Anyone teach their kids to swim all on their own?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well this is one of the dimmer things on DCUM

No OP you do not teach them if you are not certified

You can not watch all three at once and teach them

Swimming takes more than a week

This is so f-ing hilarious

Well, it’s DCUM. People here also send their kids to classes to learn how to ride a bike and tie their shoes (not kidding).

[Anonymous]

My kid made a ton of progress going to the pool every day for a weekFrequency matters more than quantity IMO. Lessons have been virtually useless.

One thing that also helped was DD figured out she could float in her bath water and then started working on that at the pool.

[Anonymous]

No, we tried but until we hired a real pro our kids made little progress.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I never put a floaty on my kids. I was always in the water an arm length away. We did lots of diving toys to practice going under. It was definitely easier for me because my kids are 5 years apart and we went to the pool everyday. For your kids, I’d try to make it as much like play as possible and not feel like lessons.

This was basically my daughter. She’s 5 now. We didn’t go this often but we go a lot. Diving off the side of the pool to fish for toys at the bottom helped a ton. She learned by watching others. She learned to dive today by watching kids dive off the diving board. We haven’t done lessons so she’s mostly taught herself. She absolutely loves it and it’s really fun to go to the pool with her.

[Anonymous]

I did, before he started the lessons to get better technique at age 5. I taught him around age 3. I used those swim pads where you can remove layer by layer as they learn to thread water. Of course he was swimming doggy style but he learned to swim with his head under water too and to retrieve objects from the bottom. We had a pool in our apartment complex and it took one summer.

[Anonymous]

This is what I used to teach my kid
https://a.co/d/1y9Snnn

[Anonymous]

The fastest way is probably to take lessons once a week or so and then practice whatever you learned daily with them on your own. You need the repetition.

[Anonymous]

People have been swimming for millennia - before swimming lessons existed. They learned from family members and from frequent practice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The fastest way is probably to take lessons once a week or so and then practice whatever you learned daily with them on your own. You need the repetition.

Agree on this. We haven't been very consistent about taking our daughter to family swim to help her practice, but I've noticed that in the crowded group lessons my daughter only gets 5-10 minutes of actual swimming time (except for the one time nobody else enrolled and she ended up with private lessons for a couple months--that was awesome!).

We have other priorities that are higher for us than swimming, so while we want her to develop water safety skills and learn enough so that she could lap swim in the future for exercise, we've just invested our time in other skills. What I wouldn't do for a 30-hour day so we could do it all! If swimming was our family hobby we'd definitely be taking her a lot more frequently.

[Anonymous]

One of mine learned at the bottom of a deep-ish water slide. She was propelled forward from the water (I was right there to catch her) which just helped her enough to figure it out.

My youngest learned in a hotel pool. Maybe felt extra adventurous being away from home, not sure.

[Anonymous]

I used to be a swim instructor and life guard. It was when I was in college, and I taught my own DD to swim. I worked with her 1 one 1 a lot, and it took 2 summers of dedicated effort. We were in the pool several times a week working one on one.

Start out with the basics - putting face in, blowing bubbles, full submersion, floating on back, floating on tummy, swimming to the bottom to get rings in very shallow water, glides, bobs, straight leg kicking on back and tummmy, frog kick, kicks with a board, dog paddle, and then progress from there. I liked to refer to the Red Cross swimming levels and skills to keep me on track for what to work on. My DD was 5 and 6 when she learned, but she didnt really get motivated to learn until she couldn’t swim with friends in the deep end and felt embarrassed having to wear a puddle jumper.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:People have been swimming for millennia - before swimming lessons existed. They learned from family members and from frequent practice.

+1

[Anonymous]

Goggles help. Especially the ones that cover the nose as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Goggles help. Especially the ones that cover the nose as well.

True

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I used to be a swim instructor and life guard. It was when I was in college, and I taught my own DD to swim. I worked with her 1 one 1 a lot, and it took 2 summers of dedicated effort. We were in the pool several times a week working one on one.

Start out with the basics - putting face in, blowing bubbles, full submersion, floating on back, floating on tummy, swimming to the bottom to get rings in very shallow water, glides, bobs, straight leg kicking on back and tummmy, frog kick, kicks with a board, dog paddle, and then progress from there. I liked to refer to the Red Cross swimming levels and skills to keep me on track for what to work on. My DD was 5 and 6 when she learned, but she didnt really get motivated to learn until she couldn’t swim with friends in the deep end and felt embarrassed having to wear a puddle jumper.

Did you teach her all of the different styles? The crawl, butterfly, side stroke, back crawl? I would find all that difficult to teach. We swam in the pool a lot when she was five and I would just remind her to keep fingers together, the different kicks. She needed lessons to go further.