“We still just don’t know enough about the safety of these survival classes for infants and babies,” he said. Michael Flaherty - a pediatric critical care physician and director of the Trauma & Injury Prevention Outreach Program at Mass General for Children- said he cannot recommend survival swimming because of a “general lack of data.” ![]() ![]() Parents enter the pool in the last week of lessons to learn how to practice swim skills at home. Toddlers and older children are also taught a sequence called “swim-float-swim” - swimming a short stretch, floating on their backs to breathe and rest, and then turning over to swim again, in the hopes that they are able to reach the edge of a pool.Īvery Clark, 22 months, practiced swimming with her father, Bryan Clark, and instructor Lauren Campion. For infants, the objective is that they learn to roll onto their backs and float in the water while they wait for help to come - a technique termed “rollback to float.” This summer, she received 200 inquiries for 12 spots.īoth ISR and Infant Aquatics have a strict structure for sessions, which span about six weeks instructors meet one-on-one with students four or five times a week for lessons that last about 10 minutes. Now, she runs Champion Infant Aquatics part time out of her home in Maynard. She feared for her son’s safety around her pool, and saw a video about survival swimming on TikTok, which inspired her to become an instructor. Ryan/Globe StaffĬampion has a strikingly similar story to Keefe. To become certified to teach survival swimming, Campion trained for over 240 hours at the headquarters of Infant Aquatics in Colorado. Instructor Lauren Campion stood by her pool at home in Maynard. “In my opinion, a baby that can potentially reach the water unattended, either by crawling or walking, can and should be taught the survival float.” “I have seen quite a few babies under a year successfully complete the program and retain those skills,” said Keefe, who has worked with infants starting at 7 months. Keefe suggests otherwise: To be taught to float, infants just need to have the core strength to sit without support. According to its policies, babies below 1 are “developmentally unable to learn the complex movements, such as breathing, necessary to swim.” The viral videos have also sparked controversy, in part because survival swimming like ISR isn’t endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends against any swim lessons for infants under the age of 1. The clips often show babies in the water, flipping themselves from facedown to faceup and floating - a skill that could save their lives if they fell into a pool. But in recent years, social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have popularized its style of survival swimming. ISR itself isn’t new - it was founded by a psychologist in 1966. The Infant Swim Resource program teaches survival swimming to children between the ages of 6 months and 6 years.
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