Waterboarding for Babies

I belong to a gym or rather a club. It's a tennis and racquetball club with several pools, yoga studio, Pilates studio, and of course a gym.  I don't belong to the tennis and racquetball part of the club since I don't play tennis. In the summer or when the weather is warm I like to swim laps in the Olympic sized pool. The short way, not the long way. There is also a highly regarded children's swim school there. They learn in a very warm salt water pool. The water isn't salty it's just not treated with chlorine.  Frankly, I don't know how the system works and I don't care. The point is, this is one of the shallow pools in which infants, toddlers, and children take swim lessons.  There is another pool just outside the Pilates studio that is used for the same thing.

In actuality these pools are torture chambers for many infants.  The CIA and their waterboarding technicians have nothing on the instructors and parents of these babies. I know the cry of a scared infant when I hear one and let me say that many of these infants are terrified to be floating on their backs with the sun beating down on their eyes.  It's a terrible thing to witness. For at least 30 minutes these infants (6 months or less) scream. How can this be a good thing?  Babies cannot be considered water safe and parents are fooling themselves if they think a 9 month old that falls into a pool can simply turn over and float until someone notices.

When I swim I wear goggles and a swim cap and still water gets in my ears and it's so uncomfortable I can't wait to get out and put some drops in my ears to dry up the water.  It's hard to imagine how miserable these babies feel with water in their ears in addition to the sun and the fear of being suspended in the water with a stranger.  How can parents  bear to listen their babies shriek and cry in pain and terror.  I can't stand it and they're not my kids.  I have to leave the pool area to avoid smacking some parent  upside the head. In the Pilates studio we have to close the windows when a baby is having a "lesson" because it's too painful to listen to the crying. I don't know what these poor babies are learning in their "lessons" but it's not swimming.

When my kids were still in diapers I took them to Mommy and Me swim classes at the YMCA.  At the beginning it was just getting them used to the water and I was in the water with them.  I didn't pass the responsibility off to some stranger. Later, when they were ready to really learn how to swim I put them in classes with instructors. By that time they weren't afraid of the water.  Of course they hadn't been subjected to water torture as infants which really helped.