I haven't heard anyone mention this rule, which I think is useful:
Cars, dogs, and water.
These are the big three common things that children interact with regularly that can, and will, cause irreparable harm or death with functionally no warning and virtually instantaneously. Kids also don't have the experience or the intuition to figure out if a situation is dangerous; cars move too fast, dogs are too hard to read, and water danger is hard to grasp even for adults (the number of people, including grown adults, I've seen panic and had to get pulled out after gleefully jumping into water where it turns out they can't reliably touch the bottom is fairly high).
The first two require some strictness (i.e. being very clear about rules like never going near a road without an adult, and never hitting a dog or pulling it's ears), but water basically requires regular swimming lessons from qualified instructors. It's something I wish happened earlier, and that more families had easy access to.
I surf a lot, and I've lost count of the amount of times I've had to save people from a riptide. They're always completely exhausted, barely keeping head above water, and minutes from getting pulled out to sea with no energy left to swim around the rip and back to shore. I pulled out a couple on deaths door on their honeymoon just a couple weeks ago - that could have crippled their families. It's frustrating the lack of awareness people have around the sea. Unless you know the shore you're swimming on intimately, or the sea is flat with no swell, there's no guarantee you'll be able to fight the sea if you're further out than up to your waist in water.
Around here flat sea is the killer as it usually is a sign of strong undercurrents. To the uninitiated it simply looks more calm. It can pull you down for real.
If you just float to open sea (typical tourist in a dingy or paddle board) you might need to get a "fun" helicopter ride from the friendly sea rescue services. Most people tend not to know that if the emergency is due to gross stupidity they will be billed afterwards (they are kind - so that is rare). Their rates are however significantly higher than regular tour operators.
So I do agree the lack of awareness is frustrating. If the locals stop swimming you should too.
But... Send me down under to Australia.and I would probably die in 5 minutes. Everything seems to be dangerous and/or poisonous there.
We are all to some degree "tourists" at some point in time with all that entails.
Dogs are the 3rd deadliest animal to humans (discounting humans themselves), but since they are popular pets and more like another family member in some Western countries, they get a big pass imho (or rather, their owners) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_deadliest_to_h...
Depends where you live and the age of the child. In the first year, asphyxiation/choking and infectious diseases are more dangerous than the three on that list.
From 1 to 10, falls are by the far the biggest risk.
If you live in the US, firearms trump all of the above, but only in the US.
I think OP was saying those three things were surprisingly dangerous. Kids have a natural fear of heights and falling, while the three on the list not so much.
Babies will happily crawl off of the edge of whatever they're on. I'm not sure if it's because they aren't afraid, or if it's because they're so used to being carried that they don't grasp the concept of gravity, or both.
My toddler recently went out on our roof to retrieve a football. I expected her to be a bit nervous, but she walked right up to the edge, no fear apparent at all. I had to desperately shove my instinct to yell for her down so I didn't scare her and distract her.
He never said he hates dogs. He said they’re one of the things a child interacts with that can cause serious harm. Especially if the child hits the dog or pulls their ears (I assume trying to play).
"All dogs are completely safe, and only attack when provoked" this is relentlessly vague, and not in line what most animal cognition specialists or vets will tell you.
I was struck by the comment that teaching kids young kids how to swim is uncommon in the US.
I got my kids into swimming lessons on their first spring (was advised to avoid it during the winter).
And it's part of primary education in my municipality, with the express purpose of reducing drownings: it's not sport, the curriculum is 100% geared towards familiarity and safety.
Everyone's holidays are at a beach, so water safety is a constant concern, and looking at Our World in Data, Portugal had far worse numbers for drownings than the US in the 80s, but are much better now.
I think it very much depends on where they live. But part of the reason more people don't know how to swim is probably because many urbanites don't have good access to pools. Many public pools in urban areas were shut down in response to civil rights when black people were no longer allowed to be blocked from using them and racists would rather nobody has a pool than allow black people to swim with white people. And then in later generations, if a parent doesn't know how to swim, they aren't likely to take their own kids to go swimming.
A lot more rural people know how to swim because of all the natural bodies of water around, but our population overall has been consistently skewing urban for a number of generations now.
I personally don't think it's uncommon. All of my kids and all of the kids of my peers were taught to swim from a very young age. I remember bringing my kids into the pool before they could walk. The US is a big place and I'm certain there are areas where it is less common.
