Time for Parents to Explore Underwater !!! Lesson One.

Are you a nervous swimmer? Are you among the 65% of adults who are uncomfortable if you were in water over your head? Do you swim across your pool with the idea that if you stopped swimming you would sink?

Here at the swim school, we often find that when we have a nervous child, we can usually find that one of their parents is also a nervous swimmer. So here is my remedy and recommendations for some things for YOU, mom and dad or even grandma or grandpa to practice at home. Please do not feel foolish in admitting your nervousness. Research shows that a parent's anxiety in anything is transferred to the child through subliminal messages in body position, voice inflections or even facial expressions. Do you sit with your arms crossed hunching forward during your child's swim lessons? Have you ever told your child he or she almost drowned when they went under for periods as brief as two or three seconds. Do you scrunch your face up as you work to submerge your child?

Summer Swim Tips for Home

We work hard with the young swimmers AND THEIR PARENTS all year long at our swim school. Often at this time of year, we see the kids coming back into the pool with some bad habits. MMMM, we wonder, where did they learn that? SO in an effort to keep those swimming skills up when the weather is warm and to give our parents some hints on what to do at home, we are offering up our Top Ten Tips for Home!

1. Headed for the backyard pool? Give the kids time to warm up and have fun and then work on their swimming skills. Ten minutes of “teaching” is enough – you’ll be surprised what a big difference that will make.

The Value of Working With Your Hands

Kathy and I often chuckle about how we have learned to handle being identified as "swim lesson teachers". When asked at a party or in a meeting by someone that we have never met before, they get a strange look on their face, that seems to say "ohhh you make a living and support your family teaching swimming?" One of my favorite questions is, "and what else do you do?" I will sometimes go off with a long winded explanation about how our small business is much more complicated than it seems. We have to train and recruit staff, work daily on our teaching techniques, interact with not only the children who swim in our programs or play in our sports camps but also their parents, schedule our pool use and yada, yada, yada. With a little internal smile I will share our story and move on through the day.

Do You Have Fun At Work ? I do!

Today as we move into a bit of the hectic days of late spring and early summer, I am looking forward with excitement to the opening of our Mesa swim school this week, the opening of our four summer sports camps in two weeks, the summer recreational swim teams and the summer energy that blows in the front doors at the indoor swim schools. As much as I am proud of our curriculum and the quality of our teaching and coaching methods, I have come to the conclusion that I have fun at work not just because of what we do but who I do it with each day.

Relax, it is not that big a deal

What's not a big deal? Well anything really. Just got out of the water teaching today. The thought running through my mind is that parents of little ones today seem to place a lot of emphasis on success in everything their child does or attempts. And if the swim lesson or tumble gym class does not go well, the parent puts too much blame on themselves. They seem to think they are failing somehow or that their child is somehow acting developmentally inappropriately.

From the Mouths of Babes

Here at the swim school we have advocated for years that swim lessons are a major layer of protection in preventing drowning. We work very hard to teach a child that there will be a consequence for stepping off the edge of the pool. They will go under water! Now I personally have two, yes two, major resources that support this theory. In a recent blog, we reported on the results of the brand new, just released, National Institute of Health study that confirmed the fact that swim lessons play a role in drowning prevention.

Swimming Lessons Do Not Increase Drowning Risk in Young Children - National Institutes of Health

FINALLY, we are beginning to have some research that supports what many of us in the Learn to Swim world have believed for years. Swim Lessons do impact a child's behavior and are a factor in the fight against children drowning. The National Institutes of Health have released a study that states:

"Providing very young children with swimming lessons appears to have a protective effect against drowning and does not increase childrens' risk of drowning"