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Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

My brothers daughter went to a private pool party that had a life guard and a 4 year old drowned. Apparently there were a lot of floaties in the pool and no one noticed him slip in. I was living in Miami at the time and it shook me immensely as I was a new dad, pools are everywhere, and the thought of losing my son who was 2yo was unbearable. I was at the apartment pool chatting with a friend who is a very advanced swimmer - the type that swims laps seemingly endlessly - and she asked “have you ever seen what would happen if he fell in the pool?”. I said no, and then she suggested I try it so that I would at least know. So I picked him up and with no warning tossed him in. He immediately froze under water, arms and legs outstretched in literally stunned silence. I counted to 5 and pulled him out and he was trembling with fear.

At that point I realized that the time it takes for a kid to drown is one breath. That may be 3 seconds, may be 10 seconds. It’s considerably shorter than the time it takes to run to the restroom, answer a call, pick up the pizza at the front door etc. They won’t fight for their life and splash, they’ll simply freeze stiff and die in silence.

I literally shared that story with every close friend I have with kids to warn them about how fast it can happen, now I’m happy to share it with you. I won’t bore you with another story concerning my brothers daughter who almost died while in swim class at the MIT pool but suffice it to say, if you haven’t taught your kids how to swim, I advise you not to trust them with anyone but yourself and your partner.

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That's the kind of trauma that stays with someone for their whole life, and not a very nice thing to do to your kid. I hope you can make sure that he sees water as something fun and not threatening as he grows up.

Mercifully, you don't really start forming strong memories until you're about 3-4, and your brain is gloriously plastic until around 23, so, to say 'that's the kind of trauma that stays with someone for their whole life' isn't really the case.

They might be a little timid around water, but, get them in swim classes in a year or so, and they'll be zooming around in no time without a care in the world.

Unfortunately not true. Babies who experience trauma may never be able to tell you about it, but they will remember it the same way they remember that their parents are safe people: it shows up in their emotions, their nervous system, their reactions to stimuli that seem innocuous.

In other words “there appears to be a reorganization of cognitive and memory functions such that narrative memory for events prior to age three or four are difficult to access later in life. These two points have led to the pervasive, inaccurate and destructive view that infants do not recall traumatic experience…”

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/child_law...

pretty sure that getting born trumps any trauma you can give a 2 yr old.

I'm not sure how you're so sure.

People being born isn't a new development. If it were significantly harmful, evolutionary pressure would have had ample time to apply.

On the other hand, I can think of plenty of trauma that wouldn't be good for a 2 year old child.

On second thought, of course there is plenty of trauma you can give a two yr old, my brain happily didn't go there during my earlier reply. I meant by actions of a parent with good intentions.

And if their parents aren't safe people, they remember that too.

I experienced feeling truly, deeply, completely safe for the first time in my thirties. It rocked my world. Things almost didn't seem real immediately afterward, like I was dreaming. I compare it to visiting France when I could speak Spanish, but not French. My brain wanted to reply to people in "not English," so kept trying to spit out Spanish responses to French questions. My brain didn't have a context for "safe" other than "not real life," so it tried to react like I was dreaming.

I don't want to go into all the details about what it's like to try to teach your parasympathetic nervous system how to come fully online when you're this far into adulthood, but I recommend making sure children do have somewhere they can practice coming down from stress way before they're my age.

But this is just a feeling, not reality?

e.g. The risk of being instantly erased by a falling meteorite/random airplane part/space debris/etc. is never literally zero. Just very very low.

My sister died very suddenly, apparently fine one minute and irrecoverably dead the next. I know I'm never completely safe.

Maybe the better term in this case is "protected," but I'm not sure. "This person, here with me, is not a threat to me, and I know that in my bones. Further, he would interpose himself between me and any threat that should arise in this moment." That's the feeling.

Most people experience that as infants. Parents are supposed to love their children this way. And it's important for the neurological development of the parasympathetic nervous system. I just didn't get to until my thirties.

