Day 10: Holding hands with someone

Might have to try for Day 10 tomorrow...
Okay, mommas, you want your kids to swim, right? Here's what I think a good instructor should do:

1. Teach kids by showing them. If an instructor is teaching back floats, they should sit the kids out of the pool and show them what a good back float looks like. {Head back, chin up, relax your body, arms out, btw}. They should be very interactive.
2. Be looking at the child when they are with them one-on-one, and there should most definitely be one-on-one time! If an instructor is looking at her buddy on the guard stand while your munchkin is sinking during a back float, she is not paying attention to your child.
3. Make it fun! There's a reason kids love to swim, water is fun! A good instructor teaches by making the basics fun. Think "red light, green light" for kicking while still teaching kids that kicking shouldn't be a "soccer-ball" kick, it should be a "fish kick" or some similar analogy.

A great instructor should notice the details when your child is swimming. If she's teaching a preschooler to back float (apparently my go-to example), she'll probably have the child's head on her shoulder, or what I would do is physically hold their head while teaching them to breath deeply so that their body relaxes and chest rises. She'll notice that arms are stiff or legs are starting to come up. She'll know that head support is crucial when on the back because a scared child does not want water in their face, and it's perfectly possible to back float without getting water on the face. And she'll keep them in the float just long enough that they will either float by themselves (yea!) or learn that they can trust her with their heads and relax.

And here's a final tip for parents: When your baby is taking a bath and you're getting to the end of it, drain it (or if it's like my bathtub, it'll be low enough anyway) enough that you can lie your child on her back, so that her ears are in the water, but not in her face. This has two benefits: the water will completely fill the ears and accustom your baby to water, and she can see your face (which should be excited and encouraging, read this! The third benefit is that she'll be "floating" without ever losing support and still be in the right position for real floating.

If you ever have questions about swimming, please let me know, I'm happy to help. Also, these are simply my suggestions built from 8 years of teaching and going on 24 years of swimming, but they may not work for everyone! (Read: Disclaimer.)

I had a little girl a few years ago who had, the previous summer, achieved swimming the entire length of the pool. Quite an accomplishment, right? It could've been, but when I started teaching her, I quickly realized that she was in no way ready to do the whole pool. In fact, she wasn't even ready to put her face under the water!
The problem was her foundation was shaky. She was afraid to be under the water; she was scared to be on her back. We spent the entire summer in the shallow end of the pool fixing her foundation—how to do a bob, how to go from her back to her belly and back, what arm strokes should look like, etc.—and our summer ended with her triumphantly swimming on her back confidently and able to stay under the water longer than two seconds. She could've gone the 25 meters, but my goal was not distance, it was strength.
The moral of this story is: If you want your children to swim safely and confidently, don't be satisfied with any lifeguard at the local pool who's roped into teaching. Find someone who is good at teaching, because your child is worth it!