Armbands for swimming?

[EdPops]

My 4.5 year old DS has been doing weekly (term-time) swimming lessons for the last 18 months and whilst he's very confident in the water he still can't keep himself completely afloat for any real length of time.

I also have a 2 year old DS so whenever we're all in the water together (local pool, on holiday etc) I always put arm bands on our eldest DS as a precaution as I'm always holding his younger brother.

I've heard armbands are counter productive to learning to swim though but not sure what else to do? Noodles and floats etc. are great but there's no guarantee he won't let go of them whereas armbands are fixed.

Any thoughts, tips, advice?

Such a tough one and can understand your worries but ultimately safety comes first. The reason that arm bands are counter intuitive to learning to swim is they limit arm movements. However a lot of the memento they need will come from his legs. I would suggest you do lots of encouragement of leg kicking when in his arm bands and then try and carve out some time for some non arm band time where you can.

The long and the short of it though is don't worry, lots of us grew up in the era of arm bands and still managed to learn to swim absolutely fine. Once he is more confident you could try a swimming life vest.

There is probably some more stuff on the market these days but my DS is 10 and so not something I am aware of.