Absolutely: it’s only because of the tremendous impact of lacking felt safety as an infant that we know they can tell the difference.

I have strong memories of significant-to-me events that happened when I was 1-2 (moving houses, falling out of bed as an infant, getting scratched by the family cat, and the birth of my sister, just to name a few).

My earliest memory is at about 18 months.

We dramatically underestimate the ability to think and reason for very young kids. Laying down memories included. I believe memories are more likely to set in when an experience is novel and new. Big events like you cite fall into that territory.

I think a lot of those who can't remember things before age 5-6 is because they had extra-stable environments.

What did you remember about the birth of your sister?

Do you not have any memories from <3?

This is obviously false. I have memories from when I was 2 that my parents also remember.

> I have memories from when I was 2 that my parents also remember.

I doubt it.

How can you tell the difference between real memories and implanted memories[1]? Children as old as 11 have been successfully implanted with memories of things that never occurred by their parents, and who later testified that their parents told them nothing!

[1] Your parents told you at age 4 what you did at age 2, you remembered the act because it was told to you, you don't remember the act of them telling you.

No need to question the previous comments experiences. Is there really anything which is "certain" when it comes to memories?

I'm not a memory expert, but as I recently read a book on the subject I think I have better than average understanding of it. If you can read Swedish or Finnish I do recommend it, the title is "Minnets Makt" by Julia Korkman (freely translated "The power of memory", official title is "Memory Dependent")[1].

The book taught me a lot about how memories work, how they are formed, recalled and modified during the years. And as memories are a core part of everyone's life, I think it would be good for more people to understand them better.

I did find a youtube video where the author, does a short lecture meant for law enforcement to teach them the basics of how memories work. As for them it is even more important to understand how meories, especially the recall of memories work when they interview people.

Disclaimer, I haven't watched it yet, only skimmed it but it does seem to cover the same concepts as in the book.

I recommend spending 27 minutes watching it for anyone who's curious about how the memory work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSyEs6feH0M&t=442s

[1] https://www.helsinkiagency.fi/memory-dependent/

> How can you tell the difference between real memories and implanted memories[1]?

Let's say something emotionally significant happened to you at the age of 2. Because it was significant, you keep recalling it regularly, maybe every week or so. Recalling and thinking about the memory is also strengthening it (and often altering it). There's not enough time to forget it if you keep refreshing the memory of it (kinda like LRU cache).

I have a couple of such early memories which I believe survived through this recall mechanism.

> Because it was significant, you keep recalling it regularly, maybe every week or so.

That's not how two year olds work. Even something as significant as losing a (or both) parents is still not significant enough to be recalled periodically, and we have many cases of that to support the hypothesis that "that's not how two year old brains work".

> I have a couple of such early memories which I believe survived through this recall mechanism.

I'm still skeptical. The first reason is that two year olds don't understand the concept of age in years (or age at all, TBH - they recognoise larger people and smaller poeple, but hafve no conept of age). The second reason is that the odds are very much against your hypothesis.

I have maybe ... two memories which I think were from age 2, but before age 3.

But I cannot determine if I was three or four at the time, instead of two. I cannot determine if they were real or a dream (because they are memories of an event of such non-significance[1] that no one else remembered).

I also cannot determine if they were not real and not a dream! I cannot tell if I "remember" them purely because when I was older my mum used to talk about the place they lived in when I was born, and with all the details, 6yo me simply interleaved actual facts with something my mind made up so that my made up memory is consistent with the facts I heard.

So, yeah, very skeptical when people tell me they can remember being two, because the odds are very much against it, and I say this as someone who has "memories" from 2yo, and I don't believe that those memories are, in fact, the memories of a 2yo me.

Not even a little bit.

[1] Memory #1: being taken to the bathroom one morning by an aunt who sometimes lived with us (and so babysat me quite often and would have done this quite often). I only have a memory of it happening once though, even though it must have happened at least a hundred times.

Memory #2: Looking at a patch of grass with a path that lead to the landlords house (also on same property, I was told when older).

