How To Talk To Kids About Swim Lessons
For thirty minutes every week, you get to step back and watch us teach your kids to swim. After those thirty minutes are up, you have a whole week before your next lesson. Depending on your child’s aptitude for the water and how the lesson went, they might have a lot to say about it. If they talk your ear off about how excited they are to be back, that’s great! If, instead, they beg you to never bring them to the pool again, that’s a tougher conversation to navigate.
We understand that one of the hardest things for parents and guardians to do is to leave your child on the pool deck while they are screaming and begging you not to leave. To ease the transition, you might try to process your feelings about the swim lessons together. You think talking about the lesson will help them feel safer once they actually get in the water – and it could! But what you say and how you say it is very important. Sometimes, while you mean well, you could end up getting in the way instead of helping.
Here are some ways to talk to your child about their swim lesson.
Focus on Fun
If your swimmer brings up their lesson, you don’t have to shut down that conversation – just redirect it. It sounds counterintuitive, but we recommend talking about anything but the actual swimming. Talk about the coach, talk about the toys, talk about the snack you’re going to get from the vending machine after – don’t talk about the skills.
Instead of indulging their ruminations about water getting in their eyes and feeling nervous on their back, you can ask, wasn’t that coach nice? Isn’t it cool that they had a Batman toy? Did you like the games you played with the coach? Our lessons aren’t just about swimming, they’re about having fun. When you talk to your kids, focus on the fun.
Set Realistic Expectations
Telling your child that they won’t have to do anything they don’t want to do might make it easier to get them onto the pool deck, but the benefit ends there. When you promise your child they won’t have to put their face in the water or do any back floats, and it is our job to push your child to do exactly those things, the trusting relationship between swimmer and coach is thwarted.
It could also increase your child’s anxiety week by week; when mom or dad say one thing, and the coach says another, your swimmer has no idea what to expect, leading them to expect the worst. Instead of making promises to avoid different tasks in the pool, encourage them to advocate for themselves: Coach’s job is to keep you safe and teach you how to swim. If you don’t like something, tell them and they will listen.
At Tiburon, we emphasize connection, trust, and relationship-building between our coaches and your swimmers. It’s our job to guide them to the other side of their fear, anxiety, or general neuroticism. The best thing you can do to ease the transition is demonstrate the same trust in your child’s coach that you want your child to have.
Let The Conversation Arise Naturally
If your swimmer doesn’t mention the lesson to you during the week, it’s not essential that you force a conversation about it. You may think you’re providing an opportunity for your child to share their big feelings before all those feelings come out during the lesson, and this is valid. However, it could have the unintended consequence of creating apprehension around the lesson that your child wasn’t necessarily feeling before.
When you bring the lesson up without being prompted, it could signal to your child that this is a Big Deal. If swimming is so fun and easy, they might think, why do my parents want to talk about it so much? If you say, for example, I know it’s scary to do x,y,z, they might hear MOM AND DAD AND GRANDMA AND NANNY THINK IT’S DANGEROUS TO DO X,Y,Z. Obviously, that’s not what you meant, but sometimes in our best efforts to validate emotions, we end up reinforcing our swimmers’ fears. If you let them bring up the swim lesson on their own, you get to hear what they really want to say about it, as opposed to what they think you think they think or… well, you get it.
Look at the Proof
When swimmers are anxious and lack confidence in themselves, there is little you can say that will convincingly contradict the narrative they have formed. If your child tearfully tells you that they absolutely cannot do the things that you, with your own two eyes, watch them do from the window or TV screen every week, we recommend taking videos during their lesson to show them later. That way, when they say “I can’t put my face in!” or “I can’t float!” you have more than reassuring words – you have concrete evidence. We hope this helps cut down your back-and-forth by 50%.
No matter how much you try to soothe your swimmer before and after the lesson or try to convince them that their fears are unfounded, if your swimmer is anxious or scared, you can expect those big feelings to show up when it’s time to get in the pool. Don’t take it personally – we certainly don’t. The work happens week by week during the lesson, not outside of it. All we need to do is trust the process.