Don’t hurt kids because of love

I was born in the south of China, which has a lot of rivers and lakes. There were so many opportunities to learn swimming, but I really didn’t know how to swim at all. However, I haven't been afraid of water since I was a child.

After I went to college, there was a swimming lesson each week. But a drowning accident broke the plan, and then the swimming class was canceled. I still didn’t know how to swim after I graduated.

Last year, my son had a swimming class in school. He was very afraid of the water because he was born in the north of China, and he has never swam in a pool since being a baby. After we received this feedback from the teacher, we decided to swim together during the summer holidays. He finally learned to swim like a frog with the help of the coach and me.

Time’s fly. That’s two months later. One day, we looked at the price list of the swimming store and bought a special ticket with half price, which was going with support swim twenty times for two persons. Behind a short discussion, we built a swimming team named Frog Team, which included a father and his lovely son.

In the summer, there were a lot of children in the swimming pool. But there were fewer people there after October. My son has a cold from the freezing weather. So I went swimming twice by myself. Then I saw something, which made me upset.

One day, I finished the swimming task and went out of the pool. In front of the bathroom door, suddenly a little boy ran out of the bathroom, naked and laughing. I was so surprised that I stood still to find out what had happened. Then I heard a coach shout loudly and run to the front of the boy. He used a long stick to hit the boy’s butt. There was a loud, hitting echo in the swimming room. But the boy didn’t cry but just went hurrying into the bathroom. The coach was nagging that it was the second time that little boy ran into the pool naked, which has made some clients complain about this not-polite behavior.

The boy’s butt has been seriously hurt, absolutely. But he was so afraid or strong that he didn’t cry at all. I went into the bathroom and heard that the boy was shouting at himself, “I hate you.”

I think the coach was not a good enough teacher because he was fully controlled by the angry emotion. He forgot that the real solution could be to try to tell the boy that the behavior was not polite and not funny at all. However, hitting a little kid is always wrong, and he should talk to the boy's parents first.

About two weeks later, my city had already become very cold, and it’s minus 8 degrees outside. But I still wanted to go swimming. There were only a boy and me in the pool. A coach was teaching the boy on the bank of the pool. I had been enjoying my swimming time at first. But my finest emotion was broken by the coach’s loud noises. He always shouted at the boy.

“Keep swimming, just as I told you.”

“What are you doing? Who taught you to swim like that?”

“Don’t stop for rest; we have just swam for a short time.”

The boy kept swimming very hard while the teacher was shouting at him. He was just a little boy who was about ten or eleven years old. I guessed that the boy was really tired, and he shouldn’t keep swimming that way. For the teacher, he didn’t remember the right goal for swimming. In his mind, swimming for a long time always means doing a good job. But we like swimming just because we are interested in it and it will keep us healthy.

We are not machines, and we don’t need to study that way. We should take some rest if we get tired. We shouldn’t use all our energy at once. We would rather go more far than go faster only at the beginning part. Life is a long journey, and we always stop to enjoy the scenery.

I want to tell the parents who want to let their children learn something. You should take care of your children because a lot of coaches or teachers are not real professional guys who are teaching the wrong way. They only wasted your time and hurt your children’s health, both in body and mind, then took your money away.

If you love your children, don’t always just leave them alone with the teacher; stay with them. At least you should talk to the kids and ask what was going on in the lesson. Sometimes, they really need your help and support.