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Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

I am impressed by these videos any time the pop up on hacker news. But one thing struck me: that they are using those large floatation rings. A lot of the incidents seem to be where a child looses contact to the ring and then cannot swim on itself. I am wondering, why they are allowed at all. In my personal experience, I have rarely seen such rings in public pools and that basically means, you are not getting far into the deep part of the pool without some basic swimming skills. Most people/children wouldn't even try as they don't feel comfortable with deep water without an aid.

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Those are toys that are fun to play with for people who can swim fine. The problem is when non-swimmers use them as boats. They are not safety devices.

Without the rings non-swimmers couldn't get into trouble but swimmers have less fun. You could also pave over the pool with concrete and remove the hazard entirely - no fun for swimmers but all risks of drowning removed.

As someone who worked as a wave pool lifeguard for 8 years and is a current certified Water Safety Instructor, I mostly agree. The large rafts are never really what I have an issue with. It's water wings and other personal flotation devices that are much more troublesome.

Parents are a huge part of the issue. PFDs give them a false sense of security where they feel like they don't have to watch their kid. The best change my old pool ever made was banning them (besides USCG approved life vests). The rafts were almost never an issue unless parents stuck their kid in the middle and stopped supervising (which happened a lot and we'd yell at the about). Crappy parental supervision is the cause of most problems at pools.

Somehow people don't realize the danger that pools possess.

Swimming is one of the few activities that children engage in which can go so wrong as to end up in their death. I would suggest that it is borderline negligence for a parent to put a child in such a dangerous situation without proper precautions (supervision). I wouldn't let a small child I am responsible for go into a pool alone regardless of the presence of lifeguards. Especially not a wave pool.

> Swimming is one of the few activities that children engage in which can go so wrong as to end up in their death

Climbing trees (fall risk)

Climbing tall playground equipment (I broke my arm falling from a height of just 3 feet once, on one of those). Broken neck, etc.

Playing in the street (cars)

Bicycling (can get hit by a car, sigh)

Trampoline (don't get me started)

Exploring (falling down deep wells, etc.)

The Gashlycrumb Tinies is not just a morbid story about impossible deaths. Living is dangerous, living young possibly especially so!

Making fireworks that closely resembled pipe bombs (almost blew leg off)

oh jesus. yeah, exactly!

I had a pyromaniac phase. Once set a field on fire. Things could have gone extremely worse.

Peter Thiel mentions in his autobiography that, out of the six co-founders of PayPal, four of them made bombs in high school.

Tory Bruno, CEO of the United Launch Alliance, made rockets out of 80yo moldy dynamite. 6m10s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdPoVi_h0r0

Moldy? Psh, that's nothing. The real excitement begins when you play with the sweat coming off the dynamite, like we did back when I was a kid in the 80s!

Note: the above is sarcasm. "Sweating" or "weeping" dynamite is dangerous and you should immediately leave the area and contact your local equivalent of 'the bomb squad' to report it.

Over time, regardless of the sorbent used, sticks of dynamite will "weep" or "sweat" nitroglycerin, which can then pool in the bottom of the box or storage area. For that reason, explosive manuals recommend the repeated turning over of boxes of dynamite in storage. Crystals will form on the outside of the sticks, causing them to be even more sensitive to shock, friction, and temperature. Therefore, while the risk of an explosion without the use of a blasting cap is minimal for fresh dynamite, old dynamite is dangerous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite

Fellow 90's kid-pyro checking in. I remember when my father finally found my stash of black powder, metal tubing, various makeshift cannons, and flammable chemicals. Didn't really get in trouble--he was relieved it wasn't something as dangerous as weed.

Among destructive devices built as kids in the 90s, I think our crowning accomplishment was the Thermite we made as teenagers... only possible thanks to my friend who was somehow able to acquire a big block of Magnesium. I provided the Aluminium baseball bat ;) We got lucky that it fizzled out partway through (maybe from hitting dirt?), but his parents were definitely not too thrilled about the nasty hole in the concrete patio.

So none of those activities resulted in your death? Or are you posting on HN from beyond the grave?

