MA’S BABY SINK STINK
Float video makes waves online
THE VIDEO shows a 6-monthold Florida girl struggling to swim as her mother looks on.
It is shocking to watch, but the baby’s mom said she’s teaching the girl to swim this early because her older brother drowned as a toddler.
The two-minute video, uploaded to Facebook by user Dov, shows a bubbly baby girl in a yellow dress being lured out into a pool.
She plunges in trying to reach after a bright, flowered sandal and her head goes under, but neither of the adults step in to help her. Instead, they watch as she struggles and ends up floating on her back.
One of the onlooking adults encourages her, saying, “Good girl, good girl.” At the end of the video, the baby is lifted out of the water and an adult says, “I’ve got you baby.” The video is captioned, “So hard to watch but every kid should learn this young.”
The video — which had been viewed more than 600,000 times by Monday morning — has drawn both anger and praise.
“I think that it is great to teach your child at a young age on how to float, but this video was reckless and dangerous,” wrote one Facebook user.
The baby’s mother, Keri Morrison, disagrees. The Palm Beach Gardens mother said she’s determined to teach baby Josie how to swim after her 2-year-old son Jake drowned in 2013.
Since then, she and her husband, Roarke, have become advocates for the Infant Swimming Resource Self-Rescue technique, a method for teaching babies to float independently.
“These lessons are safe and effective and they’ve been around for 50 years,” she told the Daily News.
Her older daughter Julia, now 2, took the infant swimming classes before turning 1. “She was 3 months at Jake’s passing and 8 months when she took the classes. They don’t teach them how to swim that young,” the 39-year-old mother said. “They teach them to roll back and float.” Now, Julia “swims like a fish and loves the water.” Morrison and her husband started the Live Like Jake Foundation to spread awareness. Three stills from video (above) posted to Facebook show 6-month-old Josie (below with mom Keri Morrison) forced to float in pool.
Jake died during a trip to Orlando, when he fell off a dock and drowned.
“As a parent, your No. 1 job is to protect your child, to do everything that you can to keep them safe, and I failed my son when I did not put him in these lessons,” she told The News.
“That eats me up, every minute of every day — that I could have potentially saved his life,” she said.
The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that there is no evidence swimming lessons prevent drowning for babies younger than 1, although after that it may have some impact.