The US is a vast, varied geographic landscape. On the coastlines, obviously learning to swim is going to be more common than in the Arizona desert. Most of the US isn’t near some enormous body of water, even if small lakes and streams are nearby. It just isn’t reasonable to teach when most people might go their whole lives not needing to swim.
You might not know, but many, many houses in AZ do have dug pools in their back yards. Fly over in an airplane sometime. More water access than I had growing up in the PNW when it wasn’t raining.
Arizona was a stand in for "any place that doesn't have direct access to a large body of water." Even if Arizona has large retirement communities rich enough to have pools in most homes, my point stands.
Man, this is just not an accurate stand-in, though, _because_, well, Arizona has literally over 500,000 residential pools. It's actually one of (if not) _the_ highest pool-per-capita rates.
And because of that, drowning is the leading cause of death for children 1 to 4 years old in Arizona.
As a result, parents here are fairly fastidious about early childhood swim lessons. It's a _big_ deal for us. We've had both of our kids in lessons as early as a year, but a lot of folks start at 6-9 months.
If anything, the distributed nature of the many many many many _small_ bodies of water makes the drowning problem more pervasive and dangerous. An ocean is... well, an ocean: its availability for extremely small children is limited by geography, and many areas where you might take small children are policed by professional lifeguards. Backyard swimming pools, on the other hand, can be a lurking danger literally over your neighbor's wall. My parents had a neighbor one house over who had a 4 year old drown in their pool... from one house further over. He had stacked chairs against the cinderblock wall and climbed over while his grandfather was watching him but dozed off. Even if you don't have a pool in your own backyard, it's a risk here in Arizona.
What’s large? I’m not sure the creeks and swimming holes I frequented in my youth would qualify.
Also, the post isn’t about swimmable water—it’s a cautionary tale about how little it takes to drown. I can confirm that as one winter my neighbor drown in a shallow mud puddle off his back porch. He had a non-fatal heart attack and fell into it unconscious.
There is also a tight correlation between swimming skills and economic class. Reasonable access to a pool or natural water body is not a given, as you point out. Even if you're reasonably close to one of those, sufficient regular time to teach your kid to swim is a luxury. That leaves swimming lessons, which cost money. Access is the main problem, particularly in urban areas.
Not really access, but interest. The YMCA offers swimming lessons easily within reach of poor families that want them. A subset of the population just thinks it’s useless.
I disagree, YMCA lessons are not accessible. First off, you don't know what level your child is, and I remember being stressed trying to read our Ys website to understand what the levels meant. This is important because 2, the classes fill very quickly. You have to know what you want and sign up as soon as they're available. And finally, the classes are at very specific times, which certainly do not work for all working parents schedules. For example, it will just be tue or Thur at 5:45pm. If you can't make that you are SOL.
Put them at the lowest level if you don’t know. That’s easy.
As far as schedule goes, who’s taking care of the kid? At age 3 or 4 when you do this, it’s not like they are in school so some adult has to be around at 5:45pm.
Look, I'm telling you this from my perspective as someone who tried to do the exact thing you're saying. If those things stressed me out as an adult who knows about swimming, and crucially prevented me from signing up my kids for swimming lessons at the Y, then it is going to be even more true for people who are low income and not knowledgeable. These are real barriers. Acting like they're not is just putting our collective head in the sand and letting the problem perpetuate.
Your barrier sounds like some other anxiety issue unrelated to economic status.
You know how important swimming lessons are and yet just gave up and skipped it entirely? Or are you actually privileged and had other swimming lesson options for your kid and just didn’t want to bother with the affordable system’s constraints?
Lots of lower middle class/poor including me when I was growing up went to this without a problem. 25 cent public bus ride with mom was an adventure
Now that pools are practical, I expect weather to be a larger factor: swimming is much more desirable in hot dry weather. I'd predict there are more swimming-hours per capita in Phoenix than Boston.
You seem to think swimming is only useful if you accidentally end up in a giant body of water. In reality swimming skills are damn useful as soon as you end up in any water that goes up to your head, and those bodies of water are everywhere across the globe. More so for children.
Arizona was the worst possible example. It has the lowest ratio of people per pool in the county. Additionally, pools are far more dangerous for children than the coasts because they are sitting right there at home ever present waiting for you to relax and lose track of the kids.