None did, this was a counterargument to the claim that swimming was "one of the few" ways for kids to die.

There are unfortunately many many ways for kids to die.

Yeah, but drowning is way more common than the other ones. This is like saying, "Well, I am not going to wear my seat belt, since people also die from being struck by lightning"

Just because multiple things are possible doesn't mean they are equally probable.

Household:

- various kitchentools, knives, fork

- other tools, axe, hammer

- (poison) cleaning stuff

- climbing on the tish and falling on their neck

- ...

Yes, life is dangerous, yet sadly most parents today take the approach of avoiding all dangers at all cost.

And of course you should not leave dangerous things around and make it as safe as possible, but how can one learn, how to deal with dangers, when all the slightest dangers are removed? That will only hurt later on.

One have to play with fire, to learn how to deal with it. If parents forbid it completely, kids will just burn stuff on their own. I did ... and luckily I never burned anything down. But friends of mine ... allmost burned down a village.

Drowning far outweighs all of those categories for ages 1 - 9 https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...

In the large majority of motor vehicle incidents the child is an occupant of the vehicle : https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

I see they have a category "Unintentional Pedestrian, Other" unable to find a glossary. Possibly refers to being hit by MV while a pedestrian?

Unintentional Poisoning seems really common for adults?! Misuse of prescription drugs apparently.

That's also illegal drugs, IE opiod overdoses

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5605a1.htm

The graph in your first link is absolutely fascinating. I found the number of "Unintentional Poisoning" and "Suicide" deaths especially surprising (due to the high numbers)

Unintentional poisonings have rocketed up the charts in the past few years. It didn't used to be in first place. That's the fentanyl crisis you're seeing.

The document we were looking at for poisoning was from 2011.

10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group HighlightingUnintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2011

It seems I'm getting old, but you can watch it happen:

2007 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/unintentional_2007_bw...

2008 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...

2009 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...

2010 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10lcid_unintentional_...

2011 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...

All Data - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html

In the US children aged under 9 cannot be counted as a death by suicide.

Suicide means "the deceased ended their life, and had the intent to do so". The US says that people under the age of 9 cannot make a reasoned decision about killing themselves, and thus cannot have the intent to die.

So there will be some people under 9 who killed themselves. It will be a very small number. But their death will be counted as something other than suicide.

Jesus. Multiple types of suffocation for babies < 1 yr old

From your link:

5-9: Unintentional Drowning 128

Unintentional Fire/Burn 81

I would not call that "far outweighs".

I can agree with that not "far outweighing", but those are mostly home fires : https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/105/6/1355#re... not "activities that children engage in"

The most likely outcome from all the scenarios you mentioned is that nothing happens. Kids do these things all the time and are just fine.

Injuries occur occasionally, and even less frequently are those injuries fatal.

A friend of mine supermaned head-first into a tree while snowboarding last year. The tree was probably a foot in diameter, and he was going fast enough to shake snow off the whole tree. What happened? Nothing. We all laughed about it and kept snowboarding.

We are pretty resilient creatures when it comes to impact damage.

Drowning though, completely different. Much like filling a car's oil intake with dirt and then having the engine immediately seize. If you start breathing in water, you're do some serious damage to your lungs and cutting off oxygen to your brain, and further inhibiting basic survival functionality, and quickly resulting in death, if not remedied immediately.

It depends on the child's ability. Plenty of kids were swimming by themselves in the ocean at 8 or younger because they had a lot of experience or even doing competive swimming from younger ages. Most parents when I was a kid would set rules as too how far into the sea you could swim and that'd be it. I think this is common throughout the world in places close to beaches as I was.

I think the key is: learn swimming in an early age and then regularly go swimming. Swimming, not using floating toys. Children, who regularly play in the water - we did all kind of water-wrestling :) - can get extremely proficient at it.

Yeah I’m taking swimming lessons as an adult after totally failing to retain what I was taught as a child. You have to practice and play in the water constantly to develop any proficiency. To get a child to do that means they have to not be afraid of the water.

Can confirm, grew up near the sea, was free diving for shiny rocks and shells by 7 or 8 and would spend hours in the water every day of vacation. Parents had to basically drag me out so I wouldn’t starve.

