Back Float Swim Lesson Feed Back from the Swim Professor:
The most important advice I can offer you to share with your parents is don't force it. It is very common for children at this age not to like being on their backs, and while they are capable and skill ready, the children may not be "mentally ready." Learning to swim should be a loving, enjoyable experience, and infants and toddlers should not be forced to do swim lesson skills against their will.When I am teaching an infant-toddler swimming lesson class, I stress to the parents, if your child is communicating to you that he/she is not happy, respect that feeling. In this case, sit the child up.
By keeping a child focused approach, your young students will learn to love swimming lessons and develop a life long love of the water. By forcing back floating (or any skill) on a happy child, you will only prolong the process of learning the skill, and in many cases, set yourself up for failure. Why? Because by forcing a skill on a child, the child will only learn to dislike the process of learning to swim instead of loving it, and loving it is what we should all want!
This is a true story about my son Jeb: When he was two, he seemed to hate being on his back. My approach is to spend a designated amount of time on back floating/kicking every lesson and the back kicking activity is in every lesson plan - like it or not, I come back to each skill every lesson, but I never make the child do it against his/her will. So every time Jeb would fuss, I would simply sit him back up and continue singing and loving and teaching. During one lesson, we were on the front kicking exercise with the noodle. Jeb was now kicking around the pool independently (of course I would follow him around and keep my eyes on his face to make sure he wasn't taking in water). As he was kicking around the pool on his front, he suddenly, out of the blue, without any direction or instruction from me, flipped himself over on his back and started kicking everywhere on his back! He's been kicking happily on his back ever since.
He had been "skill-ready" even when he didn't want to do it, he just wasn't mentally ready to try the skill until that day. Parents and teachers should not get caught up in their own goals or be overly task oriented, but rather keep learning fun, and the skills will fall into place with the right environment.
Don't think you are doing your swim lesson students a favor because back floating is some magical lifesaving skill. Children should love the water first; drowning prevention is a layered approach.
No child should ever be in a situation where they have to save themselves. There should be multiple layers of protection that prevent a child from ever getting into a life threatening situation.
I hope this helps, and keep up your enthusiastic work! You are a special teacher and your students are lucky to have you!
