Without the rings non-swimmers couldn't get into trouble but swimmers have less fun. You could also pave over the pool with concrete and remove the hazard entirely - no fun for swimmers but all risks of drowning removed.
Parents are a huge part of the issue. PFDs give them a false sense of security where they feel like they don't have to watch their kid. The best change my old pool ever made was banning them (besides USCG approved life vests). The rafts were almost never an issue unless parents stuck their kid in the middle and stopped supervising (which happened a lot and we'd yell at the about). Crappy parental supervision is the cause of most problems at pools.
Swimming is one of the few activities that children engage in which can go so wrong as to end up in their death. I would suggest that it is borderline negligence for a parent to put a child in such a dangerous situation without proper precautions (supervision). I wouldn't let a small child I am responsible for go into a pool alone regardless of the presence of lifeguards. Especially not a wave pool.
You would. Let me give you the scenario: you're home alone with the three kids, you've been chasing them around, doing laundry, cleaning up spilled grape juice, telling Jenny to stop cutting Tommy's hair, etc. Finally, you think everyone is down for a nap. You turn on the game. 5 minutes later, 5 minutes, you think "It's too quiet...". You get up and walk around for a couple minutes to find 4 year-old Sally's door open. No Sally. Where's Sally? Sprint around the house, run down to the kitchen, look in the back yard, and she's face down in the pool. You immediately get her out, desperate. You realize you have to separate from her to call 911. She's been unaccounted for by now for 12 minutes.
The paramedics get a breath back, but anoxic brain injury has set in. She dies, tubes in every orifice, 3 days later.
I have seen this play out more than once. My parents had a pool. I was a lifeguard, have made rescues. I was also on swim team, I'm in the Navy now, and I'm a physician. I surf, I dive, I do open ocean swimming and triathlons. I've helped rescue a diver in pulmonary edema. I think I wouldn't leave my kid unattended, but I know I might.
I've met the parents. They wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone either.
I have a fence.
A friend's son was visiting, also four years old, vanished for just a second and suddenly I thought Oh god, the pool. Sure enough there he was stuck outside the fence trying to get to the pool but frustrated that the latching mechanism can only be operated by someone at least 5 feet tall.
I wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone. Pool safety is life and death. Get a fence.
I don't know why my comment above was downvoted, but we did consider buying a house with a pool when our kids were young, and we decided that the risk was ETOOHIGH, especially given that we have a wonderful community pool in the neighborhood.
Pools are expensive to operate and dangerous to have children around -- your own as well as your guests'.
Of course luxury homes with their own pool in the backyard put rather a big strain on safety around your own home. Put a good fence around it, I guess.
...and safety is relative to this child's capability. My parents put me through extensive swimming lessons from a young age precisely so they could let me play unsupervised in the ocean. I'd been a half mile out to sea alone by the time I was 10. Turns out I wasn't as unsupervised as I thought; my mum was freaking out but, unable to swim, couldn't do anything about it!
But if the child can't swim, no alone pool time for them.
Sea, though, can be tricky. Half a mile out to sea, currents can be very different. I know that I as a kid once floated on a tiny inflatable boat quite a bit out to sea, and my dad swam after me to drag me back. I thought I could get back on my own, but my dad clearly wasn't entirely convinced.
Climbing trees (fall risk)
Climbing tall playground equipment (I broke my arm falling from a height of just 3 feet once, on one of those). Broken neck, etc.
Playing in the street (cars)
Bicycling (can get hit by a car, sigh)
Trampoline (don't get me started)
Exploring (falling down deep wells, etc.)
The Gashlycrumb Tinies is not just a morbid story about impossible deaths. Living is dangerous, living young possibly especially so!
In the large majority of motor vehicle incidents the child is an occupant of the vehicle : https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Suicide means "the deceased ended their life, and had the intent to do so". The US says that people under the age of 9 cannot make a reasoned decision about killing themselves, and thus cannot have the intent to die.
So there will be some people under 9 who killed themselves. It will be a very small number. But their death will be counted as something other than suicide.
10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group HighlightingUnintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2011
2007 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/unintentional_2007_bw...
2008 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...
2009 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...
2010 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10lcid_unintentional_...
2011 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...
All Data - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html
Unintentional Poisoning seems really common for adults?! Misuse of prescription drugs apparently.
5-9: Unintentional Drowning 128
Unintentional Fire/Burn 81
I would not call that "far outweighs".
