Training from Infant Swimming Resource

The National Institute of Health estimates that approximately 1,500 children die each year from drowning accidents with many of these accidents occuring in swimming pools and ponds. The number of children suffering mild to severe injuries from falling into the water is much higher. It takes a split second for a young child to escape his parent's eye and fall into water unnoticed. It takes just a few seconds more for the results to be damaging or tragic. These accidental deaths can be avoided with instruction from a program that has been developed over the past 40 years and has successfully trained over 140,000 children to survive from drowning-related accidents. This program is called Infant Swimming Resource (ISR), and its mission is to teach young children between the ages of 6 months to 6 years how to save their own lives if they fall into the water.

Unlike traditional swimming lessons, which focus on teaching children to hold their heads up out of the water and swim strokes like the dog-paddle, the first thing a child learns with their highly trained Infant Swimming Resource instructor is to float on his back. The purpose of introducing floating is a basic survival technique within the program. A small child who falls in the water unnoticed may only be able to swim for a few minutes before exhausting himself. This may not be enough time to make it to the edge of the water or even find the edge in a panic situation. The floating technique is an imperative key to survival for children between the ages of six months and one year as it teaches the child to instinctively react to a fall in the water, not with panic, but with a simple roll to a float. Only when the instructor sees the child is very comfortable floating on his back will she introduce the concept of rolling over from a drowning position on his stomach (facedown in the water) to his back, so he can float, rest and breathe until help arrives.