> I wouldn't let a small child I am responsible for go into a pool alone

You would. Let me give you the scenario: you're home alone with the three kids, you've been chasing them around, doing laundry, cleaning up spilled grape juice, telling Jenny to stop cutting Tommy's hair, etc. Finally, you think everyone is down for a nap. You turn on the game. 5 minutes later, 5 minutes, you think "It's too quiet...". You get up and walk around for a couple minutes to find 4 year-old Sally's door open. No Sally. Where's Sally? Sprint around the house, run down to the kitchen, look in the back yard, and she's face down in the pool. You immediately get her out, desperate. You realize you have to separate from her to call 911. She's been unaccounted for by now for 12 minutes.

The paramedics get a breath back, but anoxic brain injury has set in. She dies, tubes in every orifice, 3 days later.

I have seen this play out more than once. My parents had a pool. I was a lifeguard, have made rescues. I was also on swim team, I'm in the Navy now, and I'm a physician. I surf, I dive, I do open ocean swimming and triathlons. I've helped rescue a diver in pulmonary edema. I think I wouldn't leave my kid unattended, but I know I might.

I've met the parents. They wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone either.

I have a pool.

I have a fence.

A friend's son was visiting, also four years old, vanished for just a second and suddenly I thought Oh god, the pool. Sure enough there he was stuck outside the fence trying to get to the pool but frustrated that the latching mechanism can only be operated by someone at least 5 feet tall.

I wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone. Pool safety is life and death. Get a fence.

Better yet: don't have a private pool.

The houses in my new construction neighborhood all have pools. We deleted the pool and got almost no cash back, so far as I know we were the only family to do so. I'm not carrying that responsibility.

+1.

I don't know why my comment above was downvoted, but we did consider buying a house with a pool when our kids were young, and we decided that the risk was ETOOHIGH, especially given that we have a wonderful community pool in the neighborhood.

Pools are expensive to operate and dangerous to have children around -- your own as well as your guests'.

That was an extreme example,the point is that kids can end up in the water in unexpected ways. Even parents that would never intentionally leave children in the water alone can end up in a situation where a child is unattended in the water. Perhaps a better example is when you have 4 kids to keep an eye on at a public pool, and you lose track of one while dealing with an injury to another, or reapplying sunscreen, or a number of other reasons to be distracted. Or what about the situation where you send your kids outside to play and they sneak back to the pool? No sensible person would let their children into the pool alone, but it can absolutely happen to even the most careful adult.

A pool needs at least two lines of protection. One day the three year old will drag a garden chair or the box someone left out to the fence and climb over it.

I don't mind leaving my child unattended for a short period in a safe area. But not near a pool.

Of course luxury homes with their own pool in the backyard put rather a big strain on safety around your own home. Put a good fence around it, I guess.

> I don't mind leaving my child unattended for a short period in a safe area.

...and safety is relative to this child's capability. My parents put me through extensive swimming lessons from a young age precisely so they could let me play unsupervised in the ocean. I'd been a half mile out to sea alone by the time I was 10. Turns out I wasn't as unsupervised as I thought; my mum was freaking out but, unable to swim, couldn't do anything about it!

But if the child can't swim, no alone pool time for them.

Exactly. My oldest son, now 10, has been perfectly able to swim on his own. We live in a former port area with lots of great swimming spots that he visits with his friends. But he's got his swimming diplomas (two of them, which I consider the minimum for this situation).

Sea, though, can be tricky. Half a mile out to sea, currents can be very different. I know that I as a kid once floated on a tiny inflatable boat quite a bit out to sea, and my dad swam after me to drag me back. I thought I could get back on my own, but my dad clearly wasn't entirely convinced.

A true story about an autistic boy and his father who spent a whole night drifting after a riptide pulled them out to sea: https://www.mensjournal.com/features/lost-in-the-waves-19691...

Some countries and states with pool culture legally require a fence around all pools. As far as I can tell, New Zealand has a legal requirement for a fence for over 30 years. There is a little more info on other countries here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_fence

I don't have a pool, thus solving this problem.

