Pursuing Safe Swimming for Kids with Selena Willows

In this episode of Pursuing Uncomfortable, host Melissa sits down with special guest Selena Willows to discuss the important topic of infant and child swim safety. Selena introduces the concept of infant swim rescue and shares her concerns with this method, suggesting alternative solutions. As the founder of Swim to Me, a program that teaches parents how to teach their children how to swim and self-rescue, Selena is passionate about the importance of water safety education for children. She emphasizes the benefits of teaching children how to swim at an early age and shares valuable tips for parents looking to introduce their children to water. Additionally, Selena draws on her years of experience teaching high fear sports such as swimming and gymnastics to discuss the importance of introducing children to different physical sensations. Tune in to learn more about how you can keep your child safe around water, while also exposing them to unique experiences that will help them in the long run.

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Transcript

0:24

Selena Willows has 28 years of experience teaching water safety. She joins the podcast today to talk to parents about helping their children overcome fear of the water, and how they can teach their children to swim and stay safe in just 10 practices of less than 10 minutes as early as two and a half years old. Let's welcome Selena to the podcast.

Melissa: 0:52

Selena, welcome to the Pursuing Uncomfortable Podcast. It's so awesome to have you

Selena: 0:57

with us today. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here, Melissa.

Melissa: 1:02

So, where are you and how are

Selena: 1:05

you? I, I am well, thank you. I am currently in, uh, Canada's capital in Ottawa. Um, yeah. Nice. Is it hot up there?

Melissa: 1:16

It's the middle of July. Well, it's not the middle of July. I was working on my calendar earlier. It's late June is We're recording and we're an el hot spell down

Selena: 1:25

here. Yeah. So it seems to come and do go. We'll have a few hot days and then it'll get chilly a little bit for a few days. Um, but it's, it's summer. It's summer in Canada. Yeah. That's the way it's,

Melissa: 1:37

yeah, exactly. Well, tell us a little bit about what you do because it's so fascinating.

Selena: 1:44

Thanks. Uh, so I help parents help their children overcome fear of the water and learn to swim. Yeah. Yeah. That's an essential skill. I

Melissa: 1:56

know when my son was little, I wanted him to be able to manage him himself in the

Selena: 2:01

water. Yeah. It's necessary. It's a life-saving skill, really. And I I, for us personally, in our home, it's non-negotiable. Everybody must learn to swim. Are

Melissa: 2:12

you all active in water sports? Is this how this

Selena: 2:15

came about for you? Um, so we are more or less active in water sports. Yes. Uh, this came about though because I have been teaching swimming and high fair sports children in high fair sports specifically for 28 years now. And so high fear sports. High fear sports, yes. So swimming falls under that category for a lot of children. And, uh, I also used to coach competitive gymnastics. Oh, so gymnastics is another one where, you know, if you slip off the bar or off the beam, there's a little bit of fear that comes in. And, uh, even trying new tricks, right, can be, can be a fearful, uh, a fearful pro, pro process for a child. So, Yeah, so I've been working in high fear sports for 28 years now. And when my little ones, cause I have two children of my own. When my eldest was 18 months, he, uh, he had a water accident and he developed a tremendous fear of water. Uh, night terrors and all that. Wouldn't go near. Hair washing became a nightmare. Um, he was traumatized. Yeah. And so I had to find a way to get him swimming because, Um, well, because like I said, it's in our home non-negotiable. Uh, we do do a lot of camping and paddle boarding and boating and fishing and stuff like that. And so though the kids are not necessarily in water sports all the time, um, we do do a lot of activities around water and so it was absolutely necessary. So how did you help