Setting those aside, the canals for irrigation are more dangerous than rivers. The southern half is also filled with dry riverbeds that turn into raging rivers in storms. Finally, Phoenix itself has something like 4 lakes within an hour drive and the salt river that people float.
The heat of Arizona makes water recreation a huge part of life.
Your point is wrong. Everywhere in the US has access to some form of swimming.
Whether or not someone learns to swim is dominated by what their parents raising them decide. It’s much more likely to follow an urban vs suburban/rural divide than any kind of geographic correlation.
I'm looking at the data for Greece (where I'm from) and I'm wondering whether the "deaths per 100,000 people" stats are taking into account the millions of tourists that visit each year, especially in the summer. Not just for Greece, of course. Every Mediterrannean country is going to be full of tourists in the summer and that's going to push numbers up for those countries.
And that all the Western European countries have 0 deaths per 100,000 people must also be a distortion. A brief online search found this article according to which 4 million people where expected to visit Greece only from the UK in 2023:
For what it's worth I checked for The Netherlands, and the data can be correct if they always round down.
In 2021 The Netherlands had ~17.5 million inhabitants[1]. 99 people drowned[2], of which 19 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.56 or 0.45.
In 2020 The Netherlands had ~17.4 million inhabitants[1]. 138 people drowned[2], of which 31 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.79 or 0.61.
This is of course dependent on the per 100 000 being inhabitants. If it includes tourists the rates go way down, because millions of people visit. For 2020 and 2021 it adds 7.2 and 6.2 million people respectively, for non-pandemic years closer to 20 million[3].
>Everyone's holidays are at a beach, so water safety is a constant concern
That explains the discrepancy just fine to me. Most families in the US who expect to be around water a lot get swimming lessons for their kids, and most families who don't, don't. I had swimming lessons growing up and mostly they just reaffirmed my belief that I hate the beach more than life itself and will never, ever, ever step foot in nature's latrine.
A ballpark estimate for Portugal is that it costs the government probably 50 euros-ish per pupil for basic swimming lessons? Given that they cut drowning deaths by almost an order of magnitude in children, that seems like pretty good ROI.
A friend of mine grew up in a town in Spain where many families had pools. All the kids were prepared at a very young age by a teacher who basically threw the kids in the water and then showed them how to survive. She was known as "la nazi".
In my country swimming lessons are mandatory with everyone swimming 25m by aged 10. School takes them on a bus to the nearest community pool until they can swim.
Those are not always available. As in, churche or mosque exists, but don't have pool and don't teach swimming. Private lesson exists, but is not cheap.
Churches will teach kids at community pools. I went to Christian school from elementary to 8th grade and we did all sorts of things in the summer for cheap
Poor people in the US don’t teach kids how to swim because they are busy surviving and don’t prioritize extracurricular activities, don’t have funds to pay someone for the lessons and parallel parenting
Not true; grew up poor in a single wide trailer. Mom put us in swimming lessons at the local city pool. And we got more swimming lessons as we got older. I competitively surfed in the 2000s. Swimming lessons helped.
In America the racial cultures place different values on learning this skill. Black people not swimming has been a prevalent stereotype my entire life and I still hear jokes about it (primarily stand up comedians these days)
I grew up poor in a trailer too but my mom made sure I swam. Never even had official lessons. We’d use public pools or visit a friends apartment pool, or sometimes just crash one. I just learned by exposure and playing with other kids. First in floaty then without. I’m better off now and have a pool in my yard but I also taught my kid early on, no lessons. It’s an important life skill and a huge hobby/activity that I feel most white peoples engage in across all economic cohorts
> In America the racial cultures place different values on learning this skill.
The US once had many community swimming pools prior to the civil rights amendment. Black people were segregated and few pools were built for them from their taxes.
Come the era of equal rights a great many pools were filled in rather than suffer the horror of mixed races in the same water. Private swimming pools and pools at clubs grew in number and it remained that few black people had access to community pools.
That was the case for a few decades, now hopefully past - but for a long time pools were associated not with swimming but with harassment and exclusion.
The forgotten history of segregated swimming pools and amusement parks
There are still community pools all across Florida - many open for over 40-50 years. County or city ran too.