I suppose you also avoid getting mugged by never leaving your room, thus solving this problem.

Until someone breaks into your backyard and sets up a kiddy pool, and your toddler goes and falls into it!

Swimming is weird, right? Imagine if whenever you took a step outside you had to remember to put your foot back down or else you'd drift off into the vacuum of space. You could jump and fly around like a balloon but if you went too high you could never get back down. Swimming is that but upside-down.

I grew up near a lake in the Alps and I am quite sure that any floatation device in Europe that is not safe for leaving your kids unsupervised has a big warning sign printed on the floatatiin device itself.

An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.

Those are called "water wings" in the US and the person you were replying to feels quite the opposite about their safety; the ones I've seen available for purchase in the states are easy to dislodge accidentally.

The ones which are just placed on the arms and not tethered to each other have a failure mode where they easily come off if the child puts their arms straight up. Unfortunately, this is also a common drowning fear response.

In general, I want people to have full market freedoms, but I put those water wings pretty near lawn darts in terms of danger.

I'd call lawn darts safer, as the danger with them is a lot more obvious. Everyone understands that throwing sharp things at people will lead to injury. It takes a significantly more informed consumer to know that a product masquerading as a safety tool is ineffectual at best.

All of the ones I've encountered in Europe are practically impossible to dislodge once they've been inflated.

All of the ones I've encountered in Europe have a butterfly-ish creature on one side and warnings in a dozen languages on the other side - not a safe flotation device.

I’ve seen a three year old jump into a pool with these (European) and they came right off, with the child plummeting to the bottom.

Pretty much anything that people might use in the water has that - vests, armbands, beachballs, whatever.

>An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.

Those are widely considered NOT safe, a non-swimmer child is probably much safer without them than with them, as using them lulls the caregiver into a false sense of security and they pay much less attention to them. They also teach children the wrong posture for swimming/floating, which can be difficult to unlearn. In the US the common wisdom says that if you use them you must be in arms reach of the child at all times - but that's what you'd do without them anyway, so what's the point?

The idea that you'd leave a non-swimmer child unattended with them is, frankly, horrifying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_armbands

The problem there, though, is the lack of parental supervision, not the armbands themselves. The bands do keep the child's head above water. But no matter what, parents need to understand that you don't leave a small child alone near water.

Arm bands should never be used. Unless they're the kind that has a chest piece, there is a significant risk of them pinning a child's face in the water.

Unfortunately those are profoundly unsafe. They only keep the child's head above water while they are slid all the way up to the shoulders. If they start to slip down the arms, which they are apt to do when swimming, they'll tend to slip all the way down to the hands and if the child isn't strong enough to pull themselves up out of the water it can keep them from being able to swim at all as it holds their hands up.

Try to imagine if you were less buoyant like if you had ankle weights on and someone tied two empty milk jugs to your hands. Your hands are suddenly not useful at all for swimming and you can't pull them underwater so now you're forced to hold yourself up by pushing your arms out.

Here's how it can look, and this makes it a bit clearer why it can be a hazard. https://i0.wp.com/renomomsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/0... If it slips down to the wrists like this it's arguably worse than having nothing at all.

I maybe should have added that I grew up during the 90s so maybe that changed already.

I'm not sure what inflatable things exist that go on a child's arms and they can't remove themselves. Water wings are considered quite unsafe.

Is it possible you are thinking of something like Puddle Jumpers (look up an image online), which look like water wings but strap behind the child's back, and don't actually inflate? Those are, indeed, considered safe.

Most pools they aren't. I worked as a lifeguard at a large public park in the Midwest in High School. We trained with many of the other large public parks in the area. The only flotation devices allowed are US Coast Guard approved lifejackets.

Part of the reason for floatation devices is a transitionary measure to get them more used to and practiced in "preswimming" while participating and not simply wading or pool side clinging.

They are just often misused - you are supposed to be supervising them when they are in the pool period and they only need deep enough water to keep their feet off the ground.

