After Lessons
All parents know how quickly a young child grows. It seems like children outgrow clothes and shoes about as quickly as you can buy them! Needless to say, your child’s height, weight, body composition, center of gravity, strength, and coordination are always changing and evolving.
Developmentally, children are constantly acquiring new motor skills. A young baby may very well go from just learning to crawl on all fours to walking without assistance in just a few months. Toddlers go from an unsteady walk to a full-out run, sometimes seemingly overnight. And preschool-age children are constantly mastering new physical feats like jumping, climbing, balancing, kicking, and catching, to name just a few
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Learning to swim is a sensorimotor skill— just like riding a bike or roller-skating. Once learned, the skill is never forgotten. However, in time your child will outgrow the body that learned the swimming skills. As they grow, your child’s center of gravity lowers, and they will need to learn to make different types of adjustments to be able to achieve and maintain the back float position easily. They will also be capable of more and more coordinated arm and leg movements while swimming. The confidence in their abilities will grow as they practice periodically with their Instructor.
It is critical to point out that even though your child needs refresher or maintenance lessons, they will not “forget” their skills. These refresher lessons simply help to ensure that they can perform the skill well, with ease and confidence. Your child’s need for refresher or maintenance lessons will depend on how old they were when they first started lessons, how consistently they attended the initial lessons, how much they have been in the water since the last series of lessons, and how much they’ve grown since the last lesson. Later in this chapter, we’ve set out some general guidelines about refresher and maintenance lessons, but your Instructor is best suited to determine when refresher or maintenance lessons will be needed for your child.
— ISR Parent Resource Guide
