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How to Teach Your Kids to Breathe While They Swim

Your kids don’t need to learn to turn their heads to breathe to be safe in the water, but if they want to do a true crawl or to swim as fast as possible, they’ll want to. Here’s how to teach this swimming skill.

There’s a lot of awareness of the body required to optimize this swimming skill. At the end of the process, your child will learn that, as his body rolls so that he’s mostly on his side, he’ll turn his head just slightly so that it’s out of the water and he can breathe in through his mouth. He’ll time the breath so that he’ll be looking through a triangle formed by the bent recovering arm and the surface of the water.

The First Step

You can practice on dry land. Have your child put his hands on the edge of a table and move his feet until he can position his upper body into a streamline position on a plane with the surface of the table. Have him hold onto the edge of the table with one hand—let’s call this the stroking arm—and gently touch the table with the other hand—let’s call this the recovering arm. Ask him to twist his torso, turning so that the shoulder of the recovering arm lifts toward the ceiling. The hand of the recovering arm might lift a few inches off the table, too. Have him notice the position of his head relative to the recovering arm.

 

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Time to Play! Side Breathing

Kids learn by playing. The more you can make learning to swim fun for your kids, the more they’ll like it, the quicker they’ll learn, and the more fun you’ll have teaching them.  Turning your head to breathe when you swim is a skill that will transform your child from an okay swimmer to a solid swimmer. Here’s a game to make grasping the concept fun.

Have your child pretend to be a log rolling in the water from stomach to back to stomach again. (I know, I know. Logs don’t have stomachs.) Have him do it himself. Now you roll him.

This game really helps with the idea that you turn your head, keeping it in line with the rest of your body instead of lifting it. It also reinforces the involvement of the rest of the body, helping your child learn to involve the torso and core in the rotation for breathing.

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Time to Play! Popup Breathing

Kids learn by playing. The more you can make learning to swim fun for your kids, the more they’ll like it, the quicker they’ll learn, and the more fun you’ll have teaching them. Once your kids are able to take a breath whenever they need one, they’re well on their way to water safety. This game will help them get a feel for how to surface whenever they need to breathe.

One of the things that you need to teach your kids when they’re learning to swim is that pushing down with their arms moves them up in the water. To help them practice this without realizing they’re practicing, make it a game. How high up can they get by pushing down into the water with their arms?

Can they pop up so that their shoulders are above the surface? Their chests? Their waists? Can they pop up higher than the edge of the pool? Can they pop up higher than you can? (It’s up to you to decide whether to let them win.)