[jambutty]

Originally Posted by mick

So just where do the children learn to swim or go underwater with there eyes open ?
in a tin bath in front of the fire ? i dout it they go to the swimming baths.

I taught my kids to be comfortable in water in the bath at home and the kitchen sink. We had got past the tin bath in front of the fire years ago.

With the kitchen sink full of lukewarm water the child took a deep breath and held it for as long as she wanted to. After several ‘breath holds’ she knew that she would not die if she wasn’t actually breathing. The next step was to dunk her face into the water for as long as she felt comfortable. It didn’t take very long before she was trying to stay underwater for longer and longer. I would time her immersion and tell her the result. Then she was encouraged to open her eyes under water and after a tentative start she did so quite happily. I knew that she had opened her eyes because as she dunked her face into the water with her eyes tightly shut, I would slip a coin, or a key or something into the water and she would tell me what she saw.

At bath time she was shown that she would float on her back and on her front with her face in the water. In other words she soon realised that she would not sink to the bottom and drown. With the bath some five feet long and a child barely two feet tall there is room for a couple of kicks to ‘swim’ its length.

With this new found confidence of being in water it took just one session in the local baths to teach her to swim, albeit it on her back. The next session was breaststroke and then the crawl. After that it was swimming the width and then the length and then diving in off the side. Later it was diving from the diving board.