07/26/2023
A pediatrician in a recent article recommended that younger children stick with mommy and me lessons until age 4, instead of doing survival swim lessons and stated there is no evidence that survival swim lessons actually reduce drownings.
First, I want to say that mommy and me lessons are actually the dangerous ones, because they teach our most vulnerable kids (drowning is the number 1 cause of death for kids 1-4 years old) to be secure and happy in the water, without teaching them ANY skills to survive in it. Statistically, most drownings in childhood (almost 70%) happen during non-swim times, when kids are not meant to be in the water. Teaching them confidence in a place that they are already so heavily attracted to without teaching survival skills there at the same time is a recipe for a drowning to happen.
I know. I did mommy and me classes with my child. They taught him overconfidence in the water. He slipped away from me for 2 minutes and died of drowning. Since then my organization has carefully examined all schools of thought that we could find, with regard to swimming lessons and have found true survival swim to be far and away the most effective in keeping younger kids safer around water.
Survival swim is safe, loving, careful, attentive and effective. They teach competence (survival skills) at the same time as teaching confidence, so that children will automatically get into a back float if they were ever to fall into the water alone. I personally have seen at least 50 cases of kids saving themselves, using these skills, from the various instructors we work with.
Please know that survival swim, when taught correctly, is safe and effective.
Let’s talk about her notion that there is no “evidence” that survival swim is effective in reducing drowning rates. Not true. There is a plethora of anecdotal evidence. Search kids self-rescuing on youtube. You will see it. When the doctor in this article says there is no evidence,, they are referring to formal studies. However, no formal studies have been done on ANY swim school of thought around their effectiveness in preventing drownings. The dcotor left that part out.
My thought is, our rates of drowning in this age group are not getting better with traditional mommy and me lessons. In fact, they are getting WORSE! Prior to 2018, drowning was the number one cause of accidental death in this age group. Now, it is the number one cause of death period in this age group. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is just NOT working. Why continue to push ineffective strategies???
It’s time for something different. It’s time to teach our kids to survive in the water.
