Real baby swimming

Water adapted newborns  were noticed already in the 18^th century as mentioned by Odent and Johnson²⁶:

When Captain Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, he later wrote of seeing neotenics, floating on their backs, in the warm streams and lagoons.

In the 1930s Myrtle McGraw ^{6 21 22} did show that babies could in being startled learn how to stay afloat by adapting the involved movements. The data did suggest how cortical control emerges gradually, affording infants increased awareness of and control over actions. Eyewitnesses nowadays still report young indigenous children swimming and diving in the Amazonas, on Andaman and Nicobar islands and in boat-dwelling, fishing and foraging sea nomad communities found in territories of five Southeast Asian states, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. These groups have several features in common. In New Scientist Helen Phillips²⁹ stated remarks by Erica Schagatay about observations on physiological properties of Indonesian Sea Dwellers:

Orang Suku Laut sea people spend up to 10 hours every day in the water, they give birth in the water, the children dive before they walk and the people harvest all their food from the sea.

Suku Laut project Neba

http://www.neba.nl/

 One outcome was an original approach in BirthLight baby swimming inspired by Amazonian forest people.  Founder Françoise Freedman¹⁰ was in the nineteen seventies doing fieldwork on the upper Amazon and noticed how much fun they had everyday with babies and children playing in rivers. Babies were trained to hold on to parents and swim towards them, always picked up before they got distressed. BirthLight Baby swimming is a model accepted in all industrialised societies and swimming and diving babies are now called water babies.  
Reported sightings of natural water births in sea people societies are becoming exceptional nowadays because their ways of life are diminishing.

 

 
Fig. 1 Water babies ©Urchin Rock 2004 ³⁴

 

Waterbirth of human babies was in the 1970s propagated and accepted in Western societies. Experience became available with work of Michel Odent.²⁷
These water births appeared remarkably safe and peaceful.

 

 

            Fig. 2 Mother and newborn a water birth CC Schuring ³¹