Why is learning to swim important for your child?

How well can your child swim? You may think the answer to this is a given. They’re learning to swim with their school after all.

But the reality is that one in three kids struggle to swim a length by the time they leave primary school. There’s every chance your child has or will fall into this statistic and you don’t even realise it.

Scaring you with this data isn’t our objective (although we must admit it scares us a little). But we do want parents to be mindful of this growing issue. At Impulse, many of us are parents ourselves, making us passionate advocates for swimming lessons. So first off…

Why are so few children learning to swim properly?

The National Curriculum stipulates that all schools must provide swimming instruction in key stage 1 or 2. At the very least, pupils must be taught to:

Swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres (a length).
Use a range of strokes effectively (for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke).
Perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situation.

But curriculum pressures are heavy, and swimming often gets pushed to the back of the queue in favour of maths or English. 3e3e3e

Whilst it’s hard to understand why this may be (let’s face it - maths and English aren’t likely to save someone’s life), it largely comes down the belief that parents have easier access to swimming tuition than academic tuition outside of school hours.

We know this isn’t the case.

Swimming participation is down from two years ago. The number of 5-10-year olds learning to swim has decreased by 4% and participation for 11-15-year olds is down 5%.

With so much pressure to meet National Curriculum demands, something has to give and swimming has taken the hit.

The key to changing these figures may lie in people’s understanding of the following…

Swimming is about more than water safety

Swimming is a low-impact exercise. We’re 75-90% buoyant in the water so it’s much better for our bodies than pounding the pavement.

Swimming teaches vital skills. Teamwork, confidence, endurance, balance, stress-management, coordination – you name it. It also teaches kids that exercise is fun! This is particularly important for the ones that have been unwillingly coerced onto a muddy rugby pitch mid-November. Brrr!

It opens doors to other sports. If you’re the type to enjoy a snorkel or kayak on a summer holiday, swimming competency is crucial. Otherwise, you could be missing out on a world of fun activities with the kids.

Swimming is a great workout. Michael Phelps says it better.

Finally, swimming stays with you for the rest of your life. We know childhood is a strange time to start thinking about the later life. But when years of gravity take its toll on our bodies, the low-resistance aspect of swimming will come in really useful. Much like learning a language, the earlier kids start to swim, the earlier it will embed itself in their brains.

Swimming is about water safety

3e3e3e 2 Ultimately, swimming is a life skill. A report from the World Health Organisation shows that drowning is the third-leading cause of unintentional death worldwide.

Globally, the highest drowning rates are amongst 1- 4 years, followed by 5 – 9 years. If there’s ever a reason to get kids learning how to swim from an early age, this is it.

Even if kids never find themselves setting foot in a swimming pool again, they will inevitably end up by a body of water in their lives. Swimming isn’t something humans can instinctively pick up on, so if it isn’t taught, they may find themselves at risk when they’re at these places.