With either of these, I can't be sure if I was 1, 2, 3 or 4 years old at the time. I also cannot tell if either was a dream, and if it was, was it a dream I had at 6yo, dreaming about being 2 yo or was it a dream I had when 2yo?

> and we have many cases of that to support the hypothesis that "that's not how two year old brains work".

What are those cases preventing a 2-year-old remembering something from a week ago, thus strengthening the memory, rinse and repeat?

> The first reason is that two year olds don't understand the concept of age in years

In my case, the memory is linked to potty training and I know when that happened.

> I cannot determine if they were real or a dream (because they are memories of an event of such non-significance[1] that no one else remembered).

I'm kind of confused that on one hand you say that you don't know if it was a dream or reality, and on the other hand completely discount the possibility of having such an early memory.

> because the odds are very much against it

You keep mentioning the odds. How do you calculate them?

> What are those cases preventing a 2-year-old remembering something from a week ago, thus strengthening the memory, rinse and repeat?

I don't see how that is relevant to "we have all these examples of two-year-olds not remembering recent signficant events". I mean, we have observation that $X doesn't happen, but you know want to know what the mechanism is? Why is the mechanism at all important to the observation? With or without a plausible mechanism, the observation still stands.

> I'm kind of confused that on one hand you say that you don't know if it was a dream or reality, and on the other hand completely discount the possibility of having such an early memory.

Well, it's the same reason I am an atheist - as there's literally no evidence for any religions' specific story of a god, I discount the possibility of there being a god at all. People's subjective experience isn't "evidence".

> You keep mentioning the odds. How do you calculate them?

Because there's too many much more likely explanations, many of which I mentioned already, than a non-falsifiable belief in the memory of a two-year old.

Unless you want to dismiss the suggestibility of children, that's basically the most likely explanation.

> we have observation that $X doesn't happen

You can't prove a negative. Did you know that the blue whale was declared extinct in the 80s only to have a pod show up some years later? We observed there were no blue whales and then there were.

You didn't know about anyone with that early of memories and now you do.

> > we have observation that $X doesn't happen

> You can't prove a negative.

Sure, but it becomes exceedingly unlikely as lack of evidence of existence continues.

> You didn't know about anyone with that early of memories and now you do.

Actually, no I don't. I know many many people with self-reported experiences, which is not the same as anyone with early memories.

I mean, if we're talking purely numbers, I'm guessing that the number of people who report god, divinity or occult experiences far outnumber those who self-report early memories, so it should be completely unsurprising that I am unconvinced of an assertion that has even fewer self-reported positive data than religion and god.

Looking at your other response, I don't understand why you feel my skepticism warrants (what I consider, maybe wrongly) your rather forceful assertions that your worldview is correct.

Would you respond the same way to someone who asserted "Well, I'm skeptical that the Gods of Abrahamic Mythology ever existed"?

Would you really tell someone "You didn't know anyone who experienced the biblical god before, and now you do"?

How is your assertion of "You didn't know about anyone with early memories and now you do" at all different from "You didn't know about anyone who was visited by aliens and now you do"?

_Why_ do you think someone can't have that early of a memory? It seems inane. Ok, here is a study:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09658211.2021.1...

the earliest reported memory in this study is 14mo. We are not talking about aliens who's travel to our system defies our current understandings of physics. We are talking about memory. Similar, you have to rely on people to describe pain. Does that mean pain doesn't exist? Or doesn't exist for babies? We've studied memory a lot. Just because _you_ don't have an early memory doesn't mean someone else also doesn't.

I don't understand your position.

To assuage your faulty memory worries, the study's methodology and analysis included longitudinal interviews with children to go over memories over time and the researchers were convinced that they memories were valid enough for the study.

One of my earliest vivid memories is specifically of my 2nd birthday party, so I'm confident I wasn't actually 3 or 4. I might not quite have been 2, or I might have been a few days older than 2, but I can pinpoint my age within a couple weeks on either side. I remember details other people didn't notice or care about, like my disappointment that the teal color of the frosting on my cake was only on the surface, not all the way through (which I discovered by shoving my hands into it), and that the water was too hot when my grandma took me to wash the frosting off my hands. I remember it the same way I remember anything else.