- various kitchentools, knives, fork
- other tools, axe, hammer
- (poison) cleaning stuff
- climbing on the tish and falling on their neck
- ...
Yes, life is dangerous, yet sadly most parents today take the approach of avoiding all dangers at all cost.
And of course you should not leave dangerous things around and make it as safe as possible, but how can one learn, how to deal with dangers, when all the slightest dangers are removed? That will only hurt later on.
One have to play with fire, to learn how to deal with it. If parents forbid it completely, kids will just burn stuff on their own. I did ... and luckily I never burned anything down. But friends of mine ... allmost burned down a village.
I had a pyromaniac phase. Once set a field on fire. Things could have gone extremely worse.
Note: the above is sarcasm. "Sweating" or "weeping" dynamite is dangerous and you should immediately leave the area and contact your local equivalent of 'the bomb squad' to report it.
Injuries occur occasionally, and even less frequently are those injuries fatal.
A friend of mine supermaned head-first into a tree while snowboarding last year. The tree was probably a foot in diameter, and he was going fast enough to shake snow off the whole tree. What happened? Nothing. We all laughed about it and kept snowboarding.
We are pretty resilient creatures when it comes to impact damage.
Drowning though, completely different. Much like filling a car's oil intake with dirt and then having the engine immediately seize. If you start breathing in water, you're do some serious damage to your lungs and cutting off oxygen to your brain, and further inhibiting basic survival functionality, and quickly resulting in death, if not remedied immediately.
There are unfortunately many many ways for kids to die.
Just because multiple things are possible doesn't mean they are equally probable.
An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.
Those are widely considered NOT safe, a non-swimmer child is probably much safer without them than with them, as using them lulls the caregiver into a false sense of security and they pay much less attention to them. They also teach children the wrong posture for swimming/floating, which can be difficult to unlearn. In the US the common wisdom says that if you use them you must be in arms reach of the child at all times - but that's what you'd do without them anyway, so what's the point?
The idea that you'd leave a non-swimmer child unattended with them is, frankly, horrifying.
Try to imagine if you were less buoyant like if you had ankle weights on and someone tied two empty milk jugs to your hands. Your hands are suddenly not useful at all for swimming and you can't pull them underwater so now you're forced to hold yourself up by pushing your arms out.
Here's how it can look, and this makes it a bit clearer why it can be a hazard. https://i0.wp.com/renomomsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/0... If it slips down to the wrists like this it's arguably worse than having nothing at all.
Is it possible you are thinking of something like Puddle Jumpers (look up an image online), which look like water wings but strap behind the child's back, and don't actually inflate? Those are, indeed, considered safe.
In general, I want people to have full market freedoms, but I put those water wings pretty near lawn darts in terms of danger.
They are just often misused - you are supposed to be supervising them when they are in the pool period and they only need deep enough water to keep their feet off the ground.
Flotation devices have no part to play in teaching how to swim. Parents (or teachers) holding their children and teaching them how to float is step 1. Only after the child can handle themselves in water (float, know when to breathe) should they be playing with flotation devices.
Previous attempts to teach me to swim used flotation devices. Without them, I was terrified of drowning.
A very smart swimming teacher, seeing my fear, taught me to float on my back, first with her assistance, then without it. Once I could float, she taught me to swim backwards, froggy style. I was afraid even about that, but she said "If you ever find yourself unable to swim, just float!" and I felt confident to do that.
From there, I was comfortable swimming on my front, because once again, I knew how to go on my back and float!
Then the rest was simple skill acquisition.
30 years later, I wish I knew the name of that swim instructor!
And one skill that swimmers need, but cannot really get with an float-assist device, is putting their face in the water. I watched an adult friend learn to swim, and this was REALLY hard for him. Crazy enough - he was ex-Royal Navy submariner, so he had passed basic water survival - he could float on his back, just couldn't do anything beyond that.
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).
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.
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.
As an anecdote, they almost killed a friend's daughter a few years ago.
She had jumped and fallen forward, and her arm floaties moved her buoyancy to her stomach-area, forcing her face into the water. Scary stuff.
She was even in a swimming pool she could stand in.
Also, when I was a lifeguard, one of the things that was sometimes hard to get to parents' heads is that "supervising" a non-swimmer does not mean sitting on the side of the pool reading a book--it's being in the water no more than an arm's length of the nonswimmer. Every second is critical in a drowning incident, so having a parent less than a meter away will almost always do a better job rescuing a kid than a lifeguard in preventing an accident
The reason for worn (handheld is a different story) flotation devices other than lifevests is to sell flotation devices; I've never found anyone who teaches swimming to children (or adults, but that's not the market for them anyway) that uses them, advises using them, or considers them anything other than a safety hazard.