For example, in Florida: Taylor County (rural) has approximately 25 total public pools and bathing places
In Alabama:
Birmingham’s Parks & Recreation currently operates around 10-11 city‑run outdoor public pools, including Crestwood, Memorial, E.O. Jackson, Grayson, Underwood, Roosevelt, McAlpine, East Thomas. Though not all open every summer due to staffing or budget issues in recent years
Similarly, I grew up poor (but on a farm, not in a trailer). My parents enrolled all of us in swimming lessons at the town community center every summer. It's true that poor people prioritize material survival, but they are people too and they want their kids to be able to do fun things in the summer.
I grew up working class and also took swimming lessons at our local city pool. Just wondering, have you actually experienced "the socioeconomic bracket," or did you just take some classes in college about it and/or surf Reddit and get angry about class warfare?
It correlates with money, and logic can eliminate a lot of possibilities, like: it isn't money in the bank that makes people to be able to swim; also it is probably not race, ethnicity, religion, or location either. The most likely explanation is that poor people prioritize it lower (or rather: rich people prioritize it much much higher, it is a no-brainer for them).
There are statistics about swimming capabilities and socio economic status. They looks the same in just about every country; kids in poorer families are worse at swimming, even in countries with comprehensive swimming education in school.
Better swimming ed in school makes the gap narrower. I don't know any recent statistics, but I have seen statistics from the 90s and back then the US was amazingly apalling in that regard.
I didn't start this thread to chastise anyone about it, but to express the idea that, in a country poorer than the US (on average), within 30 years, getting kids to swim early probably contributed significantly to close the gap in drowning mortality (and surpass the US).
Also none of my kids knew how to swim by the time they were 4 (as in the article) but all of them had had “swimming” lessons, which basically amounted to us spending around an hour in a pool with them.
All I can say from subsequent “close calls” is that, in my experience, even just a little familiarity helps a lot.
It takes reps/practice so anyone with more access should be better. Wealthier people are taking more trips to beach, may have a lake house, or have a pool at home even if it’s just a condo/apartment.
This is where I believe in the compensatory nature of the state. Swimming is an important life skill. Someone drowning is expensive for society, and seeing how parents swimming ability is inherited (socially, obviously) you STILL see effects of segregation laws in the US. Pretty crazy.
Beach and water is free fun in Florida. Everyone does it regardless of socioeconomic bracket. I would assume it’s the same everywhere else that has close access to water.
only thing I forgot to do was write “generally” “often” “disproportionately” when talking about an already well understood aspect of the socioeconomic class
it doesn't really need to be explained again that some groups have more distractions and barriers than others, mostly by class
its great that your parents prioritized your aquatic acumen and has nothing to do with the tax bracket as a whole
I almost drowned as a kid - in shallow water, and with a swim ring around my waist. I'll explain situation here as a cautionary tale for parents.
That swim ring was a bit loose. I was standing in the water, probably jumping up and down like kids do. Somehow, I lost balance and as my upper body fell to the side the swim ring moved from my waist toward feet. It stayed there and pulled my feet upward while my head went below the water. I was powerless to return to the surface as feet were stuck in that floating ring, forcing me upside down. Fortunately, a family friend noticed the situation and pulled me from the water. Near-death situation, and it looked perfectly safe.
A wave pool almost got me (those should be banned).
A wave took me underwater and there were too many people in the pool for me to easily get back up. I don't fully remember how I got out of it, only that I was pushed underwater (I think I managed to get to the shallower end)
Wave pools fucking terrify me. How can the lifeguards even see if someone is struggling? There's always shit tons of people flailing around and yelling. They genuinely give me anxiety.
You should try this. I was a lifeguard for several years, and I think the key is that there are almost always signs a person can’t actually swim. They cling to a flotation device, they stand up to their tip toes in shallow water, they seem visibly uneasy in the deep. They’re the ones who are going to get in trouble, it’s comparatively quite rare for a strong swimmer to suddenly start drowning.
I didn't know what a wave pool is (I've never been to a water park) but they do seem like an awful idea . Wikipedia says they can be hard to lifeguard:
Safety
Wave pools are more difficult to lifeguard than still pools as the moving water (sometimes combined with sun glare) make it difficult to watch all swimmers. Unlike passive pool safety camera systems, computer-automated drowning detection systems do not work in wave pools.[11] There are also safety concerns in regards to water quality, as wave pools are difficult to chlorinate.
