PFDs are a safety device, they’re great. If you think your child might be unsupervised, putting one on is safer than not. But as a teaching aide, they’re terrible.

You can’t swim with a lifejacket. You can only float (and in a position that is different from how you would naturally float in water).

Yeah, I wasn't super clear - PFDs are great if a new swimmer just needs to be in the water. My nephews used them at the beach when they were toddlers. But swim lessons were mom/dad/instructor holding them in the water.

> cannot really get with an float-assist device, is putting their face in the water.

We used kickboards for this exact purpose. So you can float face down with arms outstretched holding the board. You can transition to freestyle swimming taking one hand off the board at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM3z1eDDcGE

So it was practised for teaching swimming here in Poland at schools, but these are always in a very shallow pool and supervised too.

They lack the failure mode of floating face down in water, but instead are unsafe to others who can be hit with them. And kids will collide.

The newer foam ones are much softer and safer.

We used the same in school - mostly for training leg movements. Back then, everyone had basic swimming capabilities. But these kickboards are a totally different story than the blue donuts in the videos.

Weird they'd allow that, in the US you have to be able to swim a lap to graduate from Navy bootcamp, no matter which job you're going into.