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How to Teach Your Kids to Swim: 4 Keys to Creating Atmosphere

How you set the stage for your swimming lessons will have a huge impact on how your kids feels about learning to swim, and your kids’ attitudes will determine whether they’re willing and able to learn. So how do you create an atmosphere that sets you both up for success when you’re teaching your kids to swim?

4 Keys to Creating Atmosphere

A big part of teaching happens before you open your mouth or demonstrate a single swimming skill. It starts with creating an atmosphere that makes your kids receptive to learning. Imagine the look your kids get on their face when they’re watching a clown. (Not a scary clown. A good, funny clown.) That’s the kind of excitement and anticipation you want them to have when you’re teaching them to swim.

Relax.

Plan your swimming lesson for a time when you’re not rushed or tense. Your kids can sense tension in your face and body. They pick it up and become tense, too. You need to be truly relaxed before you start to teach. If you’re not, step back to think happy thoughts or postpone your lesson until you can have the attitude you need to make the teaching and learning experience fun for everyone.

Project confidence, calm, and enthusiasm.

Make sure those feelings come through in your voice. Don’t yell. Reassure your child with jokes, laughter and hugs. Use a patient, nurturing, positive attitude. Remind yourself that making learning to swim fun isn’t only an end in itself; it’s also an important part of setting the stage for deep, thorough learning.

Having your own emotions on an even keel will also help you respond to your child. If your child is afraid or nervous, point out how close those feelings are to excitement. The way you frame his experience for him will help shape how he perceives it. The physical sensations for a little kid trying to go to sleep the night before his birthday aren’t far removed from the ones he feels when he’s getting ready to try something new. Remind him about some of his favorite activities and how there was a moment in his life when he hadn’t tried those activities yet. This could be the moment right before discovering a new favorite.

Be trustworthy. Be honest.

Let your child know what to expect, and follow through. If you say you won’t dunk him, don’t dunk him. Your child needs to be able to trust you in the water so that he’ll have enough confidence to take the risks learning to swim entails. If you break that trust, it will take a long time to regain it. It can make learning to swim very difficult, possibly even leading to a lifelong fear of the water. If you’re a trustworthy teacher, your child will trust that he’s safe in the water.

Tame your expectations.

Don’t expect your child to do it perfectly. Don’t expect him to be fast or coordinated. Don’t expect him to progress without setbacks or plateaus. If you start to get frustrated, take a break. You’re not going to teach effectively when you’re frustrated, your child won’t learn anything, and you’ll transfer your lousy mood and tension to him. Better to hop out of the pool for a few minutes and lie on your backs together watching for animals in the puffy clouds floating by.

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What You Don’t Know about Reviewing That Will Change the Way You Think about Teaching Forever

Whether you’re teaching your kids to swim or teaching them long division, you’re going to spend a lot of time reviewing things you’ve already covered. It’s easy to feel like you’re spinning your wheels when you’re reviewing, but there’s something you should know that will change the way you think about teaching forever.

What You Don’t Know about Reviewing That Will Change the Way You Think about Teaching Forever

Reviewing is the heart of the lesson. This is so important that I’ll say it again: reviewing is the heart of the lesson. The first time your child is exposed to a new skill, he only scratches its surface. When you’re teaching your child to swim, he has to listen to you, watch you, and feel his own body, all while trying to interpret your feedback and the feedback he’s getting from his body and the water. It’s a big job, and it’s a lot to process. Not all of that processing is going to take place in the pool.

After you teach your kids a new swimming skill and get out of the pool, they’ll rest and play and do other things, but they’re still thinking about the skill you introduced. They’re still getting insights into how it worked. They’re still analyzing what was going on in the pool. A whole bunch of the learning of the new skill takes place after the lesson is over. They might even dream about it!

Don’t be disappointed if the bulk of your swimming lesson is dedicated to review. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s going to help your kids really get it.

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5 Common Feelings That Affect How Kids Learn to Swim

The sensory experience of being in the water, as well as emotional associations, leads to a range of feelings your child might have about swimming. Be on the lookout for emotional distress that you can soothe and for opportunities to motivate your child. What are the five most common feelings you can expect to crop up when you’re teaching your kids to swim?

5 Common Feelings That Affect How Kids Learn to Swim

Fear

It’s never too early to help your child feel comfortable in the water. Younger kids—three and four years old—are less fearful than older kids—seven or eight years old—who are being introduced to the water for the first time.

Where does the fear come from?

  • Fear of drowning can come from experience—like having slipped under the water in the tub for a moment—or from peers or the media.
  • Fear can come from feelings of being out of control, confused or uncertain, powerless, or unsupported in the water.
  • Fear can come from picking up parents’ own fear, worry or concerns.
  • For some kids, new things are scary.

Being afraid is reasonable. Until your child has the skills of water safety, the water is a dangerous place. That’s the whole point. That’s why he needs to learn to swim.

Many actors feel stage fright before a performance. A common tool for getting past this fear is to reframe it as excitement. You can help your child by using this technique. Understand the fear. Address it. Reframe it as excitement.

First, talk to your child to try to isolate the reason for the fear. Next, address his concerns. If he’s afraid that he’ll slip and swallow water, explain that you’ll be holding him and won’t let that happen. If he fears the unknown, explain to him what to expect once he’s in the water, from how it will feel to what you’ll be doing and how long you’ll do it.

Once you’ve addressed his concerns, point out the physical signs of fear that he might be experiencing: increased heart rate, fast or shallow breathing, shivers, tension, a rush of adrenaline. All of those are things that also happen when you’re excited. Have your child focus on what he’s feeling in his body and how he’s felt those same things when he’s been excited about something. Associate the two feelings. It’s hard to stay afraid when you’re aware that your body is responding the same way it does when you wake up on the morning of your birthday party.

Anger

Your child might be angry at being forced to do something he doesn’t want to do. He might feel anger about feeling afraid. He might feel anger in the form of frustration about not being able to physically control his body in the water as well as he’d like to be able to.

If he’s angry at being forced to do something he doesn’t want to do, give him as many choices as possible. “Would you like to go swimming and then to the park or to the park and then swimming?” or “Would you like to swim for fifteen minutes or for twenty minutes?”

If he’s angry about feeling afraid, help him to express the anger and then address the fear.

If he’s frustrated about not having the same degree of control over his movement in the water as he does on land, remind him that it took a lot of practice to learn to walk and to learn to run. Tell him funny stories about those early days. Scale back the skill you’re working on to give him a break from the frustration and an opportunity to enjoy practicing something that he’s already competent doing.

Happiness

Spending time playing in the water with your parents in the warm sun is fun. Don’t gloss over the joy you and your child can share because you’re in a rush to get to the next skill. The spaces between learning new things will be filled with the laughter that becomes memories your child will carry with him for the rest of his life.

Security

Your child will rely on you to set the tone for your time in the pool. If you feel confident and if you provide physical and emotional support, your child will feel secure. That sense of security will make him receptive to what you’re trying to teach and will color his longterm feelings about swimming and the water.

Pride

As your child’s efforts pay off and he learns new things and masters new skills, he’s likely to feel proud. Help to encourage and validate that feeling. Talk about how well he’s doing to other adults in front of him. Give him a forum for sharing that pride.

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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.