It's probable I encoded my memories verbally much earlier than most children, though. My mom made a list in my baby book of the hundred words I could use correctly on my first birthday, and I was conversational and fluent well before my second.

The theory that "childhood amnesia" happens because we start encoding memories verbally and forget how to access the nonverbal ones would track with my experience. I just encoded mine verbally much earlier than most children.

Most people do not have memories of being two. But some of us certainly do.

How do they even know they were 2, and not, say, 3 or 4? Most of my memories have been "implanted" when I have heard stories or I have seen photographs.

In my case, I would know roughly because some memories I have are from a certain house. My family moved to a different city before I was 3, so those memories can only be from 0-2 years of age.

I am sure I have such memories, too, but I cannot, for certain, say that I was 2 years of age or less at the time.

Yeah, just lucky that my family moved when I was young, offering a way to situate my memories in time, somewhat.

> I doubt it

My earliest memory is at 18 months. How do I know? I recall the building (and some activities and decor inside) that I was in and my mom only went into that building for some medical appointments when I was that age.

How do I know it is not a fake memory? Not sure how I could build a fake memory and then ask my mom about a given building and decor (at like age 12 or something while discussing earliest memories) and she tells me, surprised, that the last time we were there was when I was that young.

> she tells me, surprised,

Your mother has a perfect memory of all conversations she had with you or in your presence?

That's probably even more unlikely than retaining a memory from age 2 to age 12.

I don't know what world view of yours that I'm challenging. Self reflect on that. Where did I say my mom has a memory of a conversation at all? I have a memory of a conversation and an earlier memory. Do you really not recall having had conversations, especially when learning something new, from when you were young? If it is my mom's memory, do you not recall the last time you were somewhere else? Like, you couldn't name the year you had a surgery?

My mom and I, while I was 12, had a conversation. The conversation was about early memories. During that conversation I told of my earliest memory to which my mom replied, in that conversation, that that building and appointment(s) were from when I was 18 months old.

I was twelve when I learned what my age was at the time of the early memory. I am now much older than twelve and I recall this conversation with my mom (and I still recall the memory we were discussing).

She was surprised, when I was twelve, that I had such an early memory.

> I don't know what world view of yours that I'm challenging. Self reflect on that.

You're taking skepticism of extraordinary recall much more personally than I am being skeptical. Your remark about self-reflection is a good one for you to consider too.

I already considered the possibility that my 2yo self might have created memories I know have, and rejected it as too outlandish.

> The conversation was about early memories. During that conversation I told of my earliest memory to which my mom replied, in that conversation, that that building and appointment(s) were from when I was 18 months old.

Unless your mum has a perfect memory, it's far more likely that she mentioned it to you or in your presence as you grew, and then forgot she did. You have never considered the possibility that your mum probably forgot that you were told or within earshot when she told someone else all about that place?

I feel that I don’t have early memories, but for some reason I have a sense of the house I lived in before I was 3. My mother didn’t believe me so I draw her the floor plan one day. She said that’s great but where is the cellar? There apparently were steep steps to another floor which I wasn’t allowed to go and which didn’t exist in my memory. Now the memory seems very faded and I don’t think I could draw the place anymore.

> There apparently were steep steps to another floor which I wasn’t allowed to go and which didn’t exist in my memory.

Surely, if that had been a memory, you'd have remembered steps, even if you never went down them.

Like remembering a table in the middle of the room even if you never ate at it.

None of what you wrote says there was no long lasting trauma, I am pretty confident there is even if onlyin subtle ways.

Have you ever heard about sub-consiousness? People behaving erraticaly without really controlling this aspect.

Ever met a person who was definitely not balanced down deep and even he/she couldnt point out why? I've met unfortunately many of those without even trying, they are all around us if you know what to look for/ask right questions.

