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.
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.
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.
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!
I had a pyromaniac phase. Once set a field on fire. Things could have gone extremely worse.
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.
There are unfortunately many many ways for kids to die.
Just because multiple things are possible doesn't mean they are equally probable.
- 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.
In the large majority of motor vehicle incidents the child is an occupant of the vehicle : https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Unintentional Poisoning seems really common for adults?! Misuse of prescription drugs apparently.
10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group HighlightingUnintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2011
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
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.
5-9: Unintentional Drowning 128
Unintentional Fire/Burn 81
I would not call that "far outweighs".
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.
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 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.
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'.
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.
...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.
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.
An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.
In general, I want people to have full market freedoms, but I put those water wings pretty near lawn darts in terms of danger.
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.
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.
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.