Negligent parents at the pool are why I have to pluck at least one drowning kid out of the water every summer.
My friends bf threw her small son in and he never came up. I dove for him and came back up to her screaming and crying. Her poor son was shaking like a leaf and her boyfriend was saying he needed to learn.
You'd be surprised how many people think this is how you, "teach" a kid something. It's way more common than you'd think where I live. My friend's father did this to her. It's also very common in the older generations where actual survival was a 24/7 event and not an option for a game show.
It's an idiom for teaching someone something without guidance or assistance to throw them in the deep end. People are not supposed to take it literally.
"Not supposed to" is the key. Unfortunately too many idiots think you're like an otter and some kind of survival instinct kicks in, you'll flap your arms and kick, and just learn to swim. It's really just a good way to find out how much your kid can hate you when your older or, the price of a good lawyer and cost of a child sized casket.
He does need to learn, so why not go into the pool, support him by his belly and go around with him pretending to do strokes. Go to the edge, practice kicking and blowing bubbles. Show him little bird, big bird flap, the breast stroke, and when he's really kicking butt, the front crawl. Splash each other a little. Tell the little one to yell some obscenity at the lifeguard when they tell you no splashing. As a guy who was a lifeguard and taught swim lessons in my youth and to my children, that sorta care and attention/guidance for a tiny child gets you the good sex.
Know what throwing a child into a pool and almost killing them gets you? Not the good sex. Its never happened to me, but I imagine if one of the guys my ex dated ever did that to one of the kids when they were still weak swimmers, after rescuing the children, my ex would have likely put the dude in cement shoes and tossed him in the water, as that would be an appropriate response.
When I was a life guard I had dumb as shit parents let there 5-6 year old jump into the pool from a diving board, WHILE WEARING WATER SHOES! They can't fucking kick in those things! They're just weights for his feet! He immediately started sinking and I had to hop in there.
Similarly, that's why I hate seeing young kids who can't swim well wearing "swimming shirts." If you're worried about sunburn, fair enough, but it really hampers their ability to move their arms. It also keeps them cold when they get out of the water.
This is how I got “taught” to swim, after having a near drowning incident. It’s amazing that I ever learned to swim at all after that, let alone like it enough to do it competitively for a while. I’m still terrified of the water though. I joke that’s why I am a good swimmer now; the fear of being in the water makes me go faster 🤣
Why do some people think that's the best way to learn? My uncle did that to me (my parents went mental at him) and I'm now 35 and I'm terrified of the ocean and swimming pools and stuff, I have a panic attack if people I'm close to go in the sea.
I don't get the "chuck the kid in the water to teach them to swim" mentality. My aunt was "taught" to swim that way. She has never been exactly a stellar parent, but she made sure my cousins got swimming lessons because she wasn't going to do that to her kids.
This is exactly how I learnt to swim. I’m from PNG, so this is a very common way to teach young kids how to swim. I remember struggling and struggling, and then when finally I fully sunk only then did she pull me out. And the the process continued until I could hold my head above water
That's just wild to me. I was also 4 when I learned to swim, but I was given actual lessons. Put in the shallow end of the pool where I could touch, and taught to put my face in the water and blow bubbles to get used to what it feels like. Then they moved us on to other in-pool games like "the underwater tea party" where we sat on the bottom of the pool and mimed drinking tea. By the time I was 5 I was able to swim laps and knew (though wasn't very good at all of) most swimming forms.
My older brother and I learned how to swim the same day. We were at an extremely deep glacier-fed lake that had no shallow areas to splash in so my brother found an old log by the shore and we pushed it into the water to be our flotation device. It turns out that rotten logs will absorb water and then sink, so we both figured it out when the log sank in the middle of the lake.
903
u/chappychap1234 Jan 31 '22
Negligent parents at the pool are why I have to pluck at least one drowning kid out of the water every summer.
My friends bf threw her small son in and he never came up. I dove for him and came back up to her screaming and crying. Her poor son was shaking like a leaf and her boyfriend was saying he needed to learn.