Melissa: 3:50

your son overcome the traumatic experience

Selena: 3:53

he had? Yeah, so it was a lot of research at first, frankly, um, because I knew what I knew from teaching true what I call now traditional lessons, right? And those traditional lessons with myself and with independent instructors were not working for my son. And so from there, I, I deep dove into fear in children, into how to help children overcome fear in general. Um, how these fears develop, how they manifest in the body, all of this. So I did a, a really huge deep dive into the emotional side of it. Mm-hmm. And then I did a bit of a deep dive into the physical side of it. And what I realized pretty quickly was that we teach swimming in a very particular way compared to every other sport out there. I think we're doing it wrong. I certainly think so now. Eight years later. Um, and you know, over 2000 children taught, I now know that we are teaching swimming wrong and so

Melissa: 5:01

well, now I'm really intrigued. I really barely remember swimming myself. Uh, I have some memory of my son's swim lessons. So what's the wrong way that we've all been doing? Yeah,

Selena: 5:15

so I mean, I think that this is, you know, I say wrong and that's a really heavy statement, right? That's a very bold statement for me to make. Um, but really truly what it is, is that if you can go back and remember how your child learned to walk, run, climb, ride a bike, um, stand on a snowboard, whatever sport they do, and did. Uh, there was very little prescriptive movement involved, right? Yeah. So for example, if you were to teach your child to walk well, you would have to explain to the child to lift their foot, hold their balance on one side, shift their weight over, move their foot forward, shift their weight back over, do it again. Right? And that's just why you, you can't explain that to a child. They won't understand, right. But they learn. Just by trying it, they see us do it and then they wanna try it. Now with swimming, there is that whole factor of they're in the water, right? So there's a bit of danger there, so we have to kind of modify. But swimming has been taught in prescriptive movements for almost a hundred years now. So these, these programs were developed in the thirties and a lot, uh, a lot has maintained and remained the same over the years. They've changed, you know, the order of the colors and they spread stuff out and whatever, but, The process by, with the method methodology by which they're teaching is very prescriptive movement. So I equate this to teaching a child a dance choreography. So if you get in the water and try to do, say, breaststroke or front crawl, you need to remember to kick, to move your arms, to turn your head to the side to breathe. Or if you're doing the count, right, the gliding, the pulling, the kicking, the lifting, the all of it has to be remembered. Until you have it in a sequence where you can just do it. Mm-hmm. But to get there, that's a lot for a child to remember. And so,

Melissa: 7:06

yeah. Now that you say that,

Selena: 7:07

yeah, that's a lot. Right? What happens? Well, of course children are not learning to swim until they're 5, 6, 7 years old and independently, right? Cause they have all these pieces that they have to put together. Now you add that to the fact that a child doesn't have. It's called proprioception, where their limbs are in space, right? Children don't have, uh, proprioception the way adults do. They don't really know what their limbs are doing a lot of the time. A

Melissa: 7:32

lot of the time, I would say my teenager is still, well, I think he's willfully unaware of what his limbs are doing. Willfully. Blissfully, right?

Selena: 7:45

Yeah. Yeah. So if we can actually strip away the choreography, Then the child can learn to swim the way the child learned to ride a bike. You didn't give explicit instructions. Hmm. Press down on the pedal with X amount of force and whatever. No. It's a feeling of learning to ride a bike, learning to ride a snowboard. A skateboard, um, any of those things. It's a feeling. And so if we can sw, strip away the choreography of the swimming and turn it into a feeling, kids learn so

Melissa: 8:17

fast, so fast. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And you know, I've been racking my brain trying to remember my first swim lesson, and I was really disappointed in that first lesson because it was, all right, here's the water. It's a little bit deeper than you are. Uh, don't go wander, but right now I want you to only use your arms, keep yourself afloat. And we did that for a few minutes, and then she said, okay, now I want you to do the same thing, but only use your legs. Okay. And that was my first swim lesson. I thought, well, what a ripoff, but I see that maybe that really suited me well because I trusted that my body would, would keep me

Selena: 9:01

above the water, would know what to do. Now, can I ask how old you were when you took that lesson? I'm guessing

