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What to Expect When You’re Teaching Toddlers to Swim

Toddlers experience a huge rush of physical independence very quickly. How can you use their newfound coordination when you’re teaching them to swim?

What You Can Expect

  • Independent movement in the water
  • Some understanding of water safety

What You Shouldn’t Expect

  • Fancy strokes
  • Independent water safety

How to Teach Toddlers to Swim

Kids this age are ready to be introduced to all the skills they need, but at a rudimentary level. Here are specific things to remember when you’re teaching them:

  • Focus on water safety, but don’t count on their remembering all the time.
  • Kids this age are big fans of the words “no” and “why.” Use that to your advantage.
  • Your child can follow instructions if you give them one at a time.
  • Kids this age tend to get frustrated easily. Take lots of breaks and don’t push too hard.
  • Kids this age can usually throw or kick a ball well enough to move it a little, but they won’t have real ability. They might be able to ride a tricycle, walk down stairs, run well, and stack blocks. Think of how your child does these things when you’re working on arm and leg movement.

Don’t forget that you can get step-by-step instructions for teaching kids of all ages to swim by clicking Get the Book and downloading now.

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What to Expect When You’re Teaching Infants to Swim

It’s never too soon to start thinking about water safety for your kids. What should you expect when you’re teaching your six- to eighteen-month-old to swim?

What You Can Expect

  • Developing comfort in the water
  • Some conceptual understanding of movement in the water

What You Shouldn’t Expect

  • Independent Swimming
  • Water Safety

How to Teach Infants to Swim

The most important things you can do when your child is this age:

  • Make sure the environment is safe
  • Give him plenty of experience in the water

Kids this age are too young to understand the danger of drowning, and they’re too young to coordinate their bodies well enough to truly swim. Just think about how they move on land. At the younger end of the range, they’ve just started crawling. At the older end, they’re toddling around. Their mental and physical development doesn’t give them the ability to swim at this point.

At this age—as at every age—making sure that they’re well supervised whenever they’re near or in water and that any pool is secured with an appropriate fence are the most important ways to keep them safe.

Once that’s taken care of, you can practice getting comfortable and learning to move in the water. You can progress to getting your child’s face wet, gliding, and floating. With enough practice, your kids will be able to toddle around in the pool as well as they do on land.

A Word about Infant Swimming

There are programs that work to teach kids this age to hold their breath underwater and flip onto their backs to float. Use common sense. Until they’re cognitively and physically ready to swim, this kind of training is unlikely to hurt them*, but only supervision will keep them safe.

Fall has come to the San Francisco Bay Area. Today is grey and drizzly, with the scent of fallen leaves in the air. Until spring, I’ll be posting three times a week and using the off days to drink hot cocoa and sit by the fire.

*There are risks associated with using infant swimming training, including the possibility that an infant will aspirate water. Use common sense. When in doubt, err on the side of caution.

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Time to Play! Freestyle

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. Make practicing the freestyle, or front crawl, into a game.

Have your child pretend he’s a cab driver. Ask him to take you to different spots around the pool. He does the front crawl to get there, and you swim next to him. Does he take the most direct route? Does he get a good tip? How’s traffic in the pool? Is it rush hour? Do you have good reasons to get to your destination? Are you going to fun places? You can even take this cab to places without roads. Top of Mount Everest? No problem. Be sure to send me a postcard.

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How to Set Expectations When You’re Teaching Your Kids to Swim

It’s hard to get where you want to go if you don’t have a clearly defined goal. How do you define that goal when you’re teaching your kids to swim?

Think of what your child is capable of on land. If your baby is just learning to crawl, he’ll be able to similarly explore moving his body in the water, but don’t expect mastery. If your child can walk and run with great coordination, you can expect him to develop similar coordination in the water with practice. Keep your expectations reasonable.

Think about how much practice it took on land to develop the level of mastery your child has, though. Remember the process of learning to crawl, walk or run. At the beginning, it looked awkward and ungainly. Only with time and lots of practice did those movements become a natural way for your child’s body to move. Swimming will be the same. Keep your expectations reasonable.

Keep your expectations about form reasonable. Good form will help your child swim farther and faster, but his body might not be capable of good form. Swimming is like dance, tennis, or golf. Kids learn quickly, but until their minds and bodies are developed enough, don’t expect them to have the level of mastery you’d see in an adult.

Be aware of what it takes to achieve mastery. Athletes practice for a long time thinking about their form. At some point, it becomes second nature—internalized. Without thinking about it, they continue to improve. Learning to swim involves thinking and feeling in a very conscious way for a long time, and there’s a lot to think about and a lot to feel. At some point, the knowledge starts to move into your child’s body instead of just his head, just like walking or riding a bike. Many recent studies have pointed out that the amount of practice required to achieve mastery of a skill is ten thousand hours. It would take your child many years to get that much practice. Have you spent ten thousand hours of your life swimming? That’s an hour a day for almost thirty years. In the meantime (you know what’s coming!), keep your expectations reasonable.

Have I driven you crazy with the “keep your expectations reasonable” mantra? I’ve repeated it because it’s so important. The way your child feels about swimming will depend in large part on your feelings and your feedback. If your expectations are reasonable, you’ll feed his motivation to keep trying. If your expectations are unreasonable, you’ll be frustrated, he’ll be frustrated, neither of you will have any fun, and he’ll want to stay out of the pool and quit rather than disappoint you.