Put Yourself in Their Shoes by Barbara Meltz

Author:Barbara Meltz [Meltz, Barbara F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78878-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Most camps don’t allow flotation devices because they give a child and a parent a false sense of security.

The step-by-step process that helps a younger child will also help an older one, but it gets complicated by peer pressure and the fear of embarrassment. Dan, a third-grader, was best friends all year long with Nick. They were practically inseparable. When the warm weather hit, though, Dan no longer wanted to play with Nick. Nick would call and Dan wouldn’t even want to talk on the phone.

“Did you guys fight about something?” Dan’s mom asked.

“Nope.”

“Did he do something you didn’t like? Did he ignore you? Play with someone else?”

“No, Mom, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Out of desperation, the mothers decided to have a family pool party at Nick’s house. Hearing the news, Dan refused to go. That night, Dan’s mother gently initiated a conversation: “I think I figured out why you don’t want to play with Nick. It’s because he has a pool, isn’t it?”

Silence.

“Would you like to try private swimming lessons this year, at the Y? We could go and meet the teachers and see if there was one you liked.” Dan refused.

His mother bowed out of the get-together at Nick’s family’s house, figuring that this wasn’t something she could force and remembering, as well, her own fear of the water as a child. (No, this isn’t hereditary and, besides, Dan’s mother mastered her fear as an adult. But parents can pass on a fear through a hesitant, fearful, or overly protective attitude.)

Two weeks later, Nick invited all the boys in the class to an end-of-school party. The day the invitation arrived, Dan asked his mother, “Do you think we could go to the Y today?” After two lessons, Dan agreed to go to Nick’s pool with just his mom. Once he was comfortable with the setting, he agreed to go another time before the party when just Nick and Nick’s mother would be there. When Dan got in the water and was clearly tentative, Nick said to him, “I’m a lot better swimmer than you but you’re a lot better soccer player than me, so I guess we’re even,” a comment that Dan’s mother says “endeared him to me forever.” By the time of the party, you could barely notice that Dan was less comfortable in the pool than the other boys.

Dan was lucky to have a mother with a lot of patience who was able and willing to orchestrate events in his favor. She also didn’t get into a power struggle with him. Many children Dan’s age dig themselves in deeper simply because we so badly want them to swim. (You can substitute almost any other behavior in this kind of scenario.) Dan’s mother was pleased with the way things went, but there was a poignant P.S. to the story. Weeks into the summer, when Dan and Nick were spending hot afternoons at the pool and were once again inseparable, Dan told her he had known all winter long that he would have to stop being best friends with Nick when summer came.

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