Melissa: 9:09

probably seven or

Selena: 9:12

so. Yeah. So the other part is that we tend to, in traditional lessons, try to teach children to swim with their head up. Mm-hmm. Lot of children don't wanna put their face in and so we try to teach them to swim with their head up and outta the water. Unfortunately, this position is not available to children. It's just not, they don't have the upper back musculature to keep their head up and to keep in this horizontal swim position. So as soon as they lift their head, their bum goes down. Yeah. And then they become vertical. And this is actually called the drowning position. It's actually called, we don't want. Yeah. Cause

Melissa: 9:51

you have less. Yeah, that makes sense. Of course. Right up and down you're gonna sink like

Selena: 9:56

a torpedo. Exactly. So when children try to swim with their head up, they can't get very far or for very long or very fast. Because their body is, are tilted right at this angle. And so they're pressing against the water to try to move, which doesn't work very well. Right. Have you ever tried to jog in the water? Doesn't work very well. Right. So and then they're paddling, paddling, paddling to try and keep their head up out of the water so they can get air and they're exhausting themselves and they're actually putting themselves in more danger than if they were to just put their face in. Yeah, I see that now. Yeah. So there's a whole layer to this though. So savor with your face in the water for a couple of reasons. Um, the first is that they can actually move, so they can actually get to where they're going, to, where the safety point is, where the air is available to them consistently by holding onto the side or reaching the stairs or whatever. But the other problem is that as mammals, we have this amazing kind of ability, all these, all these processes in our body, right? And so one of these processes is called the D of reflex. And the dive reflex allows us, or tells our brain and tells our body not to take a breath. Okay, so

Melissa: 11:07

real quick, you're saying Dai, d i v e?

Selena: 11:10

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The dive reflex that all mammals have this, and what it is, is that when water hits these little tiny nerves in our nostrils, the dive reflex is activated and our body knows we are underwater. We are not to breathe Now. Just like any other complex system, it can be overridden, right? This is how we end up at a place where possibly we're drowning. However, it's also how free divers stand our water for so long and can hold their breath for so long, because as soon as the dive reflex is activated, not only do we know not to breathe, but oxygen is diverted to essential organs only, and so we can actually maintain a breath for a very, very, very long time underwater. When a child swims with their head up like this and the water is lapping up and down and up and down, and they're breathing through their mouth, dive reflex is not activated. And so a lot of times children will end up inhaling water. Oh, and this is where they end up on the side coughing, coughing, coughing. No, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. And then they go back in play and they do it over and over and over again. And this is where we end up with folks.

Melissa: 12:14

You know, I had, uh, some friends of friends. Who, uh, lived in Hawaii, they had a, a baby and they just kind of threw the baby in the water. There was a little more to it than that. Yeah. And they were present with it, but the baby just knew what to do.

Devon: 12:29

Hi, I wanna take a quick moment and tell you about my mom. She's an amazing mom and an amazing podcast host, isn't she? She's also amazing at helping people to understand and manage anxiety, and to build a strong experiential practice. She has online courses, books, and a lot of free resources and downloads to help you live an amazing life. So please check out Light Life and love ministries.com and her YouTube channel. Blue Weeks are in the show notes.

Selena: 12:56

Yes. Yeah. So that's actually called Infant Swim Rescue. And it is, uh, it's a methodology for infants. It, um, it's a survival kind of swim, uh, swim course. Now, the thing with. The thing with that is that asking a child to float on their back is extremely onerous. It's

Melissa: 13:17

really hard to get a child to swim, to, to float

Selena: 13:19

on their back and to just relax in the water, right? Mm-hmm. Um, we're asking children to submit to the water when they have no capability in it. Now, ISR has done at very, very, very young ages, and, um, they're, uh, it can take 40 to 50 lessons. To get a child to actually do this mechanism. And what I've seen in my practice is that if very young children don't practice, often they lose it. Mm-hmm. The younger the child is, the more often you need to practice. My opinion on the whole thing, um, is kind of two things. One is that there's no ability to communicate with the child as to what is happening to them. And so there have been cases in which this causes trauma for a child. And very real problems later on, uh, in the water for the child. But the other part of it too is that a child should not be submitting to the water if they're not capable in the water. We're giving them a false sense of security. And if they can't walk anyway, then why do they need to know to swim? Okay. And to

Melissa: 14:25

clarify, this is for floating on your back in the water, not for swimming.

