Swimming – Essential Life Skill

We’ve always supported the children in their extra curricular activities like karate and dance clubs but we won’t force them to do anything they don’t want to. However, their swimming club is one we will enforce. We wanted to give them a good early start on what we see as an essential life skill. Learning to swim can greatly reduce the risk of drowning should they accidentally fall into water. It is great for an active lifestyle as the natural resistance of the water helps you keep fit, tone muscles and burn calories. It is also a low impact exercise so it shouldn’t create excess stress around the joints.

I’ve been taking the children swimming since they were very young and would advocate learning from as early as possible. Generally, the earliest recommended age is three months old but beyond that, the wonderful thing about swimming is that there’s no age limit and it’s great for bonding as everyone can swim together.

I’m proud of both of their achievements to date. Starting out as water babies, they have both earned their duckling awards, and their water skills awards. Mr K has also recently completed his 10 and 15 metre badges too. They both started wearing goggles earlier this year, mainly because their friends were wearing them too. For this new term, we’ve gone out and bought new trunks for Mr K and a new swimming costume for Ms C as their old kit was getting too small.

All in all, swimming is quite inexpensive compared to some of their other activities as their kit can be bought for less than £10 and keep your eye out for regular promotions by the government and local councils for kids to swim for free.  So what are you waiting for?  Get your kit on and dive in!