[News article] Playtime at the pool may boost youngsters’ bodies and brains

Ok, the emphasis is on “may”. “…[L]earning to swim early in life may give kids a head start in developing balance, body awareness and maybe even language and math skills.”
Am blessed to be able to swim at work during lunch. The campus has a gym, with swim privileges at the hotel pool on campus. Maybe the swim is keeping some math skills intact!

From the 20 May 2015 Science News article

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Loosely based on something our mother told us, it’s that learning to swim early in life may give kids a head start in developing balance, body awareness and maybe even language and math skills.

Mom may have been right. A multi-year study released in 2012 suggests that kids who take swim lessons early in life appear to hit certain developmental milestones well before their nonswimming peers. In the study, Australian researchers surveyed about 7,000 parents about their children’s development and gave 177 kids aged 3 to 5 years standard motor, language, memory and attention tests. Compared with kids who didn’t spend much time in the water, kids who had taken swim lessons seemed to be more advanced at tasks like running and climbing stairs and standing on their tiptoes or on one leg, along with drawing, handling scissors and building towers out of blocks.

Hitting milestones related to motor skills isn’t so surprising, the authors note, since swimming is a very physical activity. A bit more unexpected, they say, are the swimming kids’ advanced skills in language and math — tasks like counting, naming objects and recognizing words and letters. Kids who swam also seemed to be better at following directions. And, in some areas, kids had proportionally better scores on the development tests relative to how long they had been taking lessons.

The authors admit that they can’t conclusively claim that swimming alone is responsible for the developmental advances because the analysis was based on survey data and limited testing with young children. “Simply, we can say that children who participate in swimming achieve a wide range of milestones … and skill, knowledge and dispositions … earlier than the normal population,” the researchers write.

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