Adult Learn-to-Swim, the gut wrenching scenario… It’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon, taking a late lunch on the beach with the soft break of the lake on the sand. The perfect silence is broken by a splash and then harrowing screams of a mother. Her child is frantically splashing without control a few yards off the dock end. My soup drops, the crocs are kicked off and my sweatshirt unzipping as I’m running faster than lightning down the deck. I’m in the water, quickly out, the mother and child crying, only later do I learn the mother and child didn’t know how to swim.

The what-ifs roll in my head, what if I hadn’t been on a project that affords me the ability to work-from-home a couple days a week? What if I had eaten lunch out instead of at home today? Most importantly, what if the mother knew how to swim? Would she have had the ability and confidence to save her own child? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but it has never been more critical to stress the importance of parents learning how to swim. I’m not talking competitively, but front crawl uninterrupted for just 100 yards.

With April drawing near as Adult Lean-to-Swim month, I urge all parents not only to get their kids in swim lessons, but to take swim lessons themselves if they do not know how to swim. Imagine being put in a position where you are helpless and cannot save your own child. If you are embarrassed, don’t be, 44% of adults don’t know basic water skills. Suck it up, get lessons, learn to swim, do it for yourself, do it for your children.