By Jo-Anne Smetherham
Swimming education follows its own fashion cycles, and these days parents are launching babies into the water from the safety of their own embrace.
"It's a wonderful thing. A lot of dads don't have too much to do with their babies, and teaching them to swim is a bonding thing," said Laura Sevenus of Camps Bay, who has been teaching swimming for 40 years.
"Nobody has an inbuilt fear of water. We're all born with swimming ability, and children have a reflex that makes them hold their breath under water."
Media reports several years ago about throwing children into the water to learn to swim were incorrect, says Sevenus.
"There was a method called drown-proofing, which taught children to float on their backs. To show the child had learnt this, they would be allowed to fall into the water and float."
The public fear that followed the media reports, combined with a change in teaching fashion, led to parents taking to the water with their babies.
These days, teachers typically allow babies to remain in their parents' arms in the water and gradually introduce them to swimming in armbands and underwater, for short stretches, into their parents' arms.
Children only six weeks old have begun swimming at Sevenus's swimming school. At a class on Thursday, parents were lifting their babies into the water as they sang about Humpty Dumpty and his fall.
After bobbing their children in and out of the water, parents put armbands on them and let them chase floating toys across the water, or underwater into their arms.
Sevenus says she knows of professional Capetonians who are too busy to teach their school-age children to swim. Parents could teach their babies themselves using the current fashion of introducing swimming in stages, she said.
"There was a lack of education in the past, when people didn't know about the breath-holding and kicking reflex.
"Now parents are teaching children to swim themselves and saying, 'ah yes, this is natural'."