In the 1980s, three people died in the original 8-foot-deep (2.4 m) Tidal Wave pool at New Jersey's Action Park, which also kept the lifeguards busy rescuing patrons who overestimated their swimming ability. On the wave pool's opening day, it is said up to 100 people had to be rescued.[12]
The same thing happened to me, I nearly drowned when I performed poorly on a single wave, and the repeating nature of them kept me under the water for so long I thought I was going to die. I went up to the nearest lifeguard, about 10 feet laterally and 20 feet above the pool, and went "what the fuck?" They were confused. Probably will never go in one again.
My son had a "near drown experience" at ~2yo with a swim ring in a pool.
He somehow jumped from the side and "capsized" ending up with his head underwater, so the ring kept him in that position.
I was playing with my daughter facing the other direction and didn't notice until she pointed him out, I fished him out and he had somehow kept his breath (it was some seconds, not minutes) and kept playing as if nothing happened soon after.
I've been paranoid about my kid around water when he was younger, mostly because this was advice given by my father to me when I was an adolescent, in some context where I was going to be partially responsible for children:
Little kids can drown in as little as 2 inches of water. They can drown a bathtub that's mostly empty.
I'm a good swimmer and the only time I've ever been scared in the water was when I was using one of those damn pool noodles. These colorful toys just love to turn you upside down in the water. They're dangerous as hell.
I was taught to swim as a kid and spent summer days in the water of Long Island Sound. As a maybe 10 or 11yo swimming at a Rhode Island beach, I was tossed into some rocks thanks to some pretty rough waves. I float, so I've never worried about heading in the right direction when under water. Even still, all that tossing and turning without a deep breath was damn scary. I sat out for a bit and then went back in. Not one adult I was with, or any others for that matter, came a runnin'.
Years later, when I was taking the lifeguard class in high school, one of the first things we were taught is that you can drown on dry land with a tablespoon of water. I remember that to this day (that was back in 1980).
These days, my head is on swivel at the pool. . . And I'm not the guard. Just paying attention to all the little people. And during water aerobics, I watch the adults in the pool who are not good swimmers.
The rule of thumb is 1mL per Kg bodyweight, so a child can drown with less than 15mL of water in their lungs. The most common mechanisms are laryngospasm or contraction of the laryngeal muscles closing the airway (dry drowning) or pulmonary oedema caused by irritating of the alveoli (secondary drowning).
I'd imagine it's hyperbole. A tbsp is likely enough to just snort and not have (too many) issues. People do drown in surprisingly shallow waters, however.
It’s not hyperbole. It requires prior incapacitation, but if you’re unconscious then even a tiny amount of water can kill you.
Similarly, intoxication vastly degrades the instincts that would otherwise keep you alive. I will never understand how people think getting drunk is _fun_.
Re: intoxication, I don’t really like drinking either, but I can kindof understand the appeal. It makes me overthink everything less, so I can be more unfiltered. That can be fun, especially for dancing/stuff like that — if you feel self-conscious while dancing I’d recommend trying a couple drinks first. But I’m not a perfect person, and usually I want some filter, I rarely drink
Scary. Glad it turned out okay. The rule should be any standing water feature below 3' (1m) above grade should be enclosed by a fence to a height of 4' (1.3m) above grade if kids are anticipated to occupy the space.
And, for oceans, rivers, and flood water: remember that 1m³ of water weighs 1.1 ton/1 tonne.
> The rule should be any standing water feature below 3' (1m) above grade should be enclosed by a fence to a height of 4' (1.3m) above grade if kids are anticipated to occupy the space.
Children drowning is tragic, but this is nanny-state stuff. Are we to wrap literally any pond, lake, stream, fountain, etc. with a four-foot tall fence, because children exist? Imagine Central Park, but with the ponds surrounded by chain-link fences -- now that I think about it, I'm sort of amazed that New York City (where every other building is perpetually surrounded by ugly and useless scaffolding because one person died from falling bricks once) hasn't actually done this.
At some point, parents have to take personal responsibility for where their children run off to. Per TFA, the state the story took place in already had a law stricter than the one you're saying should exist [1]. It didn't prevent this incident. To the author's credit, this is not a plea for better laws, but rather, one for better parental supervision -- they knew there was a water feature, and still let the child run free.
So, PSA: teach your children to swim, and keep a close leash on the ones who don't know how yet.
