Modeling behavior

Last week at swimming lessons I was working deliberately on getting Elisabeth to use her arms for the strokes. She can swim around very competently with a little backpack on using her legs to keep her afloat and move around, but she doesn't yet use her arms for locomotion at all.

So this week I had her hang on the rail on the wall and told her to watch me while I swam a few strokes of the front crawl down the pool and back. When we started practicing together after that, I could see her deliberately trying to do forward arm strokes for the first time, and it occurred to me that while for several weeks the teacher has been telling the children how to do the arm strokes, Elisabeth had likely never seen anyone swimming properly. All she had seen was her other little friends doing the doggie paddle. It was a reminder to me that kids need modeling. They need to see what the real thing looks like, and not just hear about it - even if the daddy strokes are much bigger and faster than she will do.