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.”