From floaty to fearless: Luke learns to swim

When my 5-year-old son, Luke, goes swimming, he grabs his towel and puts his goggles on all by himself like a big kid. But he can’t jump in until he puts on a device that’s sort of like a wearable hug made of blue foam, with a childish name: “floaty.” How humiliating.

But humiliation can be a great motivator for growth.

To begin his journey toward water independence, he started small, shucking the floaty and “swimming” solo on the steps of our friends’ pool.

Then he started kicking his feet, wiggling his way toward his mother, Hailey, who stood about 5 feet away in the shallow end. Instead of the traditional crawl, this might be considered the “slither stroke.”

Hailey and I gave him plenty of advice to improve his efficiency, but a lot of it could be summed up in this tried and true maxim: “Use your arms, too.”

With a little effort, he officially graduated from the slither to the doggie paddle.

As Hailey inched backward to increase the distance he was asked to swim, he would stand on the steps and take several deep breaths, as if that would help him store up extra oxygen in his little lungs, and then he would push off, his head bobbing in her direction. But not for long. He quickly changed his mind, and his head reversed course and bobbed back to the safety of the steps.

What amazed me about this process is Luke’s willingness to keep trying. He failed over and over again, losing his courage and clinging to the handrail. For most people, like me, failure saps the energy out of me and makes me feel like I will never be good at the thing I’m trying to do. But, perhaps because he’s 5, and perhaps because he’s Luke, he just laughed it off and started taking his deep breaths again.

“Can you come one inch closer?” he would sometimes ask Hailey.

Sometimes she obliged. 

Finally, after a dozen attempts, he successfully doggie-paddled all the way to his mother’s arms, about 10 feet away. From there, it was 11 feet, and 12 feet.

With just a few more days of these lessons, he started to jump into the shallow end. Then into the deep end. When his head resurfaced, he looked like he was truly afraid of dying for those two seconds that elapsed before he could grasp the edge of the pool.

Why would anyone continue to do it? I wondered. He was willingly entering a state of terror, of near-drowning, at least in his mind (Hailey and I were always watching him carefully and were close by). And yet he yearned for that freedom from his floaty so much that he was willing to risk everything. He didn’t want to be a little kid anymore.

Now, he is working on his crawl, sometimes using his arms effectively as he swims across the pool. Now, he jumps into the deep end with confidence — too much confidence, considering he is still learning how to take a breath while in the water.

Luke is no longer fearful. Now, the only fearful people in the pool are his parents.