Swimming is a sport that many people love and encourages their children to participate in.  While swimming is considered a mostly girl sport there are numerous boys who swim as well.  This is also a sport that can be done as a family, and allow for some friendly competition.  You should always ensure your child has strong basic swimming skills before ever allowing them to begin swimming as a sport to ensure their safety. 

If your child enjoys swimming it should be encouraged, you never want your child to be scared of the water.  Nevertheless, at the same time, you should never push swimming and allow your child to grow into swimming at their own pace.  You should ensure that your child receives plenty of opportunities to improve their swimming skills while they are young and less fearful of water.  Competitive swimming has been an Olympic sport since the beginning. 

Swimming has numerous benefits that include improving strength, muscular conditioning, and endurance; it also increases flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness and circulation as well as provides aerobic exercise.  It also helps to strengthen the respiratory system.  Other benefits are that swimming tends to be very easy on asthma sufferers. 

Children who excel at swimming have good endurance and stamina.  Having long arms and legs also helps but is not something that is required to succeed at swimming.  Most children who actually do very well at swimming tend to swim all year long instead of just seasons at a time.  The more time your child spends swimming the more opportunity they have to master the various strokes. 

Children should start taking formal swimming lessons when they are around 4 years of ago, and should have a good set of skills by the time they are 7-8 years of age.  You should look for swimming programs in which your child is able to start off with a parent, so that they can slowly become comfortable with the water.  You want a class that makes your child feel like they are having fun, rather than over their head and bored. 

You definitely want a beginning class that keeps reliance on floatation devices to a minimum so that your child truly learns swimming instead of developing a false sense of security.  You want a swim instructor that has lifeguard certification, as well as knows CPR and first aid.  For a class size, you want no more than five children per one instructor to ensure the instructor is not spread too thin amongst children. 

If your child has some basic swim skills them a group class may be a lot of fun for them, however if your child is struggling them private and individual lessons are a great asset so that your child has the ability to spend quality time with the instructor on a personalized level to help them get up to speed on their skills.  Private lessons should generally be no longer, than 30 minutes long, so that your child does not lose interest. 

If your child goes into competition swimming then expect a huge commitment with practices two to as many as five times a week.  This does not even include the swim meets on weekends and whatever other days they are scheduled.  Synchronized swimming is another option for the swimmer that craves a teamwork setting.  Synchronized swimming can be a very graceful sport that is quite enjoyable to watch and participate in. 

The costs of swimming are relatively small compared to many other sports.  The biggest cost is a membership to a swimming pool or gym where your child can practice swimming a lot.  Otherwise, the swimsuit is the next biggest expense, which can cost from $20-$100 per suit.  Goggles and some swim lessons are the next expenses which round up the costs associated with swimming.