Good for OP for testing such an extreme stuff so rest of us dont have to mess up out kids. I would never do such tests on my small kids, even remote chances for something bad is just cruel. Also, he writes it takes even 3s to drown a child, while describing doing even more.

> Mercifully, you don't really start forming strong memories until you're about 3-4

You do. It is just childhood amnesia kicks in at some point, and you lose an access to those memories. There is no accepted explanation what happens, I personally prefer the idea, that your memory qualitatively changes in spite of language acquisition, you get another (upgraded) way to access your memory, and then you forget the old (legacy) way. I like this explanation because my own memories from the time I was ~3 yo are strange (conditionally on I could reproduce them well and not to invent things), they are almost eidetic.

But it doesn't matter to be frank, because your memories were active and accessible at some period of your life and they influenced your development already, maybe changing the development track completely. Father throwing his kind into a pool? Kid was terrified? It is a very emotional experience which is a betrayal of kid's trust, which probably will never be without limits again. It may destroy any trust to other humans as well. Though it may pass without any long term consequences also. People are unpredictable in this regard. But you'd better avoid such experiments with your kid.

> your brain is gloriously plastic until around 23, so, to say 'that's the kind of trauma that stays with someone for their whole life' isn't really the case.

Some things a sticky. If they are strong enough to change behavior at once, if the changed behavior becomes a habit, then habit will enable trauma to resist any brain's plasticity and ability to heal.

And you know, it may be a very rational thing for a kid to stop trusting his father if the father can throw the kid into water just so without any thought of how kid will feel. Probably the kid should be wary around his father.

> I personally prefer the idea, that your memory qualitatively changes in spite of language acquisition, you get another (upgraded) way to access your memory, and then you forget the old (legacy) way. I like this explanation because my own memories from the time I was ~3 yo are strange (conditionally on I could reproduce them well and not to invent things), they are almost eidetic.

I think people stick too much to the idea that human memory is kinda like computer memory.

"Remembering" trauma could also mean that the brain's structure changes in some way as a result of trauma without necessarily recording how the event exactly went.

Reminds me of a video of WW1 shell shocked soldiers I saw recently. It's not the exact memory record of the events which broke those men. Something more profound changed in their brain.

I do not suppose that human memory is like a computer. Thinking of how it works, I believe it works a bit like LLM, you formulate a prompt and get memories. It is an automatic process an you do not see the details, like what the prompt was used.

And suppose if at some point you've learned how to a) store memory in a categorized form; b) use prompts formulated in a language (or at least in categories of language), then you can "forget" the old way of prompt generating.

> "Remembering" trauma could also mean that the brain's structure changes in some way as a result of trauma without necessarily recording how the event exactly went.

This is too vague to my taste. Isn't any memory a brain's structure change?

> Thinking of how it works, I believe it works a bit like LLM, you formulate a prompt and get memories. It is an automatic process an you do not see the details, like what the prompt was used.

In some ways, LLM seem to work kinda like brain. It doesn't remember the exact details, more like patterns, from which it then attempts to reconstruct the memory.

> Isn't any memory a brain's structure change?

Well, yes. I guess what I'm trying to say is that such events produce much larger changes in the brain in comparison to non-traumatic events. In the sense that the child's behavior changes as a result. For example, the child can gain a new phobia which can persevere much longer than the memory of the actual event. My overall point is that even if you forget the actual events, you will carry the consequences of such trauma anyway.

Freud would like a word

I can confirm from personal experience that traumatic experiences seem to transcend the mind-wipe that happens in mid-childhood. At a very early age, I had a form of Krupp, and some of my earliest memories are not being able to breathe, and the panic/anxiety of it. After several decades, it's something I hardly ever think about (somewhat backing up what you are saying), but I definitely remember it.

I would also be hesitant to do this to kids on purpose. My son fell into a pool at the age of ~1, and was pulled out by my wife within a few seconds. However, he had a massive fear of water, and took a long time and concerted efforts to make him comfortable with learning to swim.

