Comment by scandinavegan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scandinavegan | Hacker News Reader

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Both my kids have been sure that they know how to swim when too young to have even tried. We signed them up for swimming lessons to make them respect water a bit more, and of course learn how to swim. They don't need to figure out that they can't swim when they're unsupervised, as that's a bit too dangerous.

My oldest started in a school that used very traditional methods (first learn legs then add arms, start by dry swimming on land and move to water, and so on), and she took the course over and over without progressing. For unrelated reasons, we switched schools, and the new school focused on just spending time in water, running in shallow water, floating, dipping your head under water as part of games, and so on.

They had something they called "playing dolphins" where they would stand in waist-deep water, jump forward, and glide as far as they could before standing up again. She only needed one round of that course before she could advance to swimming for real. I suggest spending time just getting them used to water, getting splashed in the face, or playing with floating or sinking toys in waist-deep water, to quickly get over any blocking fear of water. I liked how the new school didn't even attempt to introduce real strokes at the beginner level, but instead gave the kids confidence in their own abilities to move in water.

That echoes my own upbringing. When I was very young, 4 or 5, my parents tried to get me to learn to swim using traditional methods and utterly failed and left me slightly terrified of water.

The summer when I was 5, my brother (an excellent competitive swimmer in his youth) brought me to a pool and we played a game called "jump and I'll try to catch you" and in the course of a couple hours of him moving to deeper and deeper water and farther away from the edge I basically figured out how to doggy paddle to him. By the end of that summer my brother had me fetching coins from the bottom of a 3 meter pool from a steady tread.

Only then did he start to teach me any formal strokes, but to be honest, because of how he taught me, I think of swimming as a perfectly natural activity like walking, where I decide where to go and at what depth and my body simply figures out how to get there. Specific strokes and techniques don't really play much part.

To this day, I love swimming.

Yes, that sounds very similar.

One thing I didn't mention was that when my daughter finally started swimming, she would swim underwater until she ran out of air and then stand up. The traditional school would never have allowed this, as you were supposed to breaststroke with your head above water at all times. Since she started to swim some distance underwater, it wasn't that much of a stretch for her to stay at the surface to swim longer distances.

The transition from dolphin to swimming underwater to swimming at the surface was very quick and seamless. Perhaps she was still helped by being drilled in the traditional school's proper technique, but I think we could have used the new school's methods from the start.

Yeah, that all sounds very similar. Once I figured out how to move in water, I tended to do what your daughter does, swim under the water and surface for air. I still like swimming that way.

It's interesting that people I know who went through a very formal swimming program as youths and then think of swimming as exercise and laps, tend to struggle with below-the-surface activities, like diving for items.

I remember my brother had a whole slew of underwater games we used to play like "tea time", "hold your breath at the bottom the longest", "headstand", "underwater flips", "drag your friend while they're underwater while you run in a race", "pull a gallon of dirt off the bottom", "upside-down Buddha" and so on including some pretty intense and dangerous-ish horseplay. There's probably a more comprehensive list somewhere as he didn't invent all of these but learned them elsewhere. Looking back I realize that we learned breath control, buoyancy control, how to handle strange orientations and direction underwater, diving, getting accustomed to handling stale air or out of air situations. But it all happened naturally through play.

Growing up, the only other kids I knew who could do the same kind of things also learned in similar informal ways built around play.

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