Kids who can't/won't clean

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Rozellelily said:
Floaters off at 3-4 is pretty impressive.I guess in US culture there is a lot of swimming?
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Lots of swimming at very young ages–except among African Americans. Sadly, drowning is a frequent cause of death among African American children.

In recent years, African American Olympic swimmers and other African American swimming champions have stepped up to implement and support (with their endorsement and their help in fundraising) various “Learn To Swim” programs that encourage African American families to make sure their children learn how to swim while they are very young.

Many of our middle schools and high schools have swimming pools, and swimming is a popular choice of parents for their children’s “sport”–it’s fairly inexpensive (compared to sports like hockey, horseback riding, figure skating, etc.) and it can be done year-around, and…it is one of the NCAA sports, which means that there are college scholarships (full rides!) available!!! Woo hoo! What’s not to like?

Our award-winning Park District has a couple of local pools, and offers very reasonably -priced Learn To Swim classes (Red Cross). They also have a program that covers the cost for families that qualify because of low income.

Many many Americans of all income levels consider a trip to a lake or a beach the best possible way to spend their weekends or vacation. You don’t have to be rich to take advantage of a body of water! Many cities here in the state of Illinois have large rivers running through them (we have several very large rivers, including the Mississippi), and these are also popular recreation sites. Also, for those (like me) who aren’t fond of being outdoors in the hot sun, most hotels and motels have a swimming pool, and it’s a great way for a family to unwind after a long day of driving or flying.

In addition, a lot of Americans love to boat, kayak, canoe, and fish, and even if they don’t plan to swim–sometimes the boat doesn’t behave itself, or the fisherman gets pulled off the deck by the “big one!” Knowing how to swim can make a difference between life and death.

Swimming is a popular workout for people who are into physical fitness, and swimming is also part of any triathlon, so participants have to know how to swim.

Finally–swimming and other water activities are a Godsend for people with joint disorders–many people with debilitating arthritis and other disabilities can find a lot of freedom from pain. It’s so pleasurable being “weightless” in the water! Water therapy is part of the physical therapy offered by my hospital to appropriate patients.

So yes–many American parents consider it imperative to make sure their child learns how to swim. African American families are getting a lot of encouragement to get comfortable with swimming, and I think it’s working. We’re seeing more African American swimmers in various sports competitions, and I believe the drowning statistic is dropping, thank goodness.
 
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I will add that in my area, infant swimming classes are becoming very popular. I mean “INFANT”, as in less than 12 months, and I mean “SWIMMING” as in drop the baby in the pool without any flotation device and have them swim to safety. (I’m sure that isn’t the first step in the process, but that’s the part they show on the commercial.) I’m not ready for this with my kids, but I have a coworker that did it. She said that making sure her babies could swim was the only way she felt safe when they had weekend visitation with their dad during the summer.
Curiously, none of my siblings ever had any swimming lessons until we were old enough for summer camp, but we still learned how to “not drown” even if we didn’t have perfect form. We lived in rental units that almost always had a community pool and whenever our beach ball floated away, we learned to swim so we could go get it. Maybe not the best method for forming a trained, athletic swimmer, but it’s more or less the same way we learned to walk. No one took us to the Y for “walking lessons”. Most kids I knew, learned to swim that way.

If any kids didn’t get it figured out by second grade, they got to summer camp and learned through armbands and peer pressure. When you got to camp, you were given a swimming test to make sure you wouldn’t drown in deep water. If you could swim back and forth across the pool four times, you got a yellow band. If you could do that and tread water for 20 minutes straight, you got the coveted blue band. If you couldn’t make it across the pool, you wore the crimson band of shame. This wasn’t only during pool time. You wore these bands the entire time you were at camp, even in the dinning hall or the archery field, or building campfires. Everyone knew you were a seven-year-old failure at swimming and all the rest of your survival skills were called into question. If you had a red band, you also had to wear an embarrassing orange life preserver if you were anywhere near the lake or boathouse. (Yellow and blue bands only had to wear them when they were actually out on the water in canoes outside of the swimming area.) So, as a matter of prepubescent pride, even if you’d never dipped your toe in the deep end of any pool at any YMCA or Holiday Inn you’d been to, you were going to make it across that pool during the swimming test, or drown trying. (No one actually drowned.)

In high school, they had a pool and you were required to take a unit in swimming take pass a swimming test. Peeps is right that most of the black girls did not participate. They sat in the shallow end of the pool and insisted that their mothers said they could not get their hair wet because it would ruin their expensive hairdos. The truth of the matter was that for many of them, that was the first time they’d been in a pool. Their parents were kept out of community pools by racist discrimination laws and later, by illegal discrimination, and they never learned to swim themselves. Therefore, swimming wasn’t never part of their lives and their kids didn’t learn to swim.
 
