: Child afraid from diving head into water My child has a phobia when diving his head down the water. Is there any entertainment exercise we can do or any other suggestions?

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My child was scared of water and I tried hard to get rid of his fear. I realised overdoing things to help him actually works opposite. So, no luck.

Then my friend suggested to show my kid cartoons and animated videos and also videos from youtube that shows how babies and toddlers swim and play in the pool. My wife volunteered on this (I was in the bad books lol... ). He tried and we clapped! and Hurrah! And finally, now, he is swimming like fish!

Hope this helps!

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Just take him to the swimming pool as a family activity. Don't make a big deal of it, don't even mention that you want him to go under the water. Just play in the water, occasionally "accidentally" splashing him.

There are water toys (toy buckets, toy watering cans etc) that can be used to pour larger quantities of water.

Let him pour water over you, and occasionally retaliate in kind. Get him used to having water poured over his head until he treats it as an occupational hazard of playing in the water. As he grows more confident, you can push his tolerances a little more.

It's how we got our youngest acclimated to the water.

In the end (and this may not be appropriate for your son), I picked up and threw our son, then whisked him out of the water right away. He was under the water for less than a second but I used that as a building block. "See? It's not that bad."

Patience, perseverance (and a lot of him soaking me) finally got him to the point where he was confident. He's now swimming lengths regularly and loves playing in the water.

To be honest, "patience and perseverance" solves a lot of child-rearing issues. :)

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One of my favorite diving games growing up was "penny fetch". My folks would toss coins into the pool and we were supposed to go down to fetch them. Sometimes they would toss the higher denominations (dimes, quarters) into the deep end. Since we sometimes got to keep the money we had incentive to learn to swim underwater.

Obviously harder to do in a public pool but usually other kids didn't try to "poach", or if they did they would bring the pennies to the edge of the pool so they could be thrown back in.