The Pioneer of Survival Swimming Lessons

History and Introduction

Founded in 1966 by Dr. Harvey Barnett, Infant Swimming Resource (ISR) is the global leader in the industry it pioneered: survival swimming lessons for infants and young children. Their team of nearly 450 highly trained ISR Instructors provides the safest and most effective survival swimming lessons available. The ISR Self-Rescue instruction our students receive today is the product of more than 50 years of research and achieves unparalleled results.

Their mission, “Not One More Child Drowns,” is the foundation of everything they do and is the driving force behind ISR’s employees, independent ISR Instructors, and major corporate partnerships. The company believes that the successful prevention of the leading cause of accidental death for children under the age of four in the US will require a large group of caring and capable professionals whose sole focus is to save lives. To date, ISR has delivered more than 8 million ISR Self-Rescue lessons and saved more than 800 lives.

The ISR Approach

ISR believes that pool fences, supervision, and pool alarms are important parts of a necessary multilayered approach to drowning prevention. However, traditional lines of defense break down and the more than 4,000 drowning deaths per year bear a grim testament to the fact that traditional approaches are missing a key component: the child.
The organization’s core conviction is that the child is the most important part of a drowning prevention strategy and their more than 300,000 ISR graduates and 800 documented survival stories are proof that children can save themselves. Children are curious, capable, and have an uncanny ability to overcome obstacles like pool fences. At ISR, they take that ability and teach them skills to potentially save themselves if they find themselves in the water alone.

What Your Child Will Learn in Lessons

ISR Self-Rescue Skills

  • Infant Swimming Resource's proprietary Self-Rescue survival swimming program is 6-8 weeks course, scheduled 5 days a week for 10 minutes a day.
  • With a focus on safe, customized, one-on-one lessons by a certified Instructor, ISR's survival swimming lessons emphasize health, ongoing program evaluations and parent education to deliver the most effective and safest result in the industry.
  • Children may begin lessons at 6 months of age until 6 years of age.
  • Lessons for 6-12 month old focus on teaching the child to roll onto their back to float, rest and breathe, and to be able to maintain this lifestyle saving position until help arrives.
  • Lessons for children 1-6 years old focus on teaching the swim-float-swim survival sequence. Children learn to swim with their head down; roll onto back over to resume swimming until they reach the side of the pool, where they can either crawl out or until they can be rescued.
  • Once the children are fully skilled they will practice ISR's survival techniques fully clothed during lessons. It is recommended that children complete refresher lessons to help their in water skill level grow with their physical development.

Refresher Lessons
These are extremely important in continuing and maintaining your child’s Self-Rescue skill development. Children grow and develop rapidly from infants to young children. This development process represents improved strength, coordination, and a more finely tuned cognitive ability.


In accordance with this growth, children enrolled in ISR lessons return periodically to participate in refresher lessons. These are designed to fine-tune your child’s existing Self-Rescue skills to meet the demands of their growing bodies. It will allow them to adjust in their float and strengthen their swim. ISR recommends refresher lessons every 6 months to a year.


Refresher lessons for previous swim-float-swim students will take approximately 2 weeks to complete. For past rollback-to-float students, refresher lessons to learn the swim-float-swim sequence will likely take approximately 3 to 4 weeks.

Maintenance
This can be done weekly or monthly and left to the parents’ discretion. Maintenance lessons are necessary if you child has had an unexpected fall into the water, will not float or perform the rollback to float, or is showing any sort of hesitation or lack of confidence in performing the skills they recently mastered in ISR lessons.

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