Parents vs. the Lifeguard State

WILLIAM WATSON

Something you don’t quite realize before becoming a parent is that along with the newborn comes a permanent, low-level, background dread that bad things will happen to your child. LIke the background noise of the universe, that dread never ends. Parents’ worst nightmare is that their child dies before they do. Or rather: Parents’ worst nightmare is that their child dies before they do and it’s their fault.

Sad to say, several Quebec families have been living that nightmare in the last few weeks. A recent heat wave has pushed student demonstrations from the headlines and replaced them with horrible stories of toddlers drowning in backyard pools, of pre-teens drowning at public beaches patrolled by lifeguards and day-camp counsellors, and of non-swimming teens walking too far out into the river, stepping into underwater holes and drowning.

These are truly heart-rending stories. The anguish and guilt the parents of these children are feeling must be almost literally unbearable. No one with even a shred of human sympathy — and, whatever you may read elsewhere in the paper, that does include us reformist neo-liberals — can but feel pity for them. From this summer on their lives will be hollow.

Still, it is a reflection of the way we live today that, implicitly at least, all Quebecers are being asked to share in the guilt. Thus the province is reviewing its water-safety rules. A three-hour water-safety course is being made available to third-grade students starting this year. Nonswimmers henceforth will be required by law to wear life jackets while swimming. A number of municipalities are conducting inspections of backyard pools to make sure they conform with what are already detailed regulations.

The particulars of these new policy innovations raise lots of questions. Is three hours really enough to waterproof eight-year-olds? Are the schools not already overburdened with non-academic obligations, having previously been mandated to acquaint students with social norms regarding bullying, diversity, sexuality, morality and re-

Responsibility 101 says parents are responsible for their children

ligious belief at the expense (because there are only so many hours in the day) of literacy, numeracy and history? Mightn’t life jackets bring the unintended consequence of emboldening non-swimmers to put themselves into more dangerous situations, with the result that drownings don’t actually decline?

But there is a more fundamental question here. Consider the backyard pool, which, as a flight into Montreal on a sunny day makes clear, Quebecers have more of per capita than almost anyone else in the world. If you’ve got both a backyard pool and an infant, is it really the regulator’s or the government’s or the society’s responsibility to make sure the infant doesn’t get into the pool unsupervised? Do parents really need to be told such pools should be fenced in and that the fence has to be not only high enough to keep their toddler out but also functioning? (In one recent tragedy, there was a fence but the lock on the gate apparently was broken.)

Responsibility 101 is that parents are and should be responsible for the safety of their children. They’re the ones who need to make sure their backyard pools are secure, who need to get their kids swimming lessons at an early age, who need to outfit them with life jackets if it’s their view this will make them safer.

Even neo-liberals understand there are things government needs to do. It needs to provide “public” goods — goods all consume and no one can be excluded from consuming, which means private firms can’t make a profit producing them. It may have a role, when its intervention doesn’t make matters worse, in regulating “externalities,” where one person’s activity impinges on other people. It may properly set about addressing the worst ravages of poverty.

But in general governments don’t need to burden themselves, nor therefore should they, with the provision of “private” goods, those whose consumption mainly affects the person doing the consumption, who therefore has every incentive to do the right thing.

Is there a more private good than the safety of one’s own children? Neighbours may share the pain of a child’s death. Does anyone, can anyone feel it as keenly as parents do?

As an expression of empathy, the advent of Lifeguard State is perfectly understandable. Legislating and regulating have become the way we express concern these days. But the real message coming out of children’s drownings is, not that the state needs to be a better lifeguard, but that parents, who are and should be responsible for their children’s safety, need to see to it more effectively.

If we move instead to a system of collective responsibility, so that in the not-distant future the negligent swimming-pool regulator is sued for the backyard death, will that really help children be safer? When responsibility is shared, is anyone truly responsible?