I recently started to teach my 4 year old son how to swim while my 5 year old daughter is taking her swim class. Before, I used to play with my son and let him use a floatie. The floatie would prevent him from sinking and he got really comfortable in the water. He liked to play in the pool, but after he turned 4, I decided it was finally time to teach him how to swim.

Younger siblings often have a cheat code in life because they can watch their older siblings and absorb stuff through that additional exposure. He saw his big sister learn how to swim and he already knew how to hold his breath in the water well before he turned 4. I had an easier start because of this and had high hopes he would pick up swimming pretty easily. That was not the case.

On the way to the pool, I wanted to read about how to teach young kids how to swim and didn’t have the time, so I just decided to do breath holding exercises and to throw rings into the pool steps so my son would need to dive in to get it. He said he was scared and refused to do the diving. I didn’t expect that response since he usually is open to trying things, especially if he sort of knows what is going on (in this case he already knew how to hold his breath in the water). Instead of him needing to go fully into the water, I decided to try and have the rings on the first step where he could just see and bend over to grab them without dunking his head in. That seemed to work and we were off.

I threw the rings on the second step where he needed to bend further to grab the rings without dunking his head in and now my son was fully engaged in the ring collecting game. I then threw it on the third step where he needed to dunk his head in and he eagerly did it over and over again to get all the rings.

Now here was the real challenge - I wanted to see if he could do it on the fourth step where it’s hard to submerge your whole body into the water and dive in to grab the rings. He tried a few times and couldn’t get his body to sink in the water. Instead of getting discouraged, I saw the beast come out where he dunked his head in over and over to experiment how to get it. He then started jumping up and dropping into the water to sink deep enough to reach the rings. After figuring that out, he was better able to aim and keep his eyes open to grab the rings after jumping into the water. He was only able to stay submerged low enough to grab the rings for a second, so he got really good at reacting to the rings and grabbing them quickly. I was so proud of him.

My son then started to play the ring collecting game all by himself. He would throw the rings all over the steps and then go and gather them. He subconsciously also started to stay under the water and kick his legs to move around. He was starting to figure out how to swim and we ended the first session there after making tons of progress. That was a huge win.

This past week was our second session and he went right back to throwing the rings and gathering them. He was so motivated to get better and better at it. He also started to see how many rings he could collect before coming back up. He was diving in and sometimes collecting 2-3 rings at a time. I started to also teach him to hold his breath longer in the water and to also blow out air through the mouth and nose while in the water. Not only does it get him comfortable to slowly breath out under the water so you aren’t completely losing your breath and panicking, it also allowed him to sink like a submarine to the bottom of the pool. We played around with our breath for a while and he got really good and breathing out slowly in the water (outside of a few moments where he would gurgle water and choke a bit, but hey it comes with the territory!).

After a while, I wanted him to be able to kick off of the floor and to get his head above water. He said he was scared to do it away from the steps because he couldn’t just stand up, so we tried to just do it on the steps. He did the exercise without any issues and then I randomly brought him further away from the steps one time and he jumped off of the bottom of the pool far away from the steps without even noticing. Once he did it, I was so happy and asked him if he knew what he did. He said yes and even though I didn’t trick him, he was comfortable with the progression, which was exactly the same approach when starting the ring collecting game at the top step.

By the end of the second session, he was trying to swim out away from the steps and being very adventurous. I had to keep an arm on him at all times because I was afraid he would venture too far or not know how to come back out for air. I’m glad he is getting more comfortable in the water and hopefully we can keep making progress with each session. I’m just so proud of how he is so determined to learn how to swim that even when it was play time with his sister after her swim lesson (who is a dolphin in her own right because she is so comfortable in the water), he still wanted to keep practicing on getting better. He’s so persistent and I’m sure the pep talks and observing his big sister being persistent as well during challenging times is really translating to building his own grit. Good times.