Dreading Water : For Some, Pool Lessons Don’t Go So Swimmingly

Jeffrey Candrian, 3, woke a bit earlier than usual to a day that had an ominous look to it: sunny, with bright blue skies.

Water temperatures would be warm. It was (shudder) a day made for swimming.

His mother made him a breakfast of eggs, toast and milk. Although there had been talk within the family about what was planned for this day, nothing was said at the breakfast table.

Jeffrey, his 5-year-old brother Matthew, his 14-month-old sister Alicia and his mother, Debbie Candrian, drove from their home in Fullerton to the city’s Independence Park. They sat on an equipment locker near the huge municipal swimming pools and waited for the opening session of Jeffrey’s swimming class.

But as they approached the shallow pool with the two instructors waiting beside it, Jeffrey finally cracked and made a run for it.

He made it as far as the edge of the lawn before his mother caught him and brought him back, squirming and protesting.

“Jeffrey, Jeffrey,” cooed Karen Drewe, 21, one of the two instructors for this class of young children, most of whom had never before been in a pool without mommy.

Drewe was bending down as low as she could, trying to become as small as possible in Jeffrey’s eyes. “Come on, Jeffrey,” she said. “Jeffrey, I’m not going to bite you. Jeffrey? Jeffrey?”

“He’ll be fine,” his mother said. “He had swimming before, if you can believe it.”

But there was no coaxing Jeffrey out of the death grip he had on his mother’s left leg. But there was no way for Jeffrey to avert what would happen next. It would follow as certainly as summer follows spring, as certainly as swimming lessons follow the first day of summer.

An unspoken, unseen signal passed between mother and instructor. Drewe gently pulled Jeffrey away, picked him up and slid him into the water.

And Jeffrey ska-reemed.

“I want my mommy!”

“It’s all right, Jeffrey.”

“Mommy!”

“Look, Jeffrey, you can even touch the bottom, see? Look, no one else is crying. Look, everybody’s hair is wet.”

“Mommeeeeeeeeee!!”

No use. Mommy was obeying instructions and had walked away from the pool. She was standing, back toward Jeffrey, 20 yards away--still within sight but, for all Jeffrey could tell, out of hearing range. He gathered together all he had and shrieked his loudest toward her, but there was no visible reaction.

“I can hear him,” Debbie Candrian said. “I just don’t want to see him. When you sit and watch, you think, ‘God, they’re tor menting him.’ But they’re not.”

She was puzzled. Jeffrey had been in a similar course two weeks earlier and had not objected at all. “He was excited about this,” she said. “Even sitting here, he was excited. And he’s my one who loves the water. We’ve been talking about it all weekend.”

She listened for a moment. “I don’t hear him now. He’s probably doing fine.”

No, Jeffrey was at the edge of the pool sobbing and revising his opinion of adults. Except for a few coughs to clear water from his throat, he would cry for the entire 35-minute class.

His crying diverted the instructors’ attention enough for 3 1/2-year-old Sarah Rorick to climb out and scamper over to her mother. “We have an escapee,” said instructor Kent Werner, 19, who retrieved her without any apparent hard feelings.

One or Two First-Day Criers

There were no problems with the other children in the class. As first days go in the non-swim category, this one was pretty typical, Drewe and Werner said. One or two first-day criers. The rest compliant, if a little apprehensive.

It is only a two-week class, and even the most precocious students learn only familiarity with the water, they said.

“The hardest part is getting the kid to unwrap his arm from mom’s leg,” Drewe said. From then on, it’s downhill, she said.

“I really like working with these kids,” Werner said. “This (opening day) is the worst day. After that, you’re best friends.”

‘You See Them Progress’

“You see them progress,” Drewe said. “You’ll see them later in other classes, and they’ll be doing great. They give you hugs and kisses. You mean a lot to them, and that means a lot to you.”

Some, of course, cry and resist, but it’s to be expected, they said.

“Sometimes it’s the size of the pool,” Drewe said. Young children, used to the family’s small pool in the backyard, may be frightened by the vastness of the pools in the park.

For children taking a second swimming class, sometimes it’s the new instructor who sets them off. “It’s not who their new instructor is, it’s who their first instructor was,” Drewe said. “They want to cling to that first instructor.”

Instructor’s Gender Important

Sometimes it’s the gender of the instructor. “With the tiny tots, it’s definitely an advantage to have a woman instructor,” Drewe said. “But not necessarily with the older kids, 6 and up. The boys relate to the guys, and there’s a lot of girls who relate to the guys, too.

“The guys here relate to kids very well. I was surprised when I first started working here. I don’t think they’d admit it at their age (late teens and early 20s), but they love kids and they’re going to make great fathers.”

Usually, the crying abates within a day or two and the enemy camps unite into genuine play, said Rowland Hill, another instructor. “Then I love it,” he said. “The kids are so spontaneous.”

Drewe and Werner agreed that the prognosis is good for Jeffrey.

“I think he’ll be fine,” Drewe said.

“About the fourth day he’ll stop crying,” Werner said.

“Really, he could be the best in the class,” Drewe said.

“He’s got strong lungs,” Werner said.