Children who get trained in any skill at an early stage tend to reach mastery, they win Olympic medals, set records, and be exceptional adults. Parents have been using different avenues to improve their children’s various skills, such as hiring a chess coach for children who were good at games, a tutor for educational learning, a swimming instructor is required for swim lessons. Let’s discuss the benefits of swim lessons on early childhood development.
Benefits of swim lessons on early childhood development
People have assumed that swimming is beneficial for every age, especially toddlers. Professor Robyn Jorgenson of Griffith University Australia put this notion to test in a four-year project. The results outline how beneficial can swim lessons be. This article will summarize the research and the three main benefits of swim lessons on early childhood development your child will receive after swim lessons.
Linguistic improvements
First, swim lessons involve direct communication between the child and the instructor. This challenging environment enhances the child’s language skills to a point where this is a distinguishable difference between a swimmer’s and a non swimmer’s language skills.
Listening to important commands and instructions from the instructor improves the oral comprehension of the child. They form some key vocabulary that makes their early school years a much smoother experience.
Swimming as an activity is engaging and gives the children a chance to express what they did, what they felt, and ask any questions. The study found that children were six months to 15 months more advanced in speaking than their counterparts.
These improvements combine translate into better school performance as they are better able to understand instructions and communicate their questions better.
Cognitive improvements
The most important cognitive skill for children is to pay attention to. Swimming, as an activity, forces children to remain vigilant at all times as they remember the feeling of accidentally inhaling some water. Movement in water is significantly demanding and requires more coordination than walking or crawling. These combined train the child to be better at paying attention to their environment.
Swimming offers a variety of movement styles in the form of strokes. Children have more options to choose how they should go from point A to point B. They can choose to cover some distance underwater or all of it. They can choose how deep they go. The study suggests that options like these give children better opportunities to hone their thinking and reasoning skills.
Swim lessons come with a structured program that gradually develops in difficulty, continuously giving new challenges to the children. Furthermore, the improvements in swimming can be physically seen by the children. They enjoy getting better and better at the activity.
The positive feedback loop of giving children challenges, which they then complete to get acknowledgement and rewards and unlock skills that lead to more advanced challenges, is a powerful tool to ingrain the concept of effort and hard work.
Lastly, the experience of an extra learning environment opens children further to learning institutions and their use in developing fun skills and making new acquaintances.
Better motor skills
This surprises no one that swimming improved the physical skills of the children. Swimming promotes the children to coordinate their entire body to move better instead of relying only on their legs or arms at a time.
As swimming involves full involvement of all limbs, these limbs develop better than children who do not swim. As swimming is more intensive than walking, it requires children to use more energy through their limbs. But swimming does not have the same element of shock on the joints and chances of injury. These elements combined boost how well a child understands and uses their limbs.
The core of a child’s body is their weakest area, especially in early development as they have no prior training. The floating environment helps children understand the core of their bodies. They begin to understand how their core muscles can be used, twisting around in the water.
The floating environment also slows down how fast gravity acts on the body. As a result, children have more time to understand how their balance works. This understanding, along with better core understanding, significantly improves the balancing skills of the child.
Summary of the benefits of swim lessons on early childhood development
This study also outlines some requirements for a swim lesson. For the above benefits to be received, the child has to participate in well-structured swimming lessons. Instructors who do not use good vocabulary and language to explain things will impact how much language skills can be learned. Private swimming lessons inhibit how fast the child can learn by watching others and challenging themselves based on what others are doing.
The child has to be happy with the lessons and the environment to register. It is a positive feedback cycle. Children forced into a swim lesson should not be expected to improve their linguistic and cognitive abilities.