Allegra said:
In high school, they had a pool and you were required to take a unit in swimming take pass a swimming test. Peeps is right that most of the black girls did not participate. They sat in the shallow end of the pool and insisted that their mothers said they could not get their hair wet because it would ruin their expensive hairdos. The truth of the matter was that for many of them, that was the first time they’d been in a pool. Their parents were kept out of community pools by racist discrimination laws and later, by illegal discrimination, and they never learned to swim themselves. Therefore, swimming wasn’t never part of their lives and their kids didn’t learn to swim.
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This is the absolute truth, and it’s also true of ice skating rinks and figure skating clubs. We are all trying to get African Americans interested in figure skating, and one of the good organizations that has had lots of success is Figure Skating in Harlem (NYC). There is also a franchise of this organization in Detroit, Michigan. I wish we could get a franchise in our city–I think it would be awesome.

But you don’t have to learn how to figure skate to save yourself from death, whereas swimming is very useful for staying alive!
 
Swimming is a very important life skill.

“Floaters” give young kids a false sense of security. They think they can swim, and all it takes is one time they run into the pool sans floaties for them to realize they cannot swim, the buoyancy was fake.

At age 9 my child rescued a 3 year old from drowning in her family pool, the swim lessons he had from the youngest age offered (by Red Cross swim classes) saved a life.
 
This is an interesting conversation about swimming and race.

I grew up in Alabama and to those of us that were not well off and/or white, swimming was regarded as a “rich people’s sport.” Same with tennis and figure skating. We went to swim, but not at any of the pools. We would go in the creeks and lakes or rivers. The pools and competitive swimming was nearly exclusively whites and most of the pools were well off whites. Our school didn’t have a pool so there wasn’t any swim tests. I never realized there was actually a history behind this divide. I mean I knew about segregation in the south and separate pools but I didn’t realize it went further than that.
 
In St. Louis, it wasn’t about separate pools. It was flat out, black people weren’t allowed at the pool. When it was illegal to discriminate in plain terms that way, the same segregation was accomplished in other ways. When the public pools in the city parks became officially integrated, people used threats and harassment to keep black people out. In the suburbs, communities had exclusive “swim clubs” rather than public pools, which could keep people out based on residency, restrictive fees unfairly applied, or simply “not having been invited to join”. I was recently amazed to learn that as late as the year my mother was born, it was actually against the law to sell a home to black families in the suburb where she lived. So residency requirements were all that was necessary to keep black people out of the the public pool.
Even today, pool access can be cost restrictive. Our community pool is $350 per season for a family pass and the two local swim clubs are priced by the number of members in the family and would come to an excess of $400 for our family. You can go to the public pool and pay a daily rate, if you are a resident, which for our family comes to about $20 a visit. So most of the time we make use of the Greater-St.-Louis-Aquatic-Center-For-the-Underprivileged. AKA “the river”. Unfortunately, the flooding has been bad this year and its nowhere near safe to swim in. If you live in a rental unit in the burbs, you have a pretty good chance of having the most economical access to a pool.

Growing up, swimming wasn’t seen as a “sport” as much as a leisure activity. Most people I knew swam in a pool and or visited the lake or river for float trips. It was considered odd for a person to not be able to swim. Other than the black girls at my high school, I was in college before I met someone who legitimately could not swim.
 
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The flooding has been bad this year for sure! Cost is a huge factor for most people I know as well. That’s what I always assumed the idea of it being a “rich people sport” stemmed from.
 
13pollitos said:
swimming was regarded as a “rich people’s sport.”
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I think it’s a bit like that here too in Australia.At least when I was growing up.
There is a large opportunity for swimming/water activities like snorkeling in Great Barrier Reef etc but it is really only the wealthier people who can afford these holidays.
Queensland is amazing,but the demographic is primarily Aussies from English background or Aboriginals from poor socioeconomic situations.

As valuable as swimming is,my parents would not have been able to afford the private lessons,so us “public school kids” all learnt through the schools planning at approximately 8 years.

There’s also a big swim culture here,Bondi beach is always full etc but the beach coastal areas are predominantly lived in by Australians from English background.
“Poorer” people do sometimes go to the beach-Europeans (non English),Indians,Middle Easterners etc but it is usually a weekend day trip and they don’t have the luxury to “hang out there” all the time like the others.

When we were little our parents use to take us to rivers (now too dirty here) and public pools.The positive was that public pools entry were very cheap here -$1 to $2 dollars I think.
By that time at approx 8,could probably do “basic swimming” like tread water etc but probably more in the shallow end.
Own backyard swimming pools were primarily “owned by the rich” in our perception.