Personal opinion, based off my own experience and teaching other children how to swim:

Flotation devices have no part to play in teaching how to swim. Parents (or teachers) holding their children and teaching them how to float is step 1. Only after the child can handle themselves in water (float, know when to breathe) should they be playing with flotation devices.

I agree with this. I was very late to learn how to swim and only learned finally at around age 10.

Previous attempts to teach me to swim used flotation devices. Without them, I was terrified of drowning.

A very smart swimming teacher, seeing my fear, taught me to float on my back, first with her assistance, then without it. Once I could float, she taught me to swim backwards, froggy style. I was afraid even about that, but she said "If you ever find yourself unable to swim, just float!" and I felt confident to do that.

From there, I was comfortable swimming on my front, because once again, I knew how to go on my back and float!

Then the rest was simple skill acquisition.

30 years later, I wish I knew the name of that swim instructor!

We should clarify that PFDs (life-jackets) are probably good for young children and new swimmers. It's the floating toys that might actually be harmful.

And one skill that swimmers need, but cannot really get with an float-assist device, is putting their face in the water. I watched an adult friend learn to swim, and this was REALLY hard for him. Crazy enough - he was ex-Royal Navy submariner, so he had passed basic water survival - he could float on his back, just couldn't do anything beyond that.

> cannot really get with an float-assist device, is putting their face in the water.

We used kickboards for this exact purpose. So you can float face down with arms outstretched holding the board. You can transition to freestyle swimming taking one hand off the board at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM3z1eDDcGE

So it was practised for teaching swimming here in Poland at schools, but these are always in a very shallow pool and supervised too.

They lack the failure mode of floating face down in water, but instead are unsafe to others who can be hit with them. And kids will collide.

The newer foam ones are much softer and safer.

We used the same in school - mostly for training leg movements. Back then, everyone had basic swimming capabilities. But these kickboards are a totally different story than the blue donuts in the videos.

PFDs are a safety device, they’re great. If you think your child might be unsupervised, putting one on is safer than not. But as a teaching aide, they’re terrible.

You can’t swim with a lifejacket. You can only float (and in a position that is different from how you would naturally float in water).

Yeah, I wasn't super clear - PFDs are great if a new swimmer just needs to be in the water. My nephews used them at the beach when they were toddlers. But swim lessons were mom/dad/instructor holding them in the water.

Weird they'd allow that, in the US you have to be able to swim a lap to graduate from Navy bootcamp, no matter which job you're going into.

Arm floaties are a crutch that ought never be used. If your kid isn't strong enough to swim on their own, don't give yourself the false sense of security that comes with floaties.

As an anecdote, they almost killed a friend's daughter a few years ago.

She had jumped and fallen forward, and her arm floaties moved her buoyancy to her stomach-area, forcing her face into the water. Scary stuff.

She was even in a swimming pool she could stand in.

A real life jacket approved by the USCG or similar agency may be more expensive than water wings, but unlike cheap water wings, they are designed to keep the wearer's face out of the water. A type I or II jacket can turn some or most unconsious wearers rightside up.

https://www.boatus.org/life-jackets/types/

I learned to swim using a float shaped like a miniature surfboard that I held out in front of me. This was both supervised and done in water shallow enough that I could stand with my head above the surface. If I had not been allowed access to this I am certain that I would have refused to go in the water at all (I was already very reluctant to do so even with the float).

> Part of the reason for floatation devices is a transitionary measure to get them more used to and practiced in "preswimming" while participating and not simply wading or pool side clinging.

The reason for worn (handheld is a different story) flotation devices other than lifevests is to sell flotation devices; I've never found anyone who teaches swimming to children (or adults, but that's not the market for them anyway) that uses them, advises using them, or considers them anything other than a safety hazard.

If you want to get a kid used to “preswimming”, which as I've seen it is actually something mostly done with infants and toddlers (older nonswimmers usually seem to go straight from wall exercises to supervised short swimming with knowledgeable teachers) it's best to do it with an adult holding them, except for extremely brief transitions.

Someone who can't swim on their own should only ever use a coastguard-approved lifejacket or other personal floatation device. because of the risk of users falling off, Float toys like inner tubes, rafts, etc are only safe for swimmers. If the pool is busy, it's probably safter just to prohibit non-pfd, since they can obscure the view of the pool floor. Unapproved floats, especially water wings, run the risk of deflating or placing a non-swimmer in a position where his or her face is underwater.