Selena: 14:30

Right, so they'll roll over. It's a survival mechanism, right? So they teach them to roll over onto their back if they ever fall in, but why is the six month old falling in the water? Right? That's my opinion. That's my opinion. And there are ISR instructors all over the place that will absolutely disagree with me, and that's fine. Everybody's entitled to their opinion, but as far as I'm concerned, until a child is able to walk to the pool, open the gate, whatever, there's not necessarily a need for this. And it doesn't stick. So no backstroke.

Melissa: 15:02

Pardon?

Selena: 15:03

So no backstroke yet? No. Right. They're not gonna be doing that yet anyway. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. So ISR is very impressive. Very, very impressive. Um, and I think that, you know, there are absolutely circumstances where it has definitely saved lives. Absolutely. I just don't know that the financial implication, the time implication, uh, and the rest of it when you have a child who is not mobile anyway, is necessarily worth it. And I think it depends where you live too, right? Sure, absolutely. In Canada, we don't have ISR instructors. They're few and far between because our winters are so long that no child is gonna remember anyway from one season to the back. Whereas states like Florida, you know, Hawaii, stuff like that, where the water is there all the time and people are swimming all the time. Mm-hmm. I can see how it would be possibly worthwhile, you know, in a different, in a different setting. Sure. Yeah. So what is your mission?

Melissa: 16:04

Oh,

Selena: 16:05

my mission. So my mission is to change drowning rates. I want those statistics to change, and I think it's possible. I think that. We've been stuck in these same numbers, roughly, right? I mean, we report every year on these, these numbers of, of, you know, numbers of children who have fallen in the water and that the, that one to four age group is, is at most risk of drowning. That's where we see the most problems. Um, I would actually say that it's more two to five, but the way statistics are broken down, we don't have those numbers, right? It's one to four is the numbers we get. Um, but I would like to see that number change. And, and my mission is to get the information into parent towns because parents are the first line of defense against this. They're the ones that are there all the time. You know, we don't have lifeguards sitting in our backyard pool. We don't have lifeguards. When we go to barbecues, we don't, you know, we don't hire our lifeguard when we're having a family swim. And, uh, parents are the ones who are there, and if they have the right information and the right, uh, knowledge, know-how and confidence in their abilities, then and. Then we can potentially, you know, eradicate this problem completely as possible. Yeah, yeah. And I have

Melissa: 17:22

some adult friends who said that they just refuse to teach their children how to swim because they don't want them in the water. They just don't wanna take a chance. And then I also have adult friends that say, I cannot go boating. I cannot do these things because I never learned how to swim and I wish I would have. So, I mean, I get parents have to do what their gut tells them is the best Yeah. In raising their child. Absolutely. You should always listen to your gut Yes. In those things. But how would you, uh, speak to an adult who's never been taught how to swim? How would you start to

Selena: 18:00

teach them? Yeah. So, you know, I, I taught adults for a long time. Um, It's not my area of expertise. I'm gonna be honest. Adults come with a lot more baggage than I have patience for a lot of the time, to be honest. You know, if I'm being a hundred percent, um, with you. That being said, it's a mental game more than it is a physical game. And understanding that is going to get you a long way because it's not just about can I float, can I move in the water? It's can I stay calm because there's breath involved. Yes. And so if you can't stay calm in the water, there's no service to you learning to swim,

