Swimming lessons are one of the best ways to ensure your children’s safety! In fact, swimming lessons are so important that we mentioned them in our last blog as well. If an accident should occur and your child falls or jumps into a pool, this life skill can quite literally save their life. Of course, kids aren’t the only ones that could use a few lessons. Did you know that roughly 37 percent of adults in the United States cannot swim farther than the length of a standard pool? It’s true, according to a 1994 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even worse, a study from the USA Swimming Foundation shows that if a parent does not know how to swim, there’s only a 13 percent chance that their child will learn. Swimming lessons are a vital part of everyone’s overall safety.

Of course, it’s never too late to learn! Take Larissa Rodriguez, for example. She didn’t learn to swim until she was 40 years old. The learning process led her to create Swimmunity. Swimmunity was started as a resource to help adults find guidance and swimming lessons in their local area.

Here are Larissa’s thoughts on why swimming lessons are important for parents:

• “If you are a parent, you are your child’s ‘lifeguard.’ You are responsible for their every interaction with water. Even when your child is in the water with a lifeguard present, you should still be the first line of defense for keeping your child safe.”
• “It’s common to hear news stories about a parent, grandparent or guardian who drowns (or almost drowns) trying to save a child who has fallen in, or become distressed, in the water. Those adults go in knowing they can’t swim because their parental instinct to save the child is so strong. Give yourself the life-saving skill of knowing what to do in the water. The majority of people who drown were only 10-30 feet from safety at the time of the drowning.”
• “Take a moment to watch Muhammad Javed’s story. As a non-swimmer, he almost drowned last summer while trying to save his two-year-old son who had fallen into a lake. It’s Mr. Javed’s heart-wrenching story that finally inspired me to take action myself. The only time it is too late to learn how to swim is when you’re already drowning.”

Putting your children in swimming lessons is a great start in keeping them safer in the water, but it’s essential that everyone else in the family learns how to swim as well. Adults learn to swim all the time, and you can too!