Teaching children to swim is a valuable life-lesson, but the experience in a swimming pool is just a start to make them safer and better able to cope with life around lakes, rivers and oceans. Researchers in Norwegian University of Science and Technology applaud learning basic swimming skills, but they note there is a big difference in a warm swimming pool and unpredictable and cold waters encountered in a real-life environment. That’s not just theory. When researchers tested a group of children, noticeably fewer of them were categorized as proficient swimmers in a lake compared to what they were able to do in a pool. The study calls for children to be better trained to handle the complex challenges they may face in outdoor water environments.