Childrens' swim meets can be tedious. In fact, tedium is one of the main things new swim parents talk about at their first meets. Until they grow tired of it.

At a typical swim meet there might be 200 kids and more than a dozen events, including various lengths of freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly. These events are then divided by gender and age group and subdivided into heats with six swimmers each because usually there are only six lanes.

Do the math. The combinations are endless. Like the meets.

I'm talking five hours on Saturday, five hours on Sunday and a few hours more if your kid qualifies for finals. God help you if you've got two or more kids of different ages and one is scheduled for mornings and another for afternoons. Whole weekends can disappear.

Then there's the heat. Most meets are held inside at high school pools. They are unavoidably humid and unbearably hot -- to keep the swimmers from freezing as they go in and out of the water, I guess. Or to save on air conditioning.

So what happens is that you chat with other parents for a while, then watch the kids swim, then try to read, then wander off to get a bagel, then do all of these things over again. And again.

Reading is a particular challenge in the crowded, noisy muggy bleachers as you try to concentrate against the heat and cacophony. Once you find yourself working through the same paragraph three times, it's time to quit.

The perfect T-shirt for a swimming parent is one my wife spotted once: "If I had just one day to live, I'd spend it at a swim meet because they last forever."

One of the good things about swim meets, though, is that when your kids see you sitting there for hours on end, they know you really love them.

I was never much of a swimmer. I had lessons at the Y and swam at a couple of summer camps and on vacations. I could never do freestyle well because it always felt like I was going to sink so I would flail at full speed and wear myself out. I could breaststroke well enough to stay afloat.

I was into baseball, basketball, a bit of football, golf and tennis. I never even hung out with swimmers, and had no idea what the swimming world was about.

I started finding out a couple of years ago when our oldest son, now nearly 12, joined our local swim club. Our younger boy, now 8, signed up last year.

Now I love that they're swimming, and I've even come to enjoy up to 60 percent of the meets. That's because I've seen swimming take hold of my boys, and I like what it's done to them.

Like many sports, swimming keeps kids fit. At these early ages, my boys swim at least three times a week for an hour or more at a stretch. And the coaches drill them hard, making them do things like hold one arm in the air while they kick up and down the pool on their backs.

Unlike a lot of sports that demand this kind of athleticism, though, the chances of injury are nil. I suppose you could bonk your head at the end of the pool.

Swimming is also cheap. Swim trunks, goggles, flippers, a kick board -- the kind of stuff you'd probably get anyway to splash in the neighborhood pool or a lake on vacation. There are club and meet fees, but that's true of most organized sports.

By the time competitive swimmers reach high school, they practice for an hour-plus before school and a couple of hours after school several times a week. This turns them into prime physical specimens and tires them out enough so they are less likely to get in trouble. (Needless to say, this doesn't work with every kid.)

Swimming also means never having to yell at the coach for not playing your kid enough, which happens all too often in sports such as baseball, basketball or football. The reason is simple: swimming is precise. The times you achieve are the times you achieve. If my kid is two seconds slower in the 50 breast than your kid, your kid is going to get the breaststroke slot on the medley relay team. What am I going to say?

Swimming is both an individual and a team sport. The kids swim as individuals, except when they are doing relays, but they shout and scream encouragement to each other. They goof around at practices but really have time to bond at the meets because they, too, spend most of their time just hanging around between heats. They play cards or throw balls or talk or draw pictures on each other.

And here's my favorite part: This bonding takes place between boys and girls, among kids from schools throughout the area, among kids who run from age 6 to 18. The older kids actually pay attention to the younger kids; they mentor them and throw Frisbees with them. But the most important thing is that swim teams are made up of both boys and girls and supervised by both male and female coaches.

My boys see girls as teammates, as fellow athletes, as friends, an attitude reinforced by the coaches. This bi-gender sports culture stands in contrast to a lot of male-only teams that I've played on myself or seen close-up. Teams on which the coaches instill a macho culture, or where the testosterone simply runs unchecked, encourage boys to view girl sports as inferior, to regard girlish boys as unacceptable and to consider girls by high-school age as potential sexual conquests. There are many exceptions, of course, among both boys and teams.

One other thing about swimming. As the coaches like to point out, after practices or meets, your kid comes home clean.