Melissa: 18:41

right? Because it won't make a difference

Selena: 18:43

anyway. Not gonna make a difference. What we see is that people who, um, children who don't learn to swim early, uh, in life. So when I say early in life, I am typically talking before, uh, their developmental milestone around age five or six. Okay? And there's a developmental milestone that happens in children's brains around five or six. And people who do not learn how to swim before that developmental milestone who are, uh, afraid of the water or have anxiety around the water worry, that kind of thing, that, uh, that fear, worry, anxiety becomes more ingrained during that developmental milestone. And then what we see is that even learning to swim later on, if they haven't dealt with the feelings about it, the emotion behind it, um, it can be much harder to overcome later on in life. And these people end up. Some very competent in the water, but because those feelings are still a little bit there because they stuck, right. Um, they can, they can panic more easily. And as bipeds, we are not very good at getting ourselves over the water once we panicked,

Melissa: 19:47

like Yeah, yeah. The enemy of just about anything when it comes to survival, right?

Selena: 19:54

Yeah. And in the water, our body doesn't even do anything useful in the water when we're, when we're packaging.

Melissa: 19:59

You know, we're in that down position. We're probably making ourselves straight up and down and flailing

Selena: 20:04

about, and yeah, we're bobbing up and down. It looks like we're climbing a ladder, you know? And, and it's, uh, and we're not able to, to see or perceive help coming our way. Mm-hmm. And so, um, yeah, we're, we're not very good at getting ourselves out of it. Um, unfortunately, I do

Melissa: 20:25

have a question about gymnastics, if you're willing to Sure. Foray in that. Uh, when I was a kid, I was terrified of doing a handstand. I never had an accident. I never fell, I never had any kind of trauma that would explain it. But even still to this day, you know, I did car wheels and all that. Uh, Yeah, I tried a cartwheel not too long ago after not doing one for years, and I do not recommend that. But plus I was terrified of doing

Selena: 20:57

handstands. Yeah. So for some people it's the idea of falling over the other way. Mm-hmm. Right? If you don't have, if you're not up against a wall, um, for some, and this is a really interesting thing, is for some, if you were not put upside down as a child, And that's a feeling that your body may just not want. Um, we saw years and years. I, I coached gymnastics for years and years and years. And what we often saw were, uh, children who weren't able to do somersaults, that kind of thing, uh, when speaking with their parents, never was this child upside down. Not ever. Right. And I actually encourage parents, um, to hold their kids upside down. Yeah. All of'em upside down. It's fun for them and it gives them a sense of, you know, all the ways in which we can be in this world like a little bit more and, and what it feels like to be upside down. Because if we don't have that feeling, a lot of people have never been upside down and never will. Interesting. Yeah. I'm a

Melissa: 22:01

swing set and I hung by my feet all the time Okay. On this. And I had older brothers. I was held by my ankles. Yeah, that's just always been interesting to me. Yeah, it, yeah. But what other high fear sports do you have experience in?

Selena: 22:19

So those are the two main ones. Um, I actually, in my, in my swimming, um, career, in my, in my coaching career, I actually worked with the Canadian military for some time and we did cold water survival training. And so a lot of the, um, Not a lot. Sometimes we would have someone, an adult who would come in for cold water survival training who couldn't swim. And so then it's a whole other layer, right, that we have to put on top of that. And, um, you know, children and adults are different in their fear and the way it manifests and the way they communicate it and the way that they overcome it. Um, so it's always been interesting me to me to see, you know, how, how the children do versus how the adults do. And, uh, Yeah, that cold water survival was an interesting decade of my life coaching That bet.

Melissa: 23:08

Yeah, I bet. I had a little bit of that. I was in the National Guard for 10 years and on basic army basic training, he did an afternoon of that. So it wasn't any, anything really focused or intense, just a general exposure to it. But, uh, I remember the first question was, who has never learned how to swim? And they were taken off and trained differently.

Selena: 23:32

Yes. They are definitely needing in need of, of different training. Um, and then, and then into the, the cold water. Yeah. Yeah. This course was, um, so when I got there, they actually didn't have a curriculum at all. They just did testing. They did cold water testing. Um, and so I came in and I built a curriculum and then I administered it for 10 years. And we had, uh, it was several weeks of, of training. So they'd come in once or twice a week for an hour for training. And then at the end of it, we had our,

Melissa: 24:04

our test day. Yeah. Interesting. So, to parents that have young children, or considering having children soon, what advice would you like them to have? What do you want them to know of them?

