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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.

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How to Make a New Swimming Skill Automatic

With repetition, practice, and review, your child will turn the new movement you’re teaching into something habitual and ingrained that requires very little thought. In the early stages, though, each moment of what he’s doing takes a lot of focus and attention. How do you help your kids practice new skills to make them old hat when you’re teaching them to swim?

Make it easy

It’s easiest for kids to learn when they’re fresh and their bodies and minds aren’t too tired. Depending on how long you’ve spent on getting into the pool, reviewing, playing, and teaching the new skill, you’ll probably have between one and five minutes to practice. This may not seem like much, but remember that today’s new skill is the skill you’ll be reviewing at length in your next swimming lesson. The important thing is to introduce the skill and give your child a chance to get a small taste of how it feels.

Switch it up

If your child gets frustrated, switch to a different approach to the same skill or to a different skill entirely. Look at what he’s finding difficult and demonstrate it again. Touch his body. Have him touch your body. Feeling his own ankle when it’s flexed and pointed will be helpful, but seeing and feeling your ankle when it’s flexed and pointed will give him a different perspective.

Make it clear

Acknowledge the small subtle things that are happening as your child practices. Point out how balance and buoyancy come into play, highlighting which parts of the body are more likely to sink and which parts are more likely to float. Talk about how his body moves and feels in the water. Keep it brief and to the point, just a touch and a “feel your knee?” while he’s swimming is the most attention he can spare while he’s also trying to practice moving. Save the details for later when you’re on dry land.

Keep it simple

Remember to progress from easy to difficult and from simple to complex:

  • When you’re working on floating, start with providing lots of physical support and progress to providing little or none.
  • When you’re working on a distance, start with short and work up to the width or length of the pool.
  • When you start a skill, speed doesn’t matter. Work up to being able to do it fast or at different speeds.
  • When you start a skill, refine it slowly. At first, just doing it is enough. As you practice, work on refining body position, then movement, and then timing.

Keep it up

When you’re teaching your kids to swim, today’s new skill is tomorrow’s review. Don’t expect all the learning to happen at once. It’s during review and practice that those new skills will sink in and become automatic for your kids.

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Time to Play! Body Shape and Position

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. Here’s a game you can play on dry land that will help give your kids a feel for the best body shape and position for swimming.

A major advantage you have when you’re teaching your kids to swim is that you can try things out of the pool that help your kids learn to swim. The next time you’re at the playground, try this. Have your child hang from the bars or rings. Does his body feel long? Does it feel loooong? Have him stand on the ground reaching for a bar or ring that’s too high for him to grasp. How does it feel?

That stretched feeling, or as close to it as possible, is a good one to practice. Kids tend to scrunch their bodies up and revert to a dog paddle when they’re learning to swim, but ideally they should keep their bodies long. Having a no-pressure reference point from dry land will help them know what to aim for when you’re teaching them in the pool.