The Critical Component of Learning That Gets No Respect

We all know what learning looks like. It’s a bald guy with glasses, sitting quietly in a tower reading philosophy or math and taking occasional breaks to sustain himself with sips of tepid water and nibbles of dry bread crusts. Learning any other way is a pale imitation of that ideal, right?

Of course not, but something close to that is what we expect when it comes to our kids’ learning. We want them to pay attention to the teacher. We want them to buckle down and concentrate. We want them to do it the way grownups do.

The reality is that even adults benefit from another kind of learning that yields better, faster results than the old school, ruler-to-the-knuckles style. What is it?

The Critical Component of Learning That Gets No Respect

What is this super learning tool, and how can you use it to teach your kids to swim?

It’s play. When kids—and adults, for that matter—play, they explore situations beyond what they’ve actually experienced, develop problem-solving skills, and create new neural networks.

When your kids are creating huge towers out of blocks, they’re learning physics. When they play princess or imagine being cats, they’re learning sociology and psychology. When they play with plants or bugs, they’re learning biology.

They’re also learning how to think, they’re learning about themselves and other people, and they’re creating friendships with the people they play with. Playing is a safe way for the brain to learn, because you can use your imagination without risk.

You can take advantage of this when you’re teaching your kids to swim by using your imagination to create games and ways of looking at the lessons you’re teaching that turn them into play.

Make improving form a game. Make getting from one place to another a race. Make learning a new swimming skill a secret mission. This isn’t just a chance for your kids to play, it’s a chance for you to play and a chance for you all to play together. What’s more fun than that? As a special bonus, they’re learning to swim.

If you’re out of creative ideas for teaching swimming skills, check this site every Friday for specific ideas.

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1 Thing You Need to Know about Kids’ Minds to Keep Them Engaged

When you’re trying to teach your kids to swim, or to do anything else for that matter, your chances of success go up exponentially if you understand how their minds work.

1 Thing You Need to Know about Kids’ Minds to Keep Them Engaged

Kids keep trying if they’re having fun and think they’re doing well. Your job in each swimming lesson is to make sure those two conditions are met. The fun part is easy. You can spot a kid having fun a mile away. But how can you be sure your kids think they’re doing well?

Kids’ perceptions of success

In a study of 8- to 13-year-olds, the kids’ opinions of what made a good swimmer had everything to do with effort: if you’re trying your hardest, you’re good. Kids care about the process more than the outcome.

Defining success based on process instead of outcome will help your child to remain engaged and feel successful. Emphasizing the importance of practice for improvement fits how kids think about things and gives them control over their own success.

Praise your child when he’s trying, even if his efforts don’t seem to be bringing him closer to mastery. Even when it doesn’t look like he’s making progress, his body is processing the experience. He’s learning to swim, even if it doesn’t look like it. You want to keep him motivated so he keeps putting in the effort until the results show.

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Mystery Solved: Why Swimming Makes You Hungry

It happens without fail. Your kids finish a swimming lesson and hop out of the pool ready to devour whatever you put in front of them. If they weren’t already, they become bottomless pits of hunger. What’s going on, and why shouldn’t giving them a snack be your first response?

Why Swimming Makes You Hungry

This hunger has  physiological reasons.

  1. Water draws heat from your body faster than air. Your child’s body uses energy to keep warm, and the heat loss triggers his body to create insulation in the form of fat. Both of these things send a message to his brain that his body needs fuel.
  2. Swimming, like any other exercise, makes your child thirsty, but because he’s not sweating, he can become dehydrated without realizing it. Some of what your child perceives as hunger when he gets out of the pool may actually be thirst.

What to Do about It

Have a warm drink ready for your kids as soon as they get out of the pool after your swimming lesson, before they have a snack. It will help them warm up and satisfy any thirst that’s masquerading as hunger. After that, give them a snack. (That part’s a no-brainer.)