Also, when I was a lifeguard, one of the things that was sometimes hard to get to parents' heads is that "supervising" a non-swimmer does not mean sitting on the side of the pool reading a book--it's being in the water no more than an arm's length of the nonswimmer. Every second is critical in a drowning incident, so having a parent less than a meter away will almost always do a better job rescuing a kid than a lifeguard in preventing an accident

I could spot the person fairly easily, but that's either luck or because I can't swim, so I was looking for the person doing what I would be doing.

Please learn to swim. It's never too late. Plus, it's fun. Plus, it's classy. Plus, you won't be caught "in over your head" (sorry) in situations like this. Humans are meant to learn to swim IMHO. The instinctive response is just a "stub" that is expected to be built upon, similar to language ability and crawling->walking and other human things. (Humans don't naturally walk unless they are taught to, did you know that? Source: Sadly, a handful of humans were raised by other animals over the years, and none of them walked naturally when discovered.)

When I went to Cornell, learning to swim was a mandatory requirement. If you didn't pass the "swim 2 laps" swim test they gave you right off the bat, your first assigned P.E. class would be a swim class. (Apparently, one of the large Cornell donors stipulated this as part of his donation. Possibly, someone in their immediate family had died due to lack of being able to swim.)

You say you don't look good in a bathing suit? Swimming will teach you not to care. Hell, if you're heavy, staying close to the water surface is actually easier. And you can get great exercise WITHOUT putting the stress on your joints that pretty much every other exercise will do to you if you're heavy. (Note: I'm a bit overweight, so I get it. I get it.)

Did I mention it's fun? If you're an adult, you will feel like a kid again.

You say you don't live near a coast? Well, when you go on vacation and are near a beach, you can actually go into the water fearlessly! And surely, there's a pool of some sort nearby.

Don't be afraid. Don't care what others think. Please consider it.

How does one learn to swim with small feet? I tried to learn how to swim multiple times when I was a youth (grade school, middle school, high school). I could never grasp it and would always end up flailing my legs or slowly sinking. It was quite traumatic :)

Flippers. Flippers magnify your kick strength, you have NO IDEA by how much (like literally it must be 10x or more). They're inexpensive, and there's no shame in having them. They're easy to put on and take off.

I also scuba dive, and flippers are a necessity in that circumstance. There is a MASSIVE difference in propulsion with flippers. Since you can encounter currents in open water scuba diving, they're a lifesaver. (Scuba is super cool too, btw. But that's like... super advanced swimming. Baby steps.)

Also, arm strength. I actually think most of my propulsion when swimming comes from my arms, not my legs (I'm not saying this is the most efficient... it's just what I do... I never said I was a PERFECT swimmer, lol). Hold your fingers together in like a shallow "cup" shape, push front to back, then either lift them out of the water back to the front OR do what I do when I breast stroke and just point your fingers forward and push them through the water back in front of you in as "waterdynamic" a shape as you can figure out. And then reform the cup with your fingers/hands and push yourself through the water again.

> (Scuba is super cool too, btw. But that's like... super advanced swimming. Baby steps.)

I've met more than one scuba diver who were weak swimmers but avid divers. To your previous point, flippers turn a weak swimmer into > an olympian.

Additional comment:

I did some googling and found these fins designed specifically for pool lap swimming: https://myswimpro.com/blog/2018/03/01/8-benefits-of-swimming...

They're smaller than your traditional "scuba" style fins but probably still WAY more effective than your feet alone.

They look fun! Wow, now I want to swim again. So fun. lol

Experiment! Google! Have fun! Ignore haters! Let go of your negative experiences!

You don't really need your feet to swim. In my personal experience when swimming most propulsion comes from my hands, not my feet. Once you can tread water with just your arms you'll have plenty of time to figure out how to swim with your feet without having to worry about sinking.

