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Teaching kids to swim

by Steven Byrnes
29th Jul 2025
3 min read
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Teaching kids to swim
10Adele Lopez
8juliawise
6Nathan Helm-Burger
9Cytokine
3Steven Byrnes
7maia
13Steven Byrnes
4maia
6juliawise
5Nathan Helm-Burger
5David Atanasov
5Nathan Helm-Burger
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[-]Adele Lopez2mo102

Awesome!

I recently found out that you can apparently begin teaching a child to swim as early as 4 months. This seems important since children are at highest risk of drowning at ages 1-4, but the rate was found to be far lower among children these ages who had had formal swimming instruction: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/381058

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[-]juliawise2mo83

I wonder how much early swim lessons are a proxy for parental conscientiousness, awareness of drowning as a risk, and income. The study considered controlling for income and then decided to instead control for "less than high school education vs more than high school education" on the part of the relative answering the questions. :(

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[-]Nathan Helm-Burger2mo60

Yeah, I was comfortable swimming before I could walk. Not like, make good progress per say, but like, if I fell in water with no flotation assistance, I could comfortably hold my breath, orient, get to the surface, and float on my back comfortably without assistance.

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[-]Cytokine2mo95

"From my perspective, the victory condition was that the kid can tread water, jump in, and climb out." 

I would consider adding an additional condition of being able to swim 30-50 meters without aids. It addresses the potential risk of falling into the water in a location where it's challenging to get out. 
 

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[-]Steven Byrnes2mo30

Good point, thanks, I just added that to the post. Pretty sure my kids can do that too.

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[-]maia2mo70

the basic idea was: hold the kid, with less and less support over time. Beyond that, I was just winging it.

Can you give more description of what you did in your 30-minute sessions? Holding the kid the whole time? Taking breaks? Did they/you get bored? Did you do any other playing in the water to make it more interesting for them?

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[-]Steven Byrnes2mo130

Kids were not bored. Being in the water is such a novelty. They were always exploring how their bodies moved, splashing, making bubbles, playing with the lane separators, admiring the underwater light, etc. I would make up little activities, like trying to spin around in the water, blowing bubbles, try to get your feet out of the water in front of you then behind you then in front of you then behind you … I dunno, lots of stuff, and it wound up looking wildly different for my older kid versus my younger kid. My older (highly verbal) kid wanted gamification: a series of challenges to beat. My younger (semi-nonverbal) kid would basically just make up his own mind about what he wanted to do each minute and I would try to work around that. He actually got really into having a floaty noodle, and got very upset without it, so I just did the best I could to make sure that he was holding it in his left hand half the time and his right hand half the time so he could practice swimming with the other hand, and did what I could to reduce his reliance on it, and eventually I kinda forced him to play “chase the noodle” where I would push the noodle away from him and he would swim to it.

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[-]maia1mo41

See, I think the description of the challenges you set for them is the most helpful part of this whole post! If you have any more you can think of, please do share them.

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[-]juliawise2mo*60

This is great, Jeff and I have been trying to figure this out.

A lot of lessons include learning to float on your back. This makes sense for babies, who are more chub and less bone. It seems like ability to do this for kids and adults depends a lot on how buoyant you are, and my kids are not built for it. One of mine managed to backfloat once under perfect conditions, but I'm assuming any amount of panic / waves / etc would sink her. So I've stopped trying to use "learn to swim" time for this, and they can practice it "water play" time if they want.

Another question is whether to learn a standard method for treading water vs develop your own style. Both Jeff and one of my kids have developed something non-standard that works for them, and with the other kids I'm unsure how much to teach them the more standard method vs "you do you." Some of both, I guess.

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[-]Nathan Helm-Burger2mo50

Passively floating on your back is hard for skinny folk! Much easier to backfloat while moving, and it's still a much lower energy activity than treading water upright. I wouldn't recommend a kid trying to practice backfloating while holding still unless they're naturally buoyant. Instead, the question is 'how little energy can you expend while staying up', and 'tracking your position by looking at the ceiling so you don't bump your head while doing backstroke laps'. The faster you go, the easier it is to stay up, but the more energy you expend. There's a comfortable medium that'll be different for each person, and change as their body changes.

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[-]David Atanasov1mo50

Congratulations!

I taught swimming as my first part-time job in high school and I got the same impression you have about the learning process being mostly subconscious. Feedback can be necessary for less intuitive aspects of stroke technique but kids seemed to improve at this level of swimming by figuring out what something should feel like and then orienting towards that sense. 

