Parents Badly Misinformed About Water Safety For Their Kids
Posted May 28, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
You’ve given your kids swimming lessons, you’ve taught them all about water safety and you’ve let them know you’ll be back every now and then to check on them. They’re all set for the summer, right? Wrong. And if you think you’re not, it could be setting your family up for a tragedy.
Stephen Tar found that out the hard way several years ago. “I got a page on my pager that my daughter had fell in a pool,” he remembers. “Ambulance on the way. And retrieved Chrissie from the pool floating facedown in the shallow end.” Like many parents, he thought keeping a divided eye on her was enough. It wasn’t. “Some parents thought that checking in every ten minutes was good enough,” outlines Allyson Hewitt of Safe Kids Canada. “It simply is not. You really need to keep all children within sight and reach.”
The group’s new poll shows 86 percent of adults think swimming lessons alone will save their child from drowning. And while the findings might not be all that surprising, a statistic that it’s the second-leading cause of injury-related deaths amongst Canadian children under 14 is likely to raise some concern. But what’s even more alarming is that only about a third of parents actually supervise their kids while they’re in the water.
Kids who aren’t strong swimmers should always wear a life jacket around the pool and parents should learn CPR, a great skill to have whether you go swimming or not. And all pools should be fenced on all four sides.
Luckily for Tar, his daughter survived. He doesn’t intend to dive off the deep end of assumptions about her ever again. What can you do to make a splash in the safety pool? Here are some good resources.
