My DS has done swimming lessons since 6 months without a break apart from the occasional cold and school holidays but he still went through a nervous phase at about 18 months which probably lasted about 4 months. He would cuddle and cling a lot and some activities that he used to do confidently he wouldn't do at all. Other activities he was fine with. Some weeks he was better than others but I kept taking him every week. I was a swimming teacher myself for a while and I knew the worst thing would be to take him out of lessons because it would be harder to get him back into the water when he was older and even more aware of his surroundings. If he wanted to cuddle during the lesson, fine. He was in the water and really the main objective at this age is water familiarisation, not actual swimming.

One swimming teacher we had was quite young and not very tolerant of this behaviour so I changed to an older teacher (a mum!) who was much more understanding and said that some kids just do go through a phase where they become much more aware of their surroundings and understand that they might hurt themselves...and just to persevere. It did drive me mad when people asked if he had only just started swimming lessons - they looked at me so disbelievingly when I said he'd been swimming since he was 6 months!

DS is now coming along in leaps and bounds again in his swimming, so much so that the other parents remark on it. I think I finally hit on the solution...a smaller swimming class. He had been in a class of 8 kids and that meant that the teacher was more rushed, the class was much noisier and also he wouldn't get as many turns because of the number of kids. We changed to an earlier class that only had 3 or 4 kids and the difference in a couple of weeks was remarkable.