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Comment by lzol | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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