Americans are obsessed with swimming. And potties, but that’s a story for another time. I don’t know what it is about swimming in land-locked Illinois that gets people going all gaga but every time I said I’m not putting my kid in swimming lessons, I’d get the same reaction as if I said I refuse to feed her. “But what if she never learns!!” Yeah, what if, we could think about that or watch paint dry because that would be less boring.
Klara decided she was ready to swim last Saturday. So she swam. That’s it, no lessons, no weird experiments like in this nutso-crazy-boom-boom video. Incidentally, it was the same with the weird ritual people call “potty-training.” I ran out of diapers one day, couldn’t be bothered to drive to the store, told her it’s toilet from now on, and that was the end of the “training.”
People complicate their lives unnecessarily. With potties I can at least understand the need but swimming baffles me. Everybody learns eventually. Or not. May that be our biggest problem in life, seriously.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s because of the prevalence of drowning deaths, particularly in young children. I have a cousin who almost drowned, and it’s astonishing how quickly and silently it can happen.
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This is why. Also goes along with a desire to reduce basically all risk. Even people who don’t have a pool or any immediate risk are taking their kids to swimming lessons.
What are your opinions on SIDS guidelines? That one also seems like another over the top extreme risk reduction recommendation.
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Well, my kids did that training when they were 2-3ish. They don’t *start* by throwing the kid in the pool you know. That’s the end point for ISR. Agreed it may not make the most sense in IL, but kids not knowing how to swim here, gets people (kids AND the adults who try to fish them out) killed on a depressingly regular basis. The coast is never more than an hour away, it’s a boating culture, we have tons of lakes, and backyard pools are very very common. In FL, *not* teaching your kid to swim (whether it’s the ISR method pictured there, and many people find it cruel, but I did it as a very young kid, and it’s what was available when mine were little– they’re in regular swim lessons now). Yes, my state is obsessed with teaching kids to swim. This is not a bad thing. We were also drilled on how to escape an undertow, repeatedly, in elementary school (not in the pool, thankfully).
I have two family members who’d still be alive today if they’d ensured their 5yo could swim.
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Thanks for the perspective. Florida certainly seems like a place people and children should know how to swim.
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It’s a crucial life skill when you live around water. I don’t need my kids to be great swimmers. It’s too cold to swim outdoors here most of the year and we don’t have the pool culture that some other places do but it’s like changing a tire–something to have available in case they need it so they don’t panic and a healthy appreciation for the medium. Illinois has plenty of lakes and rivers near which I’m assuming people recreate so you don’t necessarily have to live in a coastal state to get some benefit. It’s also a lot easier to learn as a child.
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Yeah, I’ve had friends who learned as adults and… it’s a whole different thing then.
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I helped rescue a drowning child last summer in water that was waist deep on me. It was terrifying. We reviewed with our own kids what to do of you are tired and out beyond your depth and we spent time going to the community pool to practice through the winter. I don’t know that kid’s circumstances but I also don’t want their life to rely only on an alert bystander.
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I get that people who live in Florida or near water need to learn to swim, but I’ve never learned to swim and I’m terrified of water any deeper than a bathtub. I rarely go near water and don’t go to the beach, I just avoid water. Throwing a kid in the water sounds cruel but it makes a twisted sense in that the kid will have to learn so they don’t drown, but this is not a good idea and they ought to have proper lessons
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This a the end point of a series of instruction. I was appalled when I first encountered the concept but after watching more of the sequence, it made a lot more sense especially for really small children.
Are you in a position to take an adult swim class? My grandmother was in your position and I always wished that she could be relieved of that anxiety.
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ditto the anon: our kids’ swim teacher also teaches adults in one-on-one coaching, and there are adult swim classes out there, where you’d be in the pool with… other adults who never learned and are also trying to get past fear of water etc. I’m told it’s a very gratifying thing to conquer.
And yeah, the ISR videos always look horrifying. But basically what ISR does is take very young children, and teach them not to die in the water: they don’t even teach *swimming*, they teach kids to float on their backs, and get to the side of the pool. They don’t *start* by throwing them in the pool. There are mixed feelings about the methods involved– our current swim teacher doesn’t like ISR because she sometimes gets students who started there, had maybe a subpar teacher, and are now terrified of the water, and she has to undo all that. Some selection bias there. I reckon it is still better than nothing, and we had a great teacher when my kids were very small. We had no choice in the matter as we had an actual lake *in our backyard* and it would have been extremely negligent *not* to get the kids to the point where they were reasonably safe around water.
Dunno how that works out in other states, but I remember coming back to school 4th grade year and learning one of the other kids in the grade had drowned over the summer, we tried to visit a public pool one day, and it was closed because some kid had drowned that morning, one of my relatives, at age 4, got in the water at the beach while nobody was looking and had to be airlifted to hospital (survived– we all still wonder about possible brain damage though), lost two close adult family members *who could swim* because they got into distress getting their nonswimming kid out of the water, I remember we lost 4 local kids from the same family, around our age, at a bayside park we often went to, because they waded at low tide all the way out to the channel markers, and one by one lost their footing on the slope. We lose several at the beach every year (we tell ourselves it’s tourists from up north who don’t know any better, but it happens to locals as well). Friend-of-a-friend washed up a couple days after going out paddleboarding and not returning (obviously not the fault of swimming incompetence: don’t go in the water alone! All it takes is a TIA). Classmate had a younger sibling who had to be fished out of the bottom of the pool– survived, but they have no idea how long she was in the water, and there may have been some brain damage. Add to that ten near misses for every real emergency…
Ultimately, odds are low it’ll happen to any given person, but it is definitely part of the mental and physical landscape around here in a way that it isn’t, perhaps, in other parts of the country. For my own self, I *had* to make sure my kids were competent swimmers in order to not be a horrible helicopter parent.
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Yea no. I still vaguely remember when I was taught to swim. There was a woman running a summer camp to teach kids how to swim. Like the others said, that would have been the last stage. Except she had us jump in rather than toss us. Some people learn from doing, others from instruction, and more yet from example. I say camp but really it was a local woman with a pool who I think was a certified lifeguard, who taught us to swim.
The floatees are there to give the kids confidence. So they learn to enjoy the water. Yes you could wait or you could toss your kid in, then make sure they don’t down. But its a more gentle method to keep the kid calm and let them enjoy the water before they actually know how to swim.
I can’t speak for Illinois. But from Georgia, we have ponds, lakes, creeks, rivers everywhere. Not to mention our eastern coast is on the Atlantic, and just south of us is the Gulf of America. So water is a big thing here. I don’t know what percentage of the blacks don’t know how to swim, but its practically a rite of passage for the whites. Asians of course are a toss up.
Most vacations seem to be split into one of two choices. Either go to the Mountains or go to the Beach. And typically the Beach tends to win about 7 of every 10 times.
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I was present when a child (17) drowned in a local lake about 10 years ago. It was so traumatic seeing his lifeless body pulled from the water. This was an almost adult who presumably knew how to swim. What I heard was his leg or foot got caught on some sort of debris and he couldn’t resurface. You don’t need to live near an ocean to have this happen to you or your child. Water safety is so important.
I agree on your potty training point, though. That’s how I trained my first two kids and it’s how I plan on training my youngest any day now.
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This was a problem when our local boy scouts were integrated. They went on camp and all the white boys jumped in the water, so the black boy jumped in too and drowned since nobody realized that black kids never had swimming lessons.
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