Swimming Lessons Will Not Protect Your Toddler From Drowning
You don’t want your baby to drown. I don’t want your baby to drown either. Swimming lessons are great and can help them feel more comfortable in the water, but please don’t rely on them to keep you calm in the pool.
Melinda Wenner-Moyer writes in Slate that having a baby who can swim actually makes us less likely to watch him like a hawk. Drowning is the most common way children die from injury, and swimming lessons cannot completely prevent it .
Even a child who knows how to swim can suddenly forget about everything, adults can too when they are in a panic. Whether you are wearing clothes or are in cold water, everything seems different, and you need to have the fortitude to calm down and swim to shore. Can children do this? Some of them, sometimes. But that cannot be counted on.
We also tend to overlook the signs of drowning when we look directly at them. Wenner-Moyer says she twice saw her own child nearly drown. I know parents who have had similar experiences, even with children who are good swimmers. Shit happens.
So what should anxious parents do? First, find out what drowning looks like . Supervise your children at all times, even if you are sure they get along well with water. Small ones should be at arm’s length. And if you have a backyard pool, keep the back door locked and the fence locked and install a motion-sensing alarm . This is not overkill; it’s just good security practice.
Then you might want to consider swimming lessons. Swimming lessons for children are great! My 7-year-old can swim a few laps of freestyle as if it were nothing, thanks to the lessons we started when he was young. Just be realistic about what your child gets from the lessons: fun and rewarding skills, not a magical force field that protects him from drowning.