For example, some would hold their head up while trying to get onto their back, which would inevitably keep their hips too low to float, even while moving backwards. I'd usually explain or demonstrate what was going on but the real hump to get over was whatever aversive sensation they'd get when having their head back in the water. Sometimes it was that having water in their ears felt foreign or that having their head on the same plane as the rest of their body felt almost like falling backwards. Once that sensation didn't bother them, they'd be able to put their heads backwards and seemingly "feel" that pull up on their hips. The benefit of my instruction was essentially just getting them safely to that point where it clicked and then that process took care of the rest. Sometimes there would be minor regressions where the fear seemed to take a few classes to be extinguished but the subsequent attempts generally went more smoothly. 

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[-]Nathan Helm-Burger2mo50

My parents, especially my dad, love water and swimming. So I was taught to "swim" before I could crawl, mostly just learning to hold my breath as I was bobbed around in the water, and then to manage to keep my head mostly above water (when intended) and navigate (slowly) around with arm floaties. My younger brother didn't get taught until later, like maybe 1 and a half. He also loves the water, but not as much as me. I feel so at home in the water and under water. So personally, I'd recommend starting young and not having any particular goals in mind for the first few years other than "hang out in pool with kid for 20-30 min, and don't let them drown". Actual swimming strokes can come much later.

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Both my kids can swim! Yay! 🥂🍾 Some notes about the process:

  • The options were group lessons, individual lessons, and parent-is-the-teacher. We have tried all three. Individual lessons were logistically inconvenient and expensive. Group lessons were equally inconvenient, and while they seem less expensive, my impression was that if your kid is in a class of four kids, all just getting started from zero, then the kid is gonna make progress 4× slower, which cancels out the 4× lower price per lesson, but meanwhile each lesson has 100% of the hassle. False economy. So we ended up at parent-is-the-teacher.
  • We bought a membership at a nearby gym with a pool. The pool was mostly for adult lap swimming, but they set aside an hour a day for families. It was 4½ feet deep (1.4 m), which was great—deep enough for kids to not scratch their feet on the bottom, but shallow enough for me to comfortably stand.
  • I get cold in pools, especially lap-swimming pools which are not overly heated. The process was much more pleasant after I started wearing 1.5 mm Neoprene wetsuit pants into the pool. Thanks @jefftk for the idea. (The kids never got cold.)
  • For my second kid, it took 12 hours (24 sessions, each ≈30 minutes before the kid petered out and asked to get out) from “basically never been in the water” to “jumping in and swimming all around by himself, while I’m sitting in a chair lifeguarding.” I think my first kid was similar, although I didn’t keep as careful notes.
    • If there’s some magic recipe to teach a kid to swim much faster than that, well it’s too late for me, but please share in the comments.
    • Each kid was ~6 years old at the time.
  • From my perspective, the victory condition was that the kid can tread water, jump in, and climb out. (Also, doggy paddle, but that doesn’t really count as a separate thing, it’s kinda just treading water while trying to move forward.) [Update: Per comment, also to swim some appreciable distance by themselves, the farther the better.] This list is basically capturing what it takes to fall into a body of water and probably not die, and also to have fun in a pool with friends.
    • Most online tutorials would say that I was Doing It Wrong, and that I should have instead started right in on Proper Strokes like the crawl. But: (1) even the kids who learn Proper Strokes will still also need to learn to tread water and doggy paddle sooner or later; (2) you can swim faster and farther with Proper Strokes than doggy paddle, but I’m not trying to get them onto the varsity swim team or go boating without a life vest, I just want them to fall into water and probably not die, and to have fun in a pool with friends; (3) teaching Proper Strokes seemed more annoying, so I didn’t do it, sue me; (4) they can always learn Proper Strokes later.
  • One of my kids is very overly analytical, wanting to talk through everything before doing anything (“OK and then how am I supposed to move my left leg?”). My other kid is very under-ly analytical, and basically ignores all verbal instructions (this is related to his speech and language delay). In between would have been ideal, but the latter was a bit closer to optimal for what we were doing.
    • Think of learning to swim as a bit like making a giant lookup table in your brain: If my body is in configuration X, and I contract muscle Y, then I'll move according to Z. Everything is different in the water. I think it just takes a bunch of time in the water, moving different ways, to internalize this. It’s mostly subconscious.
    • (Unfortunately, building that lookup table is slowed by a chicken-and-egg bootstrapping challenge: a kid’s body moves differently in the water when there’s an adult holding onto him, or he has a floatie thing, etc.)
  • We mostly didn’t use any life vests or other floatie things. Instead the basic idea was: hold the kid, with less and less support over time. Beyond that, I was just winging it.
  • There were a bunch of sessions where I wrote “no obvious progress” in my notes. Don’t lose faith!
  • PSA: everyone should learn what drowning looks like, and it does not look like how it’s depicted on TV. “There is very little splashing, no waving and no yelling or calls for help of any kind … In [dozens of drownings each year], the adult will watch [from within 25 meters] but have no idea it is happening.”