ABC Baby Classes
Swimming overview
The Birthlight approach has been developed over twenty years in a direction
th at offers a positive response to these recent trends by promoting 'water parenting’; emphasis is placed on nurturing the bond between parent and infant in the water, and this is done by using both specially designed movement and relaxation techniques in water in ways that are most conducive to the development of survival skills and swimming.
The original approach developed in Birthlight baby swimming was inspired by Amazonian forest people with whom Françoise Freedman was doing fieldwork in her early twenties. They had fun everyday in rivers with their babies and children and learning was easy, carefree and effective.
They were rough and gentle at the same time and the babies rarely cried. Babies were trained to hold on to their parents and swim towards them, always picked up before they got distressed. This provided a useful model which can be adapted to early parenting in industrialised societies.
In our sedentary and busy lives, babies need more dedicated physical activity, ideally coupled with loving attention from their favourite persons in the world. Water as a medium in which parents and babies can relax together without distractions offers a particularly powerful affective foundation for early learning.
In the water, parents can follow the emergence of their babies'personalities and become aware of their needs in an unconditional loving and supporting way.
