Swim lessons

Had my first day off this week and spent it at the pool.  I’ve mentioned before how my son just refuses to learn to swim or ride his bike without training wheels.  He’ll be 8 years old in a couple of weeks.  While he is afraid to attempt to learn these things, I almost think he just doesn’t care if he knows how to or not.

Well today was the day he was going to learn.  I told him to go to one side of the pool and swim to the other side, all in the shallow end.  Yeah, didn’t happen.  He’d swim about 6 or 7 feet, then put his foot down and swim another 6 or 7 feet.  Essentially, he wasn’t swimming, he was pretending to swim.  Alright, guess we need to go where you can’t touch.  I grab his shorts and drag him to the deep end.  I stood on the slope for the deep end, where he couldn’t touch and let him go.  He paddled as hard as he could, and he swam about 10 feet before he could touch.  The only problem was, instead of swimming, he would keep reaching out for me because I was staying next to him.  So my next step, that’s right, put him at one side of the deep end and tell him to swim to me.

You’ll notice at the end, he kept reaching for me, which is the problem I have.  He just panics instead of swimming.  Even though he swam across the deep end 3 times today, he still won’t do it without me making him.  What this video doesn’t show, is the making him.  I had to argue with him the whole time because he wanted to quit.  One time I couldn’t get him off the ladder and had to physically pull him off.  One time, I couldn’t get him to push off the wall (after the video above) so I told him push off the wall or I throw you in.  In the end, I threw him in, and he swam across.  I don’t understand why, when he knows he can swim, he won’t.  He wanted to quit, I told him swim to the other side and you can go  back and do whatever you want in the shallow end.  He wouldn’t do it until I forced him.

Hopefully I haven’t traumatized him yet, especially since tomorrow, we are learning to ride a bike without training wheels.  I think Trevor may regret having me home during week.