Children need to be taught to swim early
Children don’t yet have the judgment or experience to understand the dangers of water, according to the Lifesaving Society, a national charitable organization working to prevent drowning. It cites statistics that show children age six to nine who can’t swim and who are unaccompanied by adults in the water are at the highest risk for drowning.
And more than 90 per cent of children in Quebec who drowned were either without adult supervision or the subjects of distracted supervision, said Raynald Hawkins, executive director of the organization’s Quebec branch, the Société Sauvetage.
“To me that means they were non-swimmers,” he said.
A seven-year-old girl drowned in late June when she wandered into in the family’s above-ground pool in St-Amable in the Montérégie region as her mother prepared dinner. A few days before that, a 10-year-old boy who was just learning to swim drowned in a small artificial lake at a friend’s house in the Lanaudière community of Ste-Julienne.
And this month a six-year-old who had recently arrived from Nigeria drowned in a crowded pool in a St-Léonard apartment building when his mother, tending to the boy’s two younger siblings, momentarily lost sight of him. A 2010 study by the Lifesaving Society found that newcomers were more than four times as likely to be unable to swim than those born in Canada.
One of the 10 recommendations of the World Health Organization’s world drowning report in 2014 was the establishment of a learn-toswim program within the school curriculum, Hawkins said.
“Our mission is not to frighten people, but to promote safe interaction with water to prevent drowning,” he said. “And so we want people to come to pools as bathers and eventually to learn to swim.”
The main objective of a program called Swim to Survive, developed by the Lifesaving Society, is to teach all children the basic skills they need to survive an unexpected fall into deep water. More than 10,000 Grade 3 students in Quebec went through the three-hour program last year. The education ministry has recognized it as a fitness activity, and Hawkins said the hope is that all Grade 3 and 4 students in the province will eventually take it.
A 15-year-old boy died this month after scaling a fence and jumping into a public pool in Ahuntsic-Cartierville late at night, when the pool was closed. Otherwise, none of the 33 fatal drownings in Quebec this year has been in a public pool.
Hawkins said he approved of a decision by the city of Montreal to harmonize admission standards to its 74 outdoor pools and 48 indoor pools for the start of the 2018 summer season. Following consultation with boroughs, the minimum age at which children were permitted to enter the pool on their own, which had been six or seven in many boroughs, was raised to eight across the board.
A child must be at least eight to be allowed into a city of Montreal pool on his own. He must be of a certain minimum height, determined by the depth of the various pool basins: at least 15 cm taller than the deepest area of the shallow end so that he can stand with his head above water.
“The child has to be able to stand so that even if he is a non-swimmer, he is safer than a six-yearold,” Hawkins said.
Alternatively, the eight-yearold must know how to swim, as assessed by a swimming test, to be allowed into a pool on his own regardless of height.
The average eight-year-old is a better swimmer than a six-yearold — and more likely to be taller, he said.
Among the Lifesaving Society’s safety standards: preschool children should be directly supervised by a parent or caregiver who remains within arm’s reach of the child, and children who cannot swim should be directly supervised by a parent or caregiver who is within arm’s reach.
“A pool is not a daycare centre,” Hawkins said.
Regulations vary from municipality to municipality. In Westmount, children six and younger who use the large pool, for instance, must be accompanied by an adult, said Bruce Stacey, division head of the municipality’s Sports and Recreation Department. They can use the splash pad without an adult getting in with them.
In Côte- St-Luc, the rule has long been that children age eight and younger must be accompanied by an adult in the pool, said Darryl Levine, the city ’s director of public affairs and communications.
“However, for kids ages seven or eight who want to swim without their guardian in the pool, we allow them to do a swim test to prove they are strong swimmers. If they pass, we give them a different-coloured bracelet to identify them so lifeguards will let them swim without their parents in the pool.”