If you had an infection of the upper airway that made it hard to breathe, you had croup.

If there was a massive steel foundry pushing down on your chest, it was probably Krupp.

You're right (though it is actually spelled krupp in my language, and I assumed it would be the same in others, as it has no inherent meaning).

> Mercifully, you don't really start forming strong memories until you're about 3-4...

A popular misconception that needs to be challenged, and one that I fear encourages some non-negligible deal of neglect and abuse.

Children under 4 years old have surprisingly excellent memories, extending years back. But something happens around age 4, possibly a burst of neurogenesis, which scrambles most of whatever episodic or autobiographical memory is in the brain. Other forms of memory endure the transition just fine. Motor skills are obviously retained, as are other life-long skills like how to speak (and for the hyper-literate, how to read). Acquired fears certainly survive, and though they can be overcome... they're still around to actually have to be overcome. Early childhood trauma, and especially abuse, absolutely leave an imprint, even if the events themselves are no longer clearly recalled.

I'd recommend reading Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score.

The conscious mind is far from the only place the body stores memory that can impact us later in life.

Idk if I was exposed to it like that, but I hate waters and don’t understand how the risk of death by drowning can be seen as “something fun”. I can swim to the shore if thrown out of boat, but see your deep bath “fun” as a group suicide tickling event. One choke, leg cramp, kick in the head and you’re in grave danger. I’d better walk the border on the roof rather than swimming through somewhere I can’t stand up.

One of my first memories is drowning. We were going down the river and our plot crashed into a fallen tree and turned over. I was in a life saving jacket and I was about 3 or 4 years old. I remember the sun shining through the green-ish water, but I don’t remember being afraid at all.

I was quickly fished out and then I just sat on that same tree and wiggled my legs and enjoyed myself while everyone else scrambled to save the things from swimming away.

I’m also pretty sure that I was thrown into the sea to teach me to swim at some point, but I have no recollection of that, just stories from my parents.

That is to say - I love swimming and feel positively untraumatized by the whole thing, even though it is scary in retrospect. Everyone’s experience is different, just my anecdata point to add.

For me it was my swimming instructor in school that just pushed me into the water when I was afraid to jump in. I can swim, but I never got any of the swimming badges and I'm to this day (30+ years later) very uncomfortable with my head under water or even water in my face.

He SHOULD see water as threatening

But not his own father! Running dangerous experiments on your child without their consent is surely at best extremely unethical. To me it sounds positively sick, or in layman terms, psychopathic.

Every generation before me was taught to swim by being tossed in a pond. It's a dangerous world. Pretending it isn't just lowers the minimum required stress before anxiety takes over.

Why add dangers, though? Even just perceived ones? It's perfectly possible to teach children to swim without giving them the experience of fearing for their lives.

Yes the world is a little bit more dangerous for that kid at least. At any moment his father might throw him in a lake with neither consent nor warning. I never had to worry about my parents experimenting on me and I simply learned to swim with lessons. Lucky me to have had such parents.

What makes it worse is that OP described it as an experiment that was primarily for his benefit, because he wanted to see what it would look like to see kid drowning. No word of wanting his kid to learn something (which still wouldn’t have been ok but at least barely makes a tiny bit of sense). That is mental, and child abuse.

Coincidentally the older people who grew up that way and are proud of it are unbearable pricks

It is indeed a dangerous world. A good parent equips their child with tools to mitigate those dangers -- teaching the child to swim in a gentle and supportive way, for example.

A bad parent subjects their child to an intentional near-drowning, leaving the child afraid, confused and fundamentally unequipped for the danger.

This is how it is now, and this is how it was in previous generations. I do accept that bad parenting was more prevalent in the past, but then, so was leprosy.

Tossing you in a pond so you'll swim is very different from tossing in a pond so you'll drown for 5 seconds.

I still have my first memory of going in a pool, I just jumped straight in and I was doing kind of star jumps with my head popping in and out of the water, while my mum took her sweet arse time fishing me out. I remember being annoyed at that for a while lol.

