House and Home
House and Home: Teaching Kids to Swim
Finding the best way to help children pick up this important skill.
When I was a kid, I simply learned how to swim by spending lots of time in pools and lakes with my friends and family. It was only when I was a teen and already knew how to swim that I took formal swimming lessons, and that was to perfect my strokes. Now that my daughters are 8, I am wondering if I should enroll them in swimming lessons. They took lessons when they were 4, but the pool was so deep for them and the water so cold, that they barely learned anything. My daughters started out this summer with rudimentary swimming skills, swimming only a little under water and doing a pseudo doggie paddle. But they were scared to put their faces in the water for any length of time and do any real swimming. So I decided to help them along a …
