Swim Study Touts Added Benefits of Infant Swim Programs

New swim study supports findings that swimming boosts children’s cognitive development.

Here’s a story that doesn’t surprise us in the least and I don’t think it surprises many parents of Texas Swim Academy students either. Many scientists have finally been able to prove once and for all that infant swim classes makes children smarter, and these folks have the research data to prove it. Early swimmers developed cognitive skills faster in several important areas:

• Visual-motor skills – swim kids were better at drawing lines and shapes, cutting paper, etc.
• Speaking and skill with numbers and letters
• Generalized cognitive skills, including problem solving and memorization

These are exactly the kind of cognitive skills that young children take with them on their next step into pre-school and school, and that give them a comfortable leg-up in learning and socializing.

This study comes from the Griffith University Institute for Educational Research, who got together a group of about 200 kids age 3-5 in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand and studied them for three years. First they interviewed the children with their parents present, to set a baseline to compare the swim kids with the non-swim kids, then they tested the children directly to remove any potential parental bias and create a precise set of data to compare development and capabilities between the two groups of kids.

The results were crosschecked against the kids’ gender and socio-economic status: the boost in development holds steady no matter how you slice it. The Griffith Institute Early Years Swimming study bills itself as, “the world’s most comprehensive study on kids and swimming.” Keep them coming!

It’s good to finally have scientific proof of something we have witnessed firsthand: swim classes for infants and toddlers can have an enormously beneficial effect, both in physical development and learning. At Texas Swim Academy, we love working with your kids and we are proud to help give them the boost they need to reach their full potential, in the water and out.