I can't swim. I'm teaching my daughter anyway.

By Anand Yadav · @summiva.app · Posted 13 June 2026 · 6 min read

I can't swim. I am in my thirties and I never learned, and I was reminded of it most sharply on a beach in Goa, watching toddlers barely older than mine play in the waves. They were two, three years old, shrieking with joy in the surf, going under and coming up laughing, while I stood where the water reaches your ankles. That gap, between those children in the sea and the grown man on the shore, is where this whole thing started for me.

Why I never learned

I grew up middle class, and swimming was simply never on the table. There was no pool I could get to, no spare money for classes, and my parents never thought to start me on it. I do not blame them for a second. They gave me what they could, and lessons at a pool were a luxury in our house, not a default. But the result is an adult who cannot swim, and who has quietly wished for years that someone had put him in the water back when it was easy.

Because it is not easy now. I am not saying it is impossible, plenty of adults learn, but it would take dedicated hours in the water every month that, honestly, I do not have right now with a young child and a business to run. So I have made my peace with that particular limit. I am not going to learn to swim at this stage of my life, and I have stopped pretending I will get around to it.

What I want for her instead

What I will not make peace with is handing that limit down to my daughter. When I watched those kids in Goa, the feeling was not envy of their skill. It was a picture of a life I want for Aanya: the ocean as somewhere she belongs, not somewhere she stands beside. I am not teaching her to swim so she can win medals or shave seconds off a lap. I am teaching her so that one day the sea is hers. So she can dive under a wave instead of bracing against it. So that when she is older and someone offers her a scuba mask, she says yes without a flicker of the hesitation I carry around. I am trying to give her the thing the water kept from me.

The part I am not naive about

Here is where I have to be honest, because a warm story about a non-swimmer dad can quietly turn into a dangerous one. The research is blunt about it. Parents who cannot swim are less likely to grasp how much supervision a child near water actually needs, and a parent who cannot swim cannot pull their child out of deep water. I cannot. If Aanya went under in water over my head, I would be useless, and pretending otherwise would be the most irresponsible thing I could do as her father.

So I have built the whole thing around that fact instead of around hope. Until she can genuinely swim, one of us, her mother or me, is always holding her, and always watching, with no phone in hand and no looking away. We do not take her to the beach to swim, and we will not until she is older and there is a lifeguard on duty. The deep-water part, the strokes, the real competence, comes from her mother, who swims, and from proper lessons when she is ready for them. My job is the shallow end: the comfort, the play, and the vigilance. I know exactly what I cannot do, and I have made sure it is never the thing standing between my daughter and safety.

What a parent who can't swim can still give

And within those limits, it turns out a non-swimmer father can give a young child almost everything that matters at this age. At 20 months Aanya laughs in a pool. She got there through splashing and a silly bouncing game, not through any technique of mine, with no floaties, just our hands. She is not afraid of the water, and that absence of fear is the foundation everything else will be built on.

You do not need to be a swimmer to give a toddler that. You need to be calm, present, and unwilling to pass your own nerves into the water. I can do all three. The strokes can wait for someone qualified. The love of the water cannot wait, and that part, it turns out, is mine to give. There is more on how we actually do it in how to teach a toddler to swim, and the whole age-by-age picture in swimming for kids.

The thing I have come to believe

So here is what I think now, standing in the shallow end while my wife swims and my daughter watches her like a hawk and tries to copy her. You do not have to be good at something to make sure your child gets it. Some of the most honest parenting is exactly this: giving your kid the thing you never had, being humble enough to bring in help for the parts you cannot do yourself, and refusing to let your own gap quietly become theirs.

I cannot swim. My daughter will. And I will have had more to do with that than the fact that I never learned would suggest. This is the thinking behind everything we are trying to give her the long way, one calm week at a time, including the things I was never handed myself. It is why I built Summiva. If you are a parent who cannot swim either, you can still start. You do not need to be able to swim. You only need to decide that your child will.