[1] In many states (including PA, apparently, per TFA), it's already required that you wrap any standing water greater than 24" deep with a fence, even if you don't have children or ever intend them to be there.
Australia has some pretty strict laws around fencing pools and water features, requiring them to be fenced when deeper than 300mm (and very strict and onerous rules about the nature of the fencing). This applies to private or public water features. However, public water features also require life guards present during operating hours.
If you as an owner, a professional, or even the labourer circumvent these rules and a child dies in the pool, you will likely be criminally charged.
These laws started to be introduced in the late eighties as pools started to be more common place. So I was curious about how these laws had effected drowning deaths since they were introduced. Turns out that drowning deaths in pools for kids under 4 have decreased 5% per year for the last 20 years [0]. That's about 500 kids lives saved in twenty years at the expense of every pool in the country being fenced - about 1.6 million pools. (Australia has the highest per capita private pools in the world.)
At an average cost of about $5k for a pool fence, you could suggest saving each child cost about $16m.
Drowning deaths in other age groups and other locations have not really changed in that time.
Even then, I have never seen any natural waterway, river, creek, beach or whatever being fenced, not even man made natural ponds in public parks.
Those laws sound similarly onerous -- though not identical -- to what we have in many US states. A depth of 300mm is...well, let's just say that's aggressive (11")...but we also have strict rules about the fencing that goes well beyond what would qualify as a normal fence [1]. And yes, there are penalties if you knowingly circumvent the rules and someone dies (though I don't know if these are criminal. There's probably always a way for a grandstanding prosecutor to make it stick.)
> Turns out that drowning deaths in pools for kids under 4 have decreased 5% per year for the last 20 years [0]. That's about 500 kids lives saved in twenty years at the expense of every pool in the country being fenced - about 1.6 million pools.
OK, well...it's a (big) assumption that the laws are the reason for the decline, and moreover, that every part of every rule you described is necessary for the declines.
That's the fundamental problem with these kinds of things -- the "if it saves even N>1 lives!" crowd appears, ignores causation, and ratchets up the strictness of rules -- never the other way around. So you end up with fencing rules around 11" inch-deep puddles of water, and full-employment programs for lifeguards, when maybe one or the other would have been sufficient. Or something else. And maybe next time, they will want to fence the fountain at the local park.
Beyond that, I don't like to engage in "value of a life" debates, because there's no upper bound on emotion. But I should say that your numbers left out the cost of the lifeguards.
[1] Because heaven forbid that a motivated child climbs said fence. If your fence is insufficiently slippery, you will be liable! I'm not joking.
>strict rules about the fencing that goes well beyond what would qualify as a normal fence
Many of the rules are similar, because they are generally commonsense rules. Australia has a few extra ones. No more than a 10mm wide protrusion within 900mm of the fence externally or 300mm internally, unless the fence is higher than 1.8m. This includes trees. You cannot open the pool area into any internal area, regardless of door safety features, even if that internal area is a locked shed. You must have a minimum 750mm clear zone around at least 75% of the pool. You have to get the pool fence reinspected and recertified every 3 years (this may differ state to state). There are lots of fines for non-compliance.
>it's a (big) assumption that the laws are the reason for the decline
It was not so much an assumption as it it was a presumption, which if true sets a lower bound on the cost. Drownings were getting pretty common in the 90s in Australia as the pool ownership started to take off, and at that time private pools accounted for around 45% of the drowning detahs for kids under 5 [0].
I do not doubt that public safety campaigns and public pool safety are also a big part of the decrease, but add to that the massive increase in not just backyard pools but also population. The fact that the fatalities have decreased during this period points to a sizable proportion being from the laws.
>I don't like to engage in "value of a life" debates
I mean, no one does. I think they can be illustrative though. Taken individually, each pool fence that saved a life only cost the parents $5k. Well worth it. And altogether, while it may sound crazy that so much has been spent to save so few lives, in context the average family pool costs around $30-60k. So the cost of putting the infrastructure in place for the kids to drown in the first place is an order of magnitude higher than the mitigations. If you wanted to look at it that way..
Sure, better stats always help to focus appropraite spending. Though I wasn't really making an argument one way or the other (just sharing my curiosity), I would point out that it is really easy to discount the importance of a safety feature after it has solved the issue. Y2K anyone?
