The Importance of Teaching Your Baby/Child How to Swim.

0

When we were little, my brother and I had a fear of water.

If we were in a swimming pool, we would not let go of the wall and stayed near the steps in the shallow end. It’s not like we had almost drowned at any point of our lives to cause that fear, I guess we were just scaredy cats, hehe.  The fact that we didn’t know how to swim, didn’t help either.  As we grew up, we’d still go to pools and beaches with our family but our parents would make us stay away from the deep end so that we wouldn’t drown. They had heard so many stories of children drowning, that they were a little overprotective of us.  Thank God nothing ever happened to us, but unfortunately many children have lost their lives due to drowning.

After doing some research, I learned on the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) website that last summer at least 202 children between the ages of 1 and 14 drowned in a swimming pool in the United Sates and out of those 202, 143 of the victims were children younger than age 5! So sad, right? I also learned that drowning is the leading cause of unintentional death among children 1-4 years old and is the second leading cause of death for children 5-14 years old. You can read about it here.

So, as a parent, what can you do?

Aside from being alert, and staying close to your children in the water, a safety step that CPSP’s national Pool Safety campaign suggests to do is teach your children how to swim. I believe this is important because their knowledge of swimming could really save their life one day! You just never know. If you cannot teach them, consider putting them in swimming lessons. Since my husband and I don’t know how to swim, we put our daughter in swimming lessons when she was 9 months, only three months ago.  We chose to put her in swimming lessons early because we wanted her to start feeling comfortable in the water as a baby so that (hopefully) she won’t have fear when she grows. She goes to Aqua Tots in McAllen and since she’s still a baby, I go in the water with her. I feel that the lessons are a fun way of bonding with her as well.

IMG_6862 600 px

Across the country classes are being run to teach babies and toddlers how to swim. Here are some local places that offer swim classes:

1.Hip2swim

2.Aqua Tots

3.Gus & Goldie

 

Do your children know how to swim? If so, at what age did they learn?

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here