Even now as an adult I wouldn’t consider myself a proficient swimmer- i can basic swim like underwear swim,above water paddle around/breaststroke,tread water etc but my strokes are non existent.My freestyle is awful at best and I still get uncomfortable in deep water.

I do love swimming though and I agree with @Peeps about it being one of best,if not best,exercises if have joint disorders.
If I exercise like on exercise bike etc I have knee pain but in water no pain and the better part is that being in water doesn’t even feel like exercise so not feel boring!!

Its really good to hear that there are measures being placed in USA to help African American background children be able to learn swim/have opportunities to swim.
Here there are a few charities who are doing the same for Aboriginal children.
Aboriginal children often have “opportunity” here to swim in rivers,but at the same time their drowning rate is higher due to not necessarily knowing how to swim and their parents also can not afford the lessons.

I believe it’s everyone’s responsibility,not just Aboriginal community or African American community etc

www.abc.net.au

The teen helping teach Aboriginal kids how to swim

A teenage girl from the New South Wales Riverina has started a charity to help teach Aboriginal children how to swim.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
 
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Is it safe to swim in rivers in Australia? Where I live, the worst you’ve got to worry about is a water moccasin, but south of here, they’ve got to worry about gators jumping out of the ponds in the golf course! I thought Australia had crocodiles and enormous, man-eating snakes in the rivers!
 
Lol 😆.
Australia doesn’t have any enormous (enough to eat man) snakes but there definitely are crocodiles here in some rivers.
There are snakes but they are more normal size snakes-I think those ginormous horrific snakes like anaconda are more in Indonesia and South America.
Maybe there is some huge snake in Australia but thankfully I have not personally seen or it’s not on our national news much.

The beauty of the Australian landscape (is this the right word?) is that it is very diverse so Queensland is different from Sydney which is different again from Tasmania etc…
In Queensland and the Northern Territory,where the majority of Aboriginals live,there definitely are crocodiles🐊 in the creeks and there is no way on earth that I would swim there.
Whether these “locals” know the areas better,or simply are willing to take more risks,I don’t know.
There definitely are people who have been attacked by crocodiles-both Australian residents and tourists!
Most of this happens I think in The Northern Territory or Far North Queensland and travelling really “inland/outback ( I’ve never been as maybe not so safe for women on these roads) has more risks of the crocodiles,snakes and spiders.

The outback here is dry,arid etc but most of the population live in the cities like Sydney and Melbourne which are probably quite similar to USA cities so there no crocodiles in these rivers.
Maybe sharks in the harbour but the rivers biggest issue for swimming is cities like Sydney is probably the pollution.

I’ve actually travelled on this road in Queensland but I’m glad it wasn’t on that night though!
Imho I think far North Queensland is one of the most beautiful parts of Australia but the tropical climate does come with chance of crocs and not to mention some bizarre flying animals etc and when there were some floods recently in Townsville it really brought the animals out.


au.news.yahoo.com

Crocodile emerges from floodwaters to terrify mum and kids in Queensland backyard

'This guy just tried to have a go at us,' the mum said after this three-metre croc charged into the family's backyard.
au.news.yahoo.com au.news.yahoo.com

I had to look up water moccasin as I figured it wasn’t a shoe…they don’t look too friendly either…
 
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Here in the southern US, alligators are as much of a threat as crocodiles are for our down under pals.
 
My kids are older than yours by a good deal. They started swim at 4. The 4 year class was pre school level 1 and it was a preview class. The first actual level is level 1 at 5 years. They were Red Cross certified.

Adding, I never learned to swim. I grew up in an inner city apartment, and we had no access to a pool. My aunt had a 4 foot above ground pool, but I was tall enough to reach the bottom.
 
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I looked them up and they are very scary looking also…like the Crocodiles brother.
Is it a tropical climate in the Southern USA?
 
Florida is sub-tropical except for the southernmost area which is tropical.

As the habitat is infringed upon, the gators have moved further north and into the large “humid subtropic” zone.
 
It’s nasty hot, whatever it is. And the areas around the gulf coast and Florida are full of swamp water, where gators live. Lots of them are small, but they can get huge too! They can live in fresh or brackish water and they’re being chased out of their natural habitats into the burbs. I don’t know if they are as big as crocodiles, but they get big enough to make short work of a person, and certainly a pet. A few years back there was a horrifying story of a family that was staying on a Disney resort and was walking next to a lagoon and a gator shot out of the water and grabbed their toddler right out of their hands. I had nightmares about it for weeks!
 
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