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Better Swimming for Smaller Children - part 1
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Articles In This Section:· At What Age Should Your Child Be Learning to Swim? - part 1 · At What Age Should Your Child Be Learning to Swim? - part 2 · At What Age Should Your Child Be Learning to Swim? - part 3 · Are You Qualified to Teach Others to Swim—Even With the Help of These Lessons? · Specific Pointers About Entering the Pool, Pool Temperature, and the Weather
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EVERYONE has heard it said that children take
to the water like ducks. But the fact remains that children
aren't ducks, and without planned and imaginative instruction, they will show a healthy talent for doing many other
things in the water than swimming. They may keep their feet
glued to the bottom as if they were wearing cement boots.
They may walk cautiously about as if they were in a mine
field or on a terrain of poison ivy. In short, they may act as
if the idea of the game were to maintain a vertical position
and to keep as much of themselves as dry as possible. On the
other hand, children also like to splash, clobber, and churn
water. This, of course, is fun. But your aim is to train them
for the best fun—the skill of swimming in water.
Parents want, or should want, their children to swim because it is one of the few sports in which the whole family can participate and have fun. There are lots of sports. There's boxing, wrestling, hiking, handball, squash, track and field, horseshoes, marching, and Indian clubs. But these are the reasons why swimming always tops the lists of "preferred sports." You may have a son playing Pop Warner football, and another son playing Little League baseball, and your husband bowls, and you really prefer golf—but you also have a five-year-old. Suddenly you realize that the family is going off in seventy-six directions, and most of the things you do together are passive (such as watching television or listening to records) because you can't all go out and play football— You do?—or baseball or tennis, but you can all have fun in the water. The most heated family fight will dissolve in the water, temporarily at least. Swimming is more than good exercise and healthful. It is a kind of spiritual revival—and besides, it gets you clean! Keeping in mind the array of propensities and resistances in children, you will find some means more effective than others in making a child feel at home in the water. If you know what procedures and techniques are best suited to children generally, and to each stage of their swimming development in particular, you will not only avoid getting them off to a false start, but you will enjoy the time spent in the water with them more. It is the object of this book to give in detail the procedures and techniques which will make your children take to the water with pleasure, grace, and ease. The ten lessons described in this series present procedures and techniques for teaching children about five years of age. But with slight maneuvering and a little imagination, the same teaching methods apply to any person who can't swim, though the adult may want to skip London Bridge Is Falling Down! On the other hand, anyone who has the courage to start to learn to swim at forty is probably enthusiastic enough to play Ring-around-a-rosy in the water, just as the five-year-olds do. It often happens that when the five-year-old learns to swim, the thirty-five-year-old mother or father decides she or he, too, would like to learn. The confidence that children gain from learning to swim is unbelievable, but for adults this confidence is immeasurable. In fact, it may be a little surprising in its effects. You may know full-grown adults who, having learned to swim at age thirty-nine, decided to take up mountain climbing or spoke in grandiose terms about trying out for the Olympics. All because they never thought they could learn to swim, and found to their amazement that they did.
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