There have been so many questions and discussions regarding crawling, creeping and brachiating, that I thought it deserves a separate article.

In Glenn Doman’s book How To Teach Your Baby To Be Physically Superb, there are few chapters devoted to these activities.

The first one is crawling.   Doman recommends building a special crawling track for the baby, where the little ones can crawl during their sleep and during the day.  Pretty much all day long.

Since I was a teenager and saw a TV program showing tiny newborns floating around regular home bathtubs, I was dreaming of one day teaching my own future kids to swim right from birth. With my firstborn I couldn’t find any resources, so we started around 9 months, when our public swimming pool opened. I got some books and by a year he could swim underwater. So if you are looking for materials on teaching babies as young as 6 month to swim, see Teach Your Child to Swim for resources, book reviews and results.

I’ve finally got my hands on “How Smart is Your Baby?” by Doman. Since someone recently was asking if this book is worth buying (in addition to other “Teach Your Baby” series) I decided to post this review:

First of all, I have all “How to teach your baby…” - Reading, Math, Encyclopedic Knowledge, Swimming, Physically Superb. “How smart is your baby” is slightly different (I haven’t read the “increase your baby’s intelligence”), though it has bits of everything.

1. No matter how shy your kid is, he will always be welcomed and will always find good friends in a sport team.
2. Participating in sports will allow the child to discover previously unknown reserves of his or her body. When your whole team is behind the child, sky is the limit to what he or she can do.
3. By exercising regularly the child will get used to staying fit. Flab? What flab!
4. Child’s self esteem will get a huge boost. If the kid tries again and again, and finally succeeds, he becomes aware of what he is capable of and this feeling will stay with her for life!

Can you believe that the child can get out of the water, and die from drowning hours later?! Yet, this is entirely possible. 4000 people die from dry drowning each year, 1400 whom are kids. What IS dry drowning?

Dry drowning is basically drowning without water. With dry drowning, you are not drowning from an immediate immersion in water; it is more of a delayed effect of a small amount of water in the lungs. This can cause result in laryngospasms, which minimize the amount of water aspirated into the lungs. Respiratory arrest may follow, leading to an inadequate supply of oxygen in the blood, cardiac arrest, and eventually brain death.

How To Teach Your Baby To Swim from birth to age six by Douglas Doman is a long awaited book on introducing newborns to swimming. A detailed set of instructions, beautifully illustrated with photographs, is separated into 8 chapters, having a chapter dedicated to each age segment. Well written and easy to understand, it has quite a lot of wonderful techniques:

• how to utilize your own bathtub and shower for introducing newborns to holding a breath
• how to walk backwards in a pool creating a current that makes it easier for the little ones to swim continuously

Summertime. Swimming pool. Beach. Kids are splashing, screaming and our mind automatically sets into the usual math routine on when we should start teaching them to swim. And, of course, there is no need to wait - whether the baby is a few weeks old or had quite a bunch of birthdays by now - he is ready to enjoy real swimming!

Huh?! What do you mean no testing?

Exactly that: testing is exactly the opposite of fun. Testing is putting the child on the spot which he didn’t ask for. Testing is a sign of distrust to your child - you don’t TRUST him, that he knows, you need PROOF.

“Babies love to learn but they hate to be tested. In that way they are very like grown-ups. Testing is the opposite of learning. Testing is full of stress… The more you test him, the slower he will learn and the less he will want to.” (Glenn Doman, Janet Doman How to Teach Your Baby To Read, 2002. Page 186).