- Since I found out I was having a baby I knew I wanted to sign her up for swim lessons.
- My daughter started lessons when she was 6 months old.
During hour five of waiting in the virtual line to get Taylor Swift tickets, I texted one of my mom friends, "This is almost as impossible as registering for swim lessons." I was referring to the debacle last year when registration opened on January 17 at 6 a.m. and the booking website crashed within minutes.
Like Ticketmaster's collapse, it was a massive inconvenience but not a surprise. The demand was too high. Too many parents were trying to sign their kids up for lessons.
It's a phenomenon I've encountered for the past four years, since my daughter was 6 months old and I signed her up for her first swim class.
I wanted my kids to know how to swim
When she was born, I didn't have plans for how I'd feed her or the kinds of toys she'd play with, or even how to get her on a schedule. One of the only things I knew was that she'd be doing swim lessons before she turned 1, because I knew the statistics.
Drowning is the leading cause of death in kids under 4 in the US. It was also a risk that felt personal; one of my high-school classmates' younger cousins drowned when we were teenagers. Our house has a pool, so I knew the risk for my daughter would be greater — most drowning fatalities in children under 5 happen in home pools or hot tubs.
While swim lessons wouldn't make my kid "drown-proof," I knew they would decrease the risk. A study published in 2009 found that formal swimming lessons were associated with an 88% reduction in the risk of drowning for 1- to 4-year-olds.
It requires so much involvement
For these reasons, my daughter took her first swim class at the local Jewish Community Center when she was 6 months old. The Saturday-morning class taught my husband and me how to introduce her to the water and helped her feel comfortable.
A few months later, she started her first Infant Swimming Resource series to learn self-rescue skills. She took a 10-minute lesson every day for six weeks to learn how to float on her back. The next summer, at 22 months, she learned how to float-swim-float the edge of the pool and pull herself out. Maintaining those self-rescue skills still involves regular refresher courses.
In addition to those vital skills, last summer, at age 3, she started traditional swim lessons to learn proper breathing techniques and strokes. That involved an hour every day for weeklong sessions. She did several sessions to master the skills in levels one and two. There are five levels in total, meaning she and her younger brother will be taking swim lessons yearly for the foreseeable future.
All of this is a huge parental commitment that involves a lot of time and money. While the privilege of having a flexible schedule and the ability to pay makes it easier to enroll my kids in swim lessons, it's still challenging. The stress of registration and transportation and managing kids who have lessons at different times can feel overwhelming. I can commiserate with the parents who cite inconvenient lesson times, limited and conflicting schedules, affordability, and difficulty with registration and finding lessons as reasons for not enrolling their kids in swim lessons.
When my husband and I began discussing whether we wanted a third kid, the first thought that popped into my head was "I can't go through swim lessons from the beginning again." Even with my privilege, it is that hard — and it's just another example of why parenting today feels so challenging.
I felt that unsustainability deep in my bones last Saturday morning as I opened my laptop for this year's registration, hoping I'd be more successful with swim lessons than I was in procuring Taylor Swift tickets.