Little Swimmers: Teaching baby to swim

The Jewish Community Center, the YMCA, and Penfield Sport & Fitness are among area organizations that are helping more and more youngsters feel safe in the pool while learning a valuable lifelong lesson: how to swim. “The earlier you can get children into the water, the safer they will be when it comes to water safety,” says Gail Buckner, the aquatics director at Penfield Sport & Fitness. “A lot of programs don’t focus on teaching swimming to babies, but our philosophy behind all of our lessons is that children learn by repetition, and no one goes into a lesson they’re not ready for. We teach according to their ability, and not according to their age.”

But that’s not the only benefit babies will receive from learning to swim at an early age. A baby’s physical strength is cultivated through muscle development, as early swimming allows the baby to use muscles that cannot yet be used while on dry land. The development of these muscles can help aid in a baby’s ability to walk at an early age while also fostering better hand-eye coordination and more finely-tuned motor skills. The associated movements that come from swimming also strengthen the baby’s heart and lungs.

Buckner says lessons start for children as young as six months old, and focus on supervised water activities such as how to safely enter and exit a pool, learning to kick and and the use of arms, floating on one’s back, and rolling over in the water. Maintaining a small student to staff ratio of 4 to 1, parents are encouraged to take an active role in the day’s lessons.Buckner says she and her staffers also work on effective communication when near the water. For example, before jumping into the pool for the first time during any lesson, the children count to three.

After the students enter the water, they make their way back to the wall, which Buckner says plays an important role in a child’s confidence in the pool. Once the babies realize the wall is always there for them, they should feel safer learning to swim. “We do limit the number of times where the baby will go under water. Kids at that age appear as if they have no fear, and they’re very comfortable in the water,” Buckner says.“We will teach the parents to teach their children to be safe in the water. As the child is learning a skill, his parent is doing that skill with him as he goes up and down the pool. It’s all about continuation and building upon their skills as the babies get more and more comfortable in the pool.”

At the JCC, there are two levels of instruction offered to parents and their babies. The Parent and Tot classes are for babies ages 10 months to 2 years, while the Advanced Parent and Tot classes are catered towards children ages 2 to 4 years. Hanna Bergwall, assistant aquatics director for the JCC, says the 30-minute classes begin with an upbeat song such as “If You’re Happy and You Know it,” and “The Wheels on the Bus” before transitioning into fun games that advance the child’s swimming education while providing a fun learning atmosphere.

One of the first lessons taught to both the babies and their parents is the importance of the prone position, where a swimmer is flat on her belly, arms extended, with her face close to the water. This serves as the primary swimming motion for many of the swimming strokes that children will learn during their swimming careers. Through the use of water toys, Bergwall and the aquatics staff encourage the babies to “learn to scoop their hands through the water and extend their arms in front of them,” the same motions they would use to swim up and down the lanes of the pool. By breaking down the skills needed to be successful in the pool, Bergwall says that children are more prone to remember that day’s lesson, and will have a broader skill base to build upon as they continue to develop as swimmers.

“When we do jumps into the pool, we encourage the kids to immediately grab onto the wall,” says Bergwall, who estimates that 300 children and parents take a swim class each quarter. “When we end our classes in the kiddie pool, the focus is on independent movement (with or without flotation devices, depending on the age group). The consistent message the parents take away from the classes is the different ways to hold a child in the water to encourage correct body positions and how to make a child feel safe and secure in the water while still pushing him to explore and try new things.”

John Boccacino is a freelance writer and monthly contributor to Rochester Area & Genesee Valley Parent Magazine. He is currently the Director of Sports Information for Keuka College. He lives in Webster, NY.