Selena: 24:18

Hold your children upside down. Yeah. Um, so don't be afraid of, of putting water in your child's face. That's a big one, right? Your child can't learn how to hold their breath and how to manage all of that. Um, if they haven't experienced it. And you know, when you consider that our children are in water for nine months before they come out, it's a perfect time right from the start, right from the start in bath time, wearing a face cloth over their face, or, you know, when you're rinsing hair or dump a cup of water and, and, you know, make sure some goes over the face. And then once you feel comfortable, Get them underwater, get them submerged. And I can even give you a little two second if you're okay with it. A little how to do, okay. So any child under the age of 12 months, but even more than that, I've seen this up to 24 months. Even in children, when you blow in their face a strong sharp blow. So, uh, they actually shut down the airway. Beautiful thing. So they'll shut down the airway and you're gonna see it. They'll go, Like that. I have no idea what that just looked like. That's gonna be interesting to watch over first

Melissa: 25:28

picture. Um,

Selena: 25:30

great. So all we do is say 1, 2, 3, go. And so you'll notice that I'm squeezing. So this gives the child a tactile, uh, cue. I'm saying it. So I'm giving a verbal cue and then when I say Go now with a young child, you're gonna blow put them under and back up and that's it. And once you get up, you. And take a breath in. Now. The reason we want them to mimic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. Yeah, love it. I

Melissa: 26:04

did notice on your website you have, uh, a downloadable guide, the Ultimate Swim Guide for Parents, five Things to Know For Success. Yeah, I'm sure that's a great resource that people should download it. And don't worry, folks, the links are in the show notes to the website. And that'll pop up there on the website. So you can get ahold of that. Yes. And yeah, this has really been interesting. I've learned a lot today. Selena, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much for having me. Any last thoughts you'd like to leave with

Selena: 26:41

us today? Sure, absolutely. I'd love to talk about, uh, the program that I have. Yeah, that enable equals parents to teach their own children to swim. You know, we talked about how getting this information to the parents' hands is of the utmost importance. And, you know, I have this, this incredible program that, like I said, we've been doing it for eight years now and, um, we have a hundred percent success rate in children, two and a half an up. So in just 10 lessons, 10 practices of under 10 minutes, your two and a half year old is guaranteed to be swimming in this program. Wow. Yes. Right, because we've stripped away the choreography and we've added in all the emotional support, both for the parents and for the children. And, um, so basically the co the program is called Swim to Me, and in it I teach the parents how to teach their child to swim and self rescue. We give you all the water safety stuff and we give you all the communication stuff, right? For the children who are, for the parents who are thinking, my child's not gonna listen to me. I give you all of that, it's all in there. Um, and we support you. It's fully supported. So you'll have access to me throughout the program and what I'm doing because I really, really, really feel like this is really important for all families, is twofold. So one is Melissa, I'm gonna leave you with a coupon code. So that, uh, listeners can get 15% off the program. Awesome. And the other thing is I want everybody to know this is a lifetime access program. So if you have more than one child and one of them is of age, now you can hop in now and it's no extra cost down the line. You still have the support, you have everything through all of the children you need to teach. So we've packaged it this way because I truly believe that it is of the absolute importance that all children learn to swim and. Children are expensive as it is, and more to the family, it gets more and more expensive. And so I wanted to make sure that there was something for families who had, um, multiple children and, and could jump into a program that, um, will allow them to teach all their children at one price. Selena, that's amazing.

Melissa: 28:46

And thank you for that coupon code. You're very welcome. All right. It's been a pleasure. It's been enlightening and it's been fun. So thank you so much and I look forward to diving deeply. See what I did there and so what you have to offer. Thank you so

Selena: 29:05

much, Melissa. It was great chatting with you.