> Many of the rules are similar, because they are generally commonsense rules. Australia has a few extra ones....You have to get the pool fence reinspected and recertified every 3 years (this may differ state to state).
Yeah, this kind of thing is exactly why NYC has scaffolding on half of the buildings, forever. Huge backlogs and high costs for "recertification" of situations that rarely ever change and carry miniscule marginal risk, due to aggressive laws.
> It was not so much an assumption as it it was a presumption, which if true sets a lower bound on the cost.
No, it's an assumption. There's a difference between "drownings might go down if we do something to limit them" (i.e. "presumption") and "this SPECIFIC SET OF RULES is therefore the thing we must do to save lives" (what is actually happening).
> Taken individually, each pool fence that saved a life only cost the parents $5k. Well worth it.
OK, let's be clear: if you build a pool and have kids, then I have no argument against you being required to put a fence around it. I agree with you that the marginal cost is trivial. Same thing for hotels, rentals, etc. Some regulations make sense.
I start to disagree when these rules are applied to everyone, everywhere, in all circumstances. Many US states impose these rules on people who don't have children, don't live near children, etc. And of course, the comment that started this thread was demanding that we wrap every body of water, everywhere, with a fence "if a child is expected to be present".
If a child comes wandering onto my (hypothetical) property and falls into my (hypothetical) garden pond and drowns, that's the fault of the parent. Particularly so if I've already got a fence around my property, live far away from people, or any number of other factors that sensibly mitigate risk.
Although in the UK, from what I've seen, there is far more prevalence of life rings being available along rivers/creeks than in the US where I basically never see such a thing.
>> Children drowning is tragic, but this is nanny-state stuff. Are we to wrap literally any pond, lake, stream, fountain, etc. with a four-foot tall fence, because children exist? Imagine Central Park, but with the ponds surrounded by chain-link fences -- now that I think about it, I'm sort of amazed that New York City (where every other building is perpetually surrounded by ugly and useless scaffolding because one person died from falling bricks once) hasn't actually done this.
Sorry if I'm being too literal here but are you saying that, for half of the houses in New York, it's true that someone died because a brick fell on their head from that house?
Half of all the houses? That sounds like a real problem that should be fixed somehow.
Learning about dangerous things is a critical part of growing up. Fencing off dangerous things does nothing. Education and care and relevant, proportionate ideas about safety is what’s needed here, not nanny state over-reach.
(Source: parent of 2 boys who grew up in North Cornwall, where the community reaction to the (insanely dangerous) local sea is to learn about it, get in it and be aware of your limitations)
On a related note. Don't assume if your child slips/falls into a pool, you will hear it. I happened to see my daughter step off a ledge in a hot tub once and she just vanished. Not a sound. If I had been facing the other direction, I would have had no idea.
As a child before I could swim I slipped and fell into a pool at a party at my grandparents house full of adults. A teen, who was inside the house, is the only one who saw me. He ran outside, dove into the pool, and saved my life. I remember my mom being hysterical and the teen being treated like a hero. I don’t remember his name he was a neighborhood kid known by my grandparents. (Maybe he cut their yard idk)
Sorry you had that experience surprisetalk. Glad for you that it was all ok.
Theres a saying that comes to my mind, I think it used to be a lot more common.
"it only takes 6 inches of water to drown"
Fall funny, get nocked out and land in a puddle or whatever, or cant lift your head out of it for whatever reason etc etc.
I am VERY conscious of water & my kids, being a scuba diver myself I have a fair respect for the sea as well, and still we have had experiences that left us a little shook.
Kids can learn to swim (read: not panic and keep the important bits above water) pretty much the time they learn to walk. By 3-5 they can learn to properly swim without assistance from floats.
You still shouldn't let them be around water unsupervised, but it can buy precious minutes when it matters and give parents some peace of mind.
Being a strong swimmer isn't much help against overconfidence or panic.
Learning how to be careful is really important, and weaker swimmers are often more cautious.
The other big problem is that you might be safe but someone less skilled copies you. I was being very careful in knee high shallows near a well sign-posted rip in South America, and some teens got in and got taken out by it. Fortunately they made it back (nobody near could have helped them).
Related PSA that drowning doesn't look like drowning [0] — people don't yell, splash, and wave like you might expect and is "almost always a deceptively quiet event".
