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The 6th Sense You Need When You Teach Your Kids to Swim

All five of your kids’ physical senses are being bombarded while they’re learning to swim. In order to help them understand their physical experience, you’ll need a sixth sense. ESP? Nope. Something you already have.

Empathy. Imagine your child’s experience of the water. It’s different from his experience on the land in almost every way.

Kids’ Sensory Experience of Swimming

The experience of swimming is dramatically different than the experience of being on dry land for all five senses.

Sight

Things look weird underwater, and the water feels strange on your eyes. Goggles help if your child is uncomfortable with these sensations.

Hearing

Your child can’t hear well underwater. Sound is muted. The feeling of water getting into his ears and draining out is strange.

Smell

Chemicals that keep the water in the pool fit for swimming can also be hard on kids’ noses. For the first ten minutes in the pool, until the awareness of the smell fades, a strong smell of chlorine can be distracting and unpleasant.

Taste

Swallowed pool water won’t taste like the water your kids are used to drinking at home.

Touch

The impact of the water on the other four senses is nothing compared to its impact on touch. It’s a bit of a cheat to call touch the fifth sense, because it’s much more than just the feel of the water on skin.

  • Weight: The feel of the water on his body is much heavier than the air he’s used to. The extra pressure on his body can feel confining.
  • Balance: The way his body balances in the water is different than it is on the land. It will make him feel less coordinated than he does on land.
  • Body Position: His body position is different in the water. On land, we’re used to aiming for an upright orientation. In water, horizontal is ideal. You can practice the idea of horizontal on land by having your child crawl or roll on the ground, just to remind him that he’s experienced this position and what it feels like.
  • Movement: Moving through the water feels different. The water resists more than air, so it’s harder to move through it. On land, our legs do most of the work moving our bodies around. In the water, our arms and torsos do most of the work.
  • Breathing: Breathing in the water is different. On land, your child doesn’t have to pay attention to the position of his head or the timing of his breathing. He just breathes whenever he needs to. In the water, he has to be aware of timing and position or risk getting a big gulp or snort of water.
  • Metabolism and heat loss: His body will lose heat faster—up to 25 times faster—in the water than it does on land. Even if he’s wearing a wet suit, he’ll be starting to cool off from the moment he gets into the water.

How Your Kids’ Sensory Experience Affects How You Teach Them to Swim

Pay attention while you’re teaching them. If it looks like they’re experiencing sensory overload, give them a break.

After they get out of the water, their brains will still be analyzing and creating a cohesive understanding of their time swimming. Rest and recovery time are important for your kids’ sensory and mental processing of their experiences in the water. Make sure to give them plenty of unstructured play and rest time out of the pool to process. Even when you’re not in the pool, they’re working on learning to swim.

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6 Truths Your Kids Know That Aren’t True in the Water

By the time they’re up and running, your kids know a lot about the world. They may not be able to explain physics concepts, but they know them. Gravity? Check. Momentum? Check.

Not all of the things your kids have learned about the world from the time they’ve spent experimenting on land are true in the water. These six characteristics of swimming make learning to swim unlike the land-based skills your kids already know. If you can help your kids understand these differences, you’ll have an easier time teaching them to swim.

6 Characteristics of Swimming That Are Different from Land-Based Skills

Finesse

Swimming isn’t about brute strength. It’s about finesse. It’s not what you’ve got; it’s how you use it. The better your child gets at swimming with good form, the less effort he’ll need to swim farther, faster. Your child knows that he can run faster if he ups his effort. You’ll need to help teach him that swimming better, not harder, will improve his performance.

Rhythm

Coordinating the movement of all the parts of the body in relationship to each other is key to swimming comfortably. Your child already knows how to do this intuitively if he can run. If he can skip, throw a ball, or kick, he’s beginning to understand this concept in a more conscious way. In swimming, the rhythm of movement determines whether you move at all in a way that it doesn’t on land. You’ll need to teach the importance of coordinated movement in swimming.

Power

Most of the power in swimming comes from the arms, the core, and the hips. The rhythm of the movement makes it work. Kicking provides stability but not much propulsion. This is exactly the opposite of land-based activities like running and biking, where the legs and core provide the power and the arms are secondary.

Drag

There’s much less resistance when you move your body through air than there is when you move through water, so reducing drag in the water is more important in swimming than it is in land-based activities. Any part of your body that’s moving forward should be slicing through the water, disturbing it as little as possible. Any part of your body that’s moving backwards should be maximizing resistance, using the water to push or pull against. When you’re teaching your kids to swim, you’ll need to give them plenty of practice and experience with what happens when they push and pull in the water.

Relaxation

A big shift in skill and ability will happen when your child learns to relax in the water. Ironically, it’s hard to relax in the water until you have enough skill to feel comfortable. You can help him by providing all the support he needs.

Ease

Nowhere is the concept of going with the flow clearer than in the water. It’s easier to go with the flow than against the flow of the water. It’s also more efficient and effective. On land, if it feels easier, it means you’re not trying harder. In swimming, making it feel easier is good.

The big picture

Keep these concepts in mind as you plan your lessons and as you spend time in and out of the pool with your child. Using these fundamentals to inform how you teach will allow your child to have the best, smoothest, fastest learning experience.

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Time to Play! Getting out of the Pool

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.

One of the most important skills you can teach your kids when they’re learning to swim is how to get out of the pool by themselves. The easiest places to get out of the pool are the stairs or pool ladder. Your kids need to be able to get to the stairs or ladder from other parts of the pool. You can make a game out of practicing this critical swimming skill.

While your child holds onto the edge of the pool, show him how to move by pulling himself along the edge with his hands. Move one hand. Then move the other hand to meet it. Practice moving along the wall this way. Now turn it into a game.

Have your child move his hands like cars in a traffic jam. One car has to move before the other can move into position next to it. No passing! Do your kids’ hands wait patiently, or do they honk their horns? What kinds of horns do they have? Are they loud eighteen-wheeler wailers or cute mini beeps?

I guarantee that this swimming lesson will be the most fun you have in traffic all day.

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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.