I've found the same (I think most of my propulsion is from my hands) but I always assumed I was doing it less efficiently (but didn't care)

Are you talking about small feet now? In general, I don’t really think foot size is all that important for swimming. Especially if you’re kicking.

People that can swim can do so without using their feet or legs.

There are paralympic swimmers with no arms or legs who can swim a length faster than me, and I'm a competent swimmer. I wouldn't worry about your foot size.

I parsed that on first read as "no (arms or legs)" instead of "(no arms) || (no legs)" and was very surprised!

I did the same thing..

Found the programmer :)

Your first read was correct, there's a guy with no limbs and he's surprisingly fast!

Larger feet are a genetic advantage for swimming but are in no way required.

Like most other sports there is a body type that is advantaged in swimming.

- Tall overall height (max speed is limited by length at water line just like boats)

- Lower than usual ratio for torso length to leg length

- Large feet

- Long arms (positive ape index)

- Large hands

Michael Phelps is a perfect example of this.

Then you still need to think, to avoid getting caught in tough water with a muscle cramp, or getting caught by seaward currents during tides, etc, etc. So, yes, it's good to know how to swim, so that you can survive immediately after getting into water, but it doesn't automatically make you bulletproof safe in water :)

Thank you for this. Swimming is a basic human activity and everyone should know how to swim, at least to a "I won't drown at a pool party" level. It's like not knowing how to ride a bike.. it's really not that hard to learn, and there are no good excuses for an adult to not know how to.

I noticed that too. The last try was the kid try to grab the ring in a hurry, but the ring is too big to grab he actually pushed it away. Seem to be really dangerous.

Many of these samples are also in a wave pool. And crowded. I assume with all of the above, drowning risk is much higher in these pools.

It's a shame that swimming/water survival aren't a part of school in the US. Knowing how to tread water and doggy paddle are valuable, life-saving skills.

It's partially because if you can teach them those skills you can probably also teach them to swim full stop. A big difficulty with that is most schools would also have to travel to get access to a pool. I've only gone to one school before college that had a pool and it was a charter school on a local college campus so they had access to that pool, some schools might have to travel 30m-1h to get to a pool if they're in a rural area.

When I was a kid in the 70's in rural California, we were bussed almost an hour to a bigger school for mandatory swimming lessons. I don't remember at what age but it was elementary school, I think maybe 5th-6th grade. Several grades were grouped together.

Most (all?) of us could already "swim" basically, since there were lakes and rivers near the small towns and kids usually got free swimming lessons around age 5. The bigger lessons were about the various (then) standard strokes, pool safety and basic lifesaving, how not to accidentally kill yourself on a diving board, swimming laps instead of just swimming around, etc.

I absolutely hated it (too many strangers, why didn't we have our own pool, my endurance was crappy, I was afraid of the deep) -- but I'm glad they made us do it instead of letting us wimp out.

I think it's something schools should do but the logistics of doing it is difficult. You don't want to do it for a whole gym class and you want more instructors available than schools have staff to provide so they have to work with some other group to get enough people to work individually with the kids.

There is of course education that can help in a lot of these situations. What amazes me is that there is no one around these kids to look for them apart from the pool staff.

Most pools here allow for non/bad swimmers to go where they want, with what they...under the absolute condition to have a good swimmer with them, all the time.

A small kid straying alone in the pool is already an alert and the pool staff will get the kid out of the water on the spot, with no reentry. Here the kids are big enough that they could be swimming by themselves, so for me the blame is on the parents for not being there, even if it was for just a minute.

I would expect so as well.

Most Wave pools are at resorts/water parks which typically do not necessarily even employ fully trained/high skill lifeguards.

They often rely on private certification programs that will train "shallow water lifeguards" who do not have to have a full set of swimming & rescue skills. They do tend to have good training for spinal injuries though.

Add in that these resorts are most attractive to non-swimmers and they are hopelessly crowded and it is a dangerous mix.

Places like Great Wolf Lodge scare the daylights out of me as a former lifeguard/WSI.

In most pools you shouldn't even be allowed in this wave pool unless you can pass a basic swim test. Most of the time that's a given with a kid under 12, but it is not entirely obvious (from the videos) how old the drowners are.

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