If you want to get a kid used to “preswimming”, which as I've seen it is actually something mostly done with infants and toddlers (older nonswimmers usually seem to go straight from wall exercises to supervised short swimming with knowledgeable teachers) it's best to do it with an adult holding them, except for extremely brief transitions.
When I went to Cornell, learning to swim was a mandatory requirement. If you didn't pass the "swim 2 laps" swim test they gave you right off the bat, your first assigned P.E. class would be a swim class. (Apparently, one of the large Cornell donors stipulated this as part of his donation. Possibly, someone in their immediate family had died due to lack of being able to swim.)
You say you don't look good in a bathing suit? Swimming will teach you not to care. Hell, if you're heavy, staying close to the water surface is actually easier. And you can get great exercise WITHOUT putting the stress on your joints that pretty much every other exercise will do to you if you're heavy. (Note: I'm a bit overweight, so I get it. I get it.)
Did I mention it's fun? If you're an adult, you will feel like a kid again.
You say you don't live near a coast? Well, when you go on vacation and are near a beach, you can actually go into the water fearlessly! And surely, there's a pool of some sort nearby.
Don't be afraid. Don't care what others think. Please consider it.
I also scuba dive, and flippers are a necessity in that circumstance. There is a MASSIVE difference in propulsion with flippers. Since you can encounter currents in open water scuba diving, they're a lifesaver. (Scuba is super cool too, btw. But that's like... super advanced swimming. Baby steps.)
Also, arm strength. I actually think most of my propulsion when swimming comes from my arms, not my legs (I'm not saying this is the most efficient... it's just what I do... I never said I was a PERFECT swimmer, lol). Hold your fingers together in like a shallow "cup" shape, push front to back, then either lift them out of the water back to the front OR do what I do when I breast stroke and just point your fingers forward and push them through the water back in front of you in as "waterdynamic" a shape as you can figure out. And then reform the cup with your fingers/hands and push yourself through the water again.
I've met more than one scuba diver who were weak swimmers but avid divers. To your previous point, flippers turn a weak swimmer into > an olympian.
Found the programmer :)
I did some googling and found these fins designed specifically for pool lap swimming: https://myswimpro.com/blog/2018/03/01/8-benefits-of-swimming...
They're smaller than your traditional "scuba" style fins but probably still WAY more effective than your feet alone.
They look fun! Wow, now I want to swim again. So fun. lol
Experiment! Google! Have fun! Ignore haters! Let go of your negative experiences!
Like most other sports there is a body type that is advantaged in swimming.
- Tall overall height (max speed is limited by length at water line just like boats)
- Lower than usual ratio for torso length to leg length
- Large feet
- Long arms (positive ape index)
- Large hands
Michael Phelps is a perfect example of this.
It's a shame that swimming/water survival aren't a part of school in the US. Knowing how to tread water and doggy paddle are valuable, life-saving skills.
Most (all?) of us could already "swim" basically, since there were lakes and rivers near the small towns and kids usually got free swimming lessons around age 5. The bigger lessons were about the various (then) standard strokes, pool safety and basic lifesaving, how not to accidentally kill yourself on a diving board, swimming laps instead of just swimming around, etc.
I absolutely hated it (too many strangers, why didn't we have our own pool, my endurance was crappy, I was afraid of the deep) -- but I'm glad they made us do it instead of letting us wimp out.
Most pools here allow for non/bad swimmers to go where they want, with what they...under the absolute condition to have a good swimmer with them, all the time.
A small kid straying alone in the pool is already an alert and the pool staff will get the kid out of the water on the spot, with no reentry. Here the kids are big enough that they could be swimming by themselves, so for me the blame is on the parents for not being there, even if it was for just a minute.
Most Wave pools are at resorts/water parks which typically do not necessarily even employ fully trained/high skill lifeguards.
They often rely on private certification programs that will train "shallow water lifeguards" who do not have to have a full set of swimming & rescue skills. They do tend to have good training for spinal injuries though.
Add in that these resorts are most attractive to non-swimmers and they are hopelessly crowded and it is a dangerous mix.
Places like Great Wolf Lodge scare the daylights out of me as a former lifeguard/WSI.