Tips to do all you can to prevent what’s more possible than you think
Ellis Raymond has spent almost half her 30 years involved in teaching swimming and water safety. It’s her passion, her mission. But when parents ask — which they do all the time — at what level their kids can be considered safe in the water, her answer is always the same: “Never.”
“We never want to give parents a false sense of security,” says Raymond, general manager and co-founder of Jim Montgomery Swim School in Dallas. “We give them tools to make them safer, because they’re never safe. My dad” — Olympic gold medallist Jim Montgomery — “is one of the most elite swimmers in the world, but he almost drowned in Hawaii. There’s a huge misconception that we’re safe in the water, and we’re not.”
With swimming season underway, we’re certainly not going to avoid lakes and pools and the ocean. Nor are we going to make our kids sit out cannonball contests and games of Marco Polo. Instead, let’s be proactive here and use the statistics — among them, that 10 people drown in the U.S. every day — to make sure we and those we love don’t become one of them.
We asked Raymond and Jennifer Pewitt, associate vice-president over aquatics for the Dallas YMCA, to share their tips about water safety, and what we need to know to reduce the risk of drowning.
• A lifeguard doesn’t mean you can let your guard down
“People think lifeguards are just sitting there,” Raymond says. “Their job is not to watch your child; it’s to scan the entire pool. You have a false sense of security.” If you put a non-swimmer into the pool, the lifeguard is likely to focus on that person and miss something else.
• Drowning can occur in mere inches of water
During her days as a lifeguard, Raymond pulled kids out of the 2-foot wading pool “all the time,” she says. “It’s shallow but it takes two seconds to fall on your face. A lot of times kids don’t think to put their feet down and stand up. Even an adult could drown in this, to fall in a foot of water and freak out. There’s a paralysis that can happen and they can’t recover themselves.”
• Everyone needs to take swimming lessons
That might sound obvious, but it’s important enough that it bears repeating and re-repeating.
“Formal swim classes can reduce drownings by 88 per cent,” Raymond says.
Pewitt offers this disturbing statistic: “By age 10, AfricanAmerican boys drown at 10 times the rate of Anglo boys,” she says. “It’s about swimming lessons. Many live in an apartment community and are home alone in summer with access to a pool and no supervision.”
YMCA Safety Around Water Apartment Swim Program, set to kick off for the ninth summer, taught 3,000 kids in the Dallas area to swim last summer. The program is free; check with your apartment management company to see if it’s offered where you live.
• Memorize this mantra: ‘Back to the wall’
Most people who drown in a pool are within reaching distance of its wall, Raymond says. For that reason, “one of the biggest things we teach is ‘back to the wall.’ We have them fall into the pool and grab the wall: ‘Back to the wall, back to the wall, back to the wall.’ We’re trying to ingrain it if they were to fall into a pool.”
The swim school starts this in parent-child classes when babies are 6 months old and “have breath control,” Raymond says. “Parents know the goals and we get to teach water safety to parents while they’re there with the baby.”
The Y offers such classes too, Pewitt says. “At age 3, we do swimming lessons without a parent. That’s where the magic learning takes place. They’re really kind of ready to be in a class without Mom. Cognitively and physically, they can learn to hold their breath, kick their feet, float on their back, swim to the wall and climb out.”
Y classes, she says, stress “being able to be comfortable in the water and orienting yourself. ‘Turn around, grab the wall, climb out.’ We increase the distance so it’s ‘jump in, swim a little, turn around, climb out.’ It doesn’t matter if they’re 2 or 32. Along the way, we teach them to kick, but we want them to first have survival skills.”
• Hold your breath
“In swimming lessons, the first thing we teach you isn’t swimming,” Pewitt says. “It’s really about can you hold your breath? Even little bitty kids, we say we teach them to comfortably and happily go under water. If you fall in the pool, you have to be able to hold your breath. People don’t drown because they can’t swim. They drown because they can’t get a breath.”
• Learn to roll over onto your back
Going from stomach to back “is an easy way to catch your breath,” Pewitt says.
• Practice
“Parents sometimes come in after three lessons and ask, ‘Why isn’t my kid in the next level?’ “Raymond says. “You give a kid a guitar for 30 minutes every week, and in a year, they won’t be proficient. Small steps; we’re building on them each week. We want kids to love the bathtub, shower time, lake time. We try to help them love water everywhere they go.”
At the same time, though:
• Be cautious
“You have to teach your kids to have a healthy respect of the water,” Pewitt says.
• Invest in a life-jacket. Water wings don’t count
“I hate those,” Raymond says. “They’re really a toy. They’re not an approved flotation device.”
In Canada, life-jackets should carry a label that reads they are Transport Canada or Canadian Coast Guard or Fisheries and Oceans Canada approved.
And speaking of life jackets:
• If you swim in brown water, wear a life-jacket
This holds true no matter what your age, Pewitt says. Brown lake or creek water means even less visibility, which can increase the incidence of drowning.
“If parents are sending kids to a lake house or know they’ll be in open water, always ask if there are supervising adults and whether they’ll all be wearing life-jackets,” she says.
When people drown in open water, peer pressure is often the reason, she says.
• Put your phone away
“We all live in a heads-down world right now,” Raymond says. “Parents are updating social media on the side of the pool. They’re thinking, ‘I can look down for a second; I want to post a picture of my cute kid at the pool.’ I encourage people to put the phone down when they’re at the pool.”
As parents, Pewitt says, “you don’t feel successful unless you’re doing more than one thing at a time. When you’re around a pool, if you aren’t physically focused on what your kids are doing, you miss the emergency and two, three, five minutes go by and there’s irreversible damage.
“It only takes 20 seconds for a kid to be unconscious. There’s a silent struggle below the surface and then the kid is on the bottom,” she says. “If people are swimming around in the pool, you just don’t see them.”
At home, if you’re bathing your child, don’t leave the room — even if you think answering the door or your phone will only take a minute.
• Drowning isn’t loud and frantic, like in movies
Instead, Raymond says, “It’s silent and happens in a second.”
• Unless you’re trained, don’t jump into the water to save someone
Swimming experts have a mantra: Reach, throw, don’t go, call 911. That means reach out with your arm, a pool noodle or something else the person can grab without pulling you in. If that doesn’t work, throw a flotation device like a buoy. Finally, call 911.
• Fence your home pool, even if your kids can swim
There are way too many stories of families who head indoors after swimming, then one kid slips back outside, goes into the pool and drowns.
“I tell people you have to have multiple layers of protection,” Pewitt says. One might be a door alarm, which sounds when the back door opens. Another is a fence — not just a backyard fence, but a fence that just goes around the pool.
“They say a pool fence reduces the risk of drowning by 85 per cent. It drastically, drastically improves the safety of the pool. We just bought our first house with a pool. All three of our kids swim competitively. They’re great swimmers, but we put in a pool fence.”