I’ve let my toddler fall in the pool - the first few times were enough, and she’s now really careful anywhere near it - and still perfectly comfortable with getting in the water appropriately, with a parent.

As for trauma - it really depends. In her case, pretty sure she’s fine as in each case she was promptly rescued and as mentioned, no aversion to water, just to falling in.

In my case - I managed to have an earnest crack at drowning nearly a decade ago, aged 30 or so, and it hasn’t left me. Swimming between two small tropical islands. Tide changed. Calm waters suddenly became ferocious chop, and I swiftly realised I was being swept out to sea, and couldn’t fight the current - and I’m a respectable swimmer. Panic set in faster than I care to admit as I realised that I was pretty fucked.

Thank my lucky stars, someone was watching me, and appeared with a rib as I was starting to take lungfuls of water. I was purple, coughing up and vomiting seawater, sobbing.

Humbling. I’ve no problem with water in general since, but the ocean now scares the shit out of me, and I won’t get in it.

Particularly as it’s something you can easily learn about without doing that!

I have such a trauma. When I was at 2nd grade in primary school, they were bringing us to the nearest pool at a stadium for swimming lessons. The teacher was asking us to jump one by one in the water and to try getting closer to a life-bouye. Most of my schoolmates were able to catch the bouye but at the moment I jumped in the water, I froze and started sinking. I was able to feel how the teacher touched a long metal stick to my arm which I grabbed and she pulled me out. Then she yelled at me why have not I tried to swim. I will never forget this experience. After 40 years, I still can not swim.

It’s a horrible fear. When my eight year old was an infant (four months old), a second cousin (semi distant family member) drowned in a pool at a family gathering. My son’s mom and I (both former lifeguards) put him in infant swim classes immediately. Teaching him the habit of turning to breathe and finding the edge of a pool, along with simple comfort in water, served as an immense comfort. Now I’m faced with his confidence in water that can surprise even the best swimmers (oceans, rivers), so there’s one more parental fear… of course.

Every child should at least learn how to float, front crawl, and backstroke. There’s just too much water in our world to have it be a death sentence.

This was a huge worry for us too especially because we live near the ocean and many swimming pools.

We did Infant Swimming Resource [1] program for our son and I can tell you it’s tremendous! He was able to swim as a 2.5yo. He can float fully clothed.

This is the main thing they teach infants by the way. Just to stay afloat until they get help. It’s a special technique and they drill that until the infant learns. Swimming comes next if there’s a good grasp of the float technique.

Highly recommended!

Watch this demo [2].

[1] https://www.infantswim.com/

[2] https://youtu.be/rKvpPeha2sw?si=Oup3tYz83VNfq_Uc

I once took my son to a fun Waterpark for his 4th birthday. Eventually we went on a very tame slide that had a "splash pool" at the bottom. It felt safe enough to let him go, so I did, watching as he slid down. After a few seconds I went too, after losing sight of him for just a few seconds.

When I got to the bottom of the slide, he was under the water with top of his head a few cms below the top. He stood there motionless, just looking up at me. I'll never forget that look of helplessness. I picked him up and he was fine luckily.

He loves water and swimming now, no trauma or anything. Don't think the danger registered with him enough, but it did with us as parents. He went straight to swimming classes a few weeks after that.

When I was a little kid, my toddler sister fell into a pool I was in, and this was her exact reaction, she just froze up. A lot of family was nearby and one of my uncles scooped her out, but the freezing up is such a surprising response, and apparently not uncommon.

Nobody with small children should be relying on lifeguards. If they're not old enough to swim and make good decisions, they need specialized attention. It's absolutely mindblowing to me how many parents I see at the pool strap some swimmies on their young child and just let them go while they're engrossed in their phone.

As at least one other poster has mentioned, let them fall in the pool while supervised and pull them out within a few seconds. Usually they gain a healthy fear of the water from that. Then take them in with you afterwards so they can see it's fun when it's with you. Also, starting swim lessons shortly after they can walk or run is a good idea.