Getting him the opportunity to learn to swim has been a very frustrating experience for me. To celebrate his accomplishment, or rather our accomplishment, I have made a cathartic timeline.
6 months: We go to our first parent tot lessons, where I thought "if we just keep this up, he'll never be afraid"
3 years: We have kept up a pretty regular course of lessons. When he was three he started to make some progress in group lessons that no longer required parents to get in the water. He had a few lessons where he was afraid, but not many.
I recognize a conspiracy among the city pools where almost all family swims are at about the same time in the middle of the day, conflicting with nap time.
4 years: We are still going to group lessons most of the time, at either the YMCA or the nearby city pool. I realize from talking to other parents that almost no one actually learns to swim from group lessons. In a 30 min group lesson, each kid is actually working on something for about 7 minutes. It is entirely about time in the water and lessons are mostly just hanging on to the wall.
It is really hard to get to the times available at local pools. The beautiful new Rainier Beach pool sells out consistently so if you are late, you won't get in. Naps are no longer an issue thankfully. The YMCA near us abruptly starts enforcing a well-intentioned but inane policy whereby kids who can't already swim must wear a lifejacket in the pool, even when they are with their parent the entire time. This makes it literally impossible to practice anything from the lessons at the Y or to teach your kid there yourself. It also gives kids a scary over-confidence where they think they can swim when they cannot. Lifejackets are super useful but this policy drives me crazy.
D's daycare takes the preschool kids to group lessons two days a week in the summer! There is no evidence of swimming, but he is in the water and it is inexpensive and convenient!
Our local city pool shuts down in January 2019 for renovation.
I achieve the milestone of spending my 100th hour googling swim lesson options and schedules.
5 years: Some other kids can swim now. D did a handful of really high quality private lessons at a swim school in South Lake Union. He made some progress. The lessons are both expensive, hard to schedule and super inconvenient. Did I mention they are in South Lake Union? I cannot handle this combination. I start to wonder how any child with working parents and without a nanny ever learns to swim.
We sign up for some more fairly pointless lessons at the Y. At least his friend is there too. Our neighborhood pool is still closed. The Y won't let families practice actual swimming.
As 2019 ends, the city pool renovations are finally complete, way behind schedule and marking almost an entire year of closure. I give up on group lessons and convince D to let me teach him. We resolve that on any weekend we are in town, we will make a point of swimming together at the city pool. The family swim time is during Dd's nap time of course, but now that doesn't matter for my five year old.
In January and February we swim quite a few times. D makes some progress on being comfortable underwater. Things are going well. Then.... COVID-19 hits and I don't need to remind you what that was like.
6 years: D has his first covid birthday in the spring of the full shutdown.
We play in Lake Washington in the summer and another lake near Mt St Helens (Lake Mayfield), but it's not really the same. Somehow my dad managed to learn to swim in the lake as a kid.
The city pool opens in February, but only for adults. I didn't make it there for a few months myself, because I had a cough. D has a persistent (non-covid) cough also.
When we finally stop coughing in late April, we head out to a pool on Mercer Island, which is allowing kids, with reservations where each family gets a lane in the shallow pool. This is where we start over, essentially from scratch. We go there on five Wednesdays. Since he basically has no school on Wednesdays (only 8 am -10 am online) we have enough flexibility to make it to mid-day time slots. Thanks pandemic.
That first swim in late April, just before his birthday, is the only time D gets in a pool as a six-year-old. I was on swim team, practicing every weekday morning all summer when I was six. I need to ask my fact checkers whether it was the summer I turned six or the summer I turned seven, but the point stands either way. I lived in the suburbs with a mom who hadn't yet returned to work after having kids.
7 years: By this point I am easier on myself, understanding that there were some circumstances outside my control and that if my kid doesn't swim as well as I did at the same age... well, there are bigger problems in the world. If he doesn't swim as well as his friends, then it's a lesson in not comparing ourselves to other people.
After the five swims on Mercer Island, our local pool opens to kids in late June and we swim there nine times in June and July, reaching the level of progress I described in the intro. We are both very excited and D is proud of himself.
Now the swimming opportunities are more abundant. We swam a few times in a hotel pool in July (because we actually went somewhere, namely Leavenworth). Jack's parents are allowed to take guests to their YMCA (which has a more shallow activity pool free from silly rules) and my parents' community pool is open to guests again, at certain hours.
You might be wondering about my experience teaching swimming. I don't really have that much, but it relies heavily on trust and so teaching someone you have a relationship with makes sense. After my first year of college I did teach a few people to swim. Two were the kids I babysat in high school, and again that summer. A friend of theirs and a woman from their church also came for lessons. We did the lessons, one at a time, in a gorgeous private pool that belonged to another friend of theirs. Only now do I realize what a privilege that was, along with the swim club my family belonged to when I was a kid.
When D and I got a bit stuck in June, I watched some YouTube videos (Swim to Fly) on teaching swimming and the thing that helped the most was telling him to to breath out through his mouth underwater. I breath out through my nose way more, but that was hard for him.
He's still got a ways to go, but this progress after so much time has been really rewarding. Next up, Dd!
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