Water safety and water survival are important subjects for any parent, even if they don’t live close to a large body of water. At Little Fins Swim School in Colorado Springs, owner Lauri Armstrong and her family-driven team of one-on-one teachers instruct infants as young as 8 weeks in developing instincts in the water that can make the difference in a possible drowning scenario.
“So, the way that babies’ bodies develop and come out of the womb is that they are more inclined to water. They have more fluid and air between their cells,” Armstrong explains. She says this makes them more buoyant, so babies learn to swim a lot faster than adults or even toddlers and young kids because their bodies are created to do that at the time of birth.
“When parents start coming to our ‘Mommy & Me’ class, it’s a huge piece of bonding with moms and dads or whoever is coming. There’s some of that skin-on-skin [connection], but then it’s also just kind of reinforcing skills as far as learning to float and learning how to be safe in the water.”
Learning Skills Even at 8 Weeks Old at Little Fins Swim School
Little Fins instructors start working on skills with the babies even as young as 8 or 9 weeks old. “We don’t obviously let them do it on their own, and we don’t let them go underwater until 6vmonths. But at 6 months old, they start going underwater.”
Armstrong points out that, if you ever watch a little baby swim, usually under the age of 2, they just keep their eyes open underwater. “It’s a biological instinctual thing. It’s not till they’re a little bit older that kids start to close their eyes when they go underwater. So again, it is one of those things that helps them learn faster because they can see what they’re doing.”
The essential element and motivation in starting early is that parents want their children to be safe. Armstrong says soon-to-be mothers even call ahead to reserve time with instructors since the teaching is always one-on-one, plans need to be made in advance especially for the summer months.
Armstrong says that drowning is one of those things most people don’t talk a lot about, especially in Colorado because we don’t have oceans or backyard pools: Our Colorado kids, specifically, don’t grow up knowing how to swim.”
Kids who live in places where there is more access to water, she says, typically grow up with that knowledge. “Here in Colorado, our kids just don’t get that. So, we have to give them that gift. We have to teach them how to be water safe or they’re just not going to know how.”
Developing Water Safety Instincts
Armstrong says parents always come to them and say, “I know that drowning is a real thing.”Kids, she explains, can drown in two inches of water “because when they fall into, say a bathtub or a small backyard kiddie pool, they freeze [or won’t turn over]. They don’t know what to do. And so, what we do is we start building muscle memory and teaching them how to recover and how to think through a situation. Then [they will] be able to fix it [by instinct].”
Little Fins Swim School doesn’t just teach infants. Kids who have been instructed when they are younger have gone on to be a prominent part of their school’s swim teams. “I mean, we often have kids that start with us at 6 months, and they swim with us all the way until they go to a swim team. They even come back and do some training because we teach one-on-one.” Many come back and say, “My coach has said I need a little bit more help on my starts or my breathing through my breaststroke.”
Little Fins can then do a month of deep focus one-on-one. “We actually have a lot of very competitive parents in our community, so we work very hard. Obviously, we know that they know that starting kids’ young is important when you want your children to be competitive in any sport. And so that’s important to us, too. But obviously, safety is our goal initially.”
However, once the kids learn the basics young, it establishes the foundation of skill “and then their growth in other things can happen much quicker,” explains Armstrong.
Bringing the Community Together through Swimming
But it is also about bringing the community together including helping kids in the disabled community. “The stories that touch our hearts the most are the stories of kiddos that maybe have different abilities or are coming from a more difficult place, obviously, than average kids.”
Armstrong speaks of one child who swims with them who has some severe physical limitations when walking. “She’s 4 years old and her physical therapist actually just came to her swim lessons a couple of weeks ago just to see what we’re doing because since she started swim lessons, she has rapid progress within her strength development in her physical therapy. And so that is just kind of a cool story about this little girl who has struggled her whole life and now has started swimming with us and has just seen huge development.”
Armstrong cites that there has been a lot of research including specific case studies in Finland and Sweden behind how kids develop differently once they start swimming or if they start swimming younger. “What they say is that kids who have started swimming younger just test so much higher in cognitive and motor skill development.” However, Armstrong says it is powerful when one can see that process happening in real time as she and her instructors sometimes do.
With two pool instruction locations available at Mermaid Grove near Garden of the Gods and Union Medical, Little Fins Swim School is looking to expand to at least one more pool location (all are heated by the way). “Our goal is that every child learns to swim … that every person learns to be water-safe. And so, we’ll just keep going on with that.”
