Swimming with Confidence only partners with high-quality brands.

Why We Partnered with Miss Dayna

We teach kids to swim. Miss Dayna teaches families how to think about water safety everywhere else — and she does it in a way kids actually enjoy. Same mission, different doors into it.

Miss Dayna — Dayna Harvey — has been teaching children to swim for 35 years. She created the WATCHING Initiative and the Waiting Whales Water Safety Kit: a complete water safety system for parents of young children, built from decades of on-the-ground work with real families. Her specialty is giving parents real tools and real language they can use starting today — not another scary statistic.

The problem

The Problem She Solves

Most water-safety education talks at parents and bores kids. Miss Dayna's materials put safety habits in kids' hands — coloring pages on the fridge, posters they picked, kits they use — so the lessons stick before anyone gets near the water.

Here's the gap she fills: nearly 70% of drownings of children under 5 happen during non-swim times, and 88% happen while an adult is present. Swim lessons matter — but they only address what happens after a child is already in the water. The WATCHING framework and the Waiting Whales Kit cover everything that happens before: a consistent, visual routine your child practices at the pool, the lake, the beach, the hotel, and the bathtub, until waiting near water becomes a reflex. And the whole system was designed from the start to work for children with autism, who are 160 times more likely to drown than their neurotypical peers — visual tools, clear boundaries, and repeatable routines that actually work for neurodivergent kids.

About Miss Dayna

Dayna built her system for the families the industry keeps missing: parents who did everything "right" and were never told that swim lessons and water safety are not the same thing; grandparents who watch the kids every Tuesday and have never been told what a water watcher actually is; families raising children with autism who need tools that fit their child; and communities where the nearest instructor is an hour away or six months waitlisted. After 35 years in the water with young children, her promise is simple — no fear, no recycled talking points. A real plan, real tools, and real language your family can start using today. Where there is water, your child will WAIT.

Free for Your Family

Free from Miss Dayna: two coloring pages and a water safety poster — join the list and we'll deliver all three by email.

Free Guides

Her two educational guides live in our Free Swim Guides collection — free at checkout, yours forever.

Shop Miss Dayna

The Waiting Whales Water Safety Kit — your child picks their whale (Wes, Wynter, Winnie, Wilson, or Willow) — plus the kit bundled with Swim Lessons in a Box for families going all in.