1 more PSA, Drowning is the #1 cause of death for people with autism. It generally happens when the person is being supervised by someone not their parents.
If you are taking care of someone with autism around water, be super aware of that.
A child with autism is 160x more likely to die from drowning vs the general population [1]
Key drowning indicators include: head low in water with mouth at water level, head tilted back, eyes glassy/empty/closed, vertical position without leg movement, hyperventilating/gasping, and attempting to swim but making no forward progress.
Doesn't help for young kids of course, but I went to a university that required you to pass a swimming test (or have equivalent credentials, PE swimming class, or exemption to graduate). Don't know how strictly enforced it was if push came to shove but it was there
My university had the same policy. Despite having swim lessons as a child, I did not learn how to swim until university. I was finally able to swim the length of the pool using the side stroke, which along with the backstroke is the only thing I can barely manage. My problem with the crawl/freestyle (or whatever it's called) is breathing -- even when I was in good enough shape to run 5-minute miles on land, I would be totally out of breath before I even got to the end of the pool.
I used to swim a lot more but was never great at it--although I once did the 1 mile swim thing in boy scouts. These days I tend to prefer side stroke when I swim.
Of all the things a university graduate should possess this seems pretty far down the list, when the most common causes of death in this demo could be addressed: car accidents, suicide, homicide, drug overdoses and alcohol-related causes
I'm also not sure what a class about not killing people including yourself looks like. Universities do often have psychiatric programs. But swimming seems a fairly basic PE program as do other ones. Certainly swimming seems more fundamental than fencing or lots of other sports though those are of course often offered too.
As a pool owner (3 feet in the shallow end and eight feet in the deep end) and parent of a three year old plus older kids that grew up with the pool — I can not fathom allowing a four year old to explore the yard on their own when this was there. Even if just two feet deep. A body of water that goes down into the ground (which this fountain appears to be) is dangerous to young children, period. I respect other peoples’ parenting styles but I personally don’t understand.
I let my four year old do this because I didn't realize how dangerous it was. I've since learned more about the risks, both through personal experience and from reading more after, and I most certainly wouldn't make the same choice now.
This isn't shallow water by any means when kids are involved. There are routinely deadly accident where kids drawn in less than a foot of water (here[1] for example a 3yo in 23cm of water).
Why is this back on the front page of the site? It was posted several days ago and has little to nothing to do with the content and context of the site.
Why didn't the aunt think to just go get her instead of calling you over to say "Hey so I know you told her to stay away from the fountain, but what about her walking around the rim of it, is that dangerous or not?"
HN isn't just for tech, it's for anything that satisfies intellectual curiosity. It's not always obvious in advance what will turn out to satisfy intellectual curiosity, but if a good discussion develops, that ends up being the most important signal.
I have more intellectual curiosity about base58 and base85 and Metas wrist based gesture control system than I do a neglectful father who nearly let his daughter drown because he was too thick to realize that if it was deep enough for water to get up to his toddler’s elbows that she could drown horizontally.
It does not take a genius to figure this out. Would he have left his daughter in the bathtub unsupervised? Would he have let his daughter walk around the rim of the bathtub if it were up to her elbows?
I can almost guarantee that he would not have let her go freely at a place with a 2 foot deep kiddie pool, so why let her run freely around the yard with the 2 foot deep mossy pit?
To me, it’s a signal that this person should not ever be involved in any safety decisions in any product that interfaces with humans and the real world. They simply don’t have the proper risk assessment faculties.
My aunt is in her 70s, and no longer very fast or loud. She was also much closer to me than to my daughter (but my view was blocked by vegetation). Even if she had seen my daughter fall in, getting me to respond would still have been much faster and more effective.
Cars, dogs, and water.
These are the big three common things that children interact with regularly that can, and will, cause irreparable harm or death with functionally no warning and virtually instantaneously. Kids also don't have the experience or the intuition to figure out if a situation is dangerous; cars move too fast, dogs are too hard to read, and water danger is hard to grasp even for adults (the number of people, including grown adults, I've seen panic and had to get pulled out after gleefully jumping into water where it turns out they can't reliably touch the bottom is fairly high).
The first two require some strictness (i.e. being very clear about rules like never going near a road without an adult, and never hitting a dog or pulling it's ears), but water basically requires regular swimming lessons from qualified instructors. It's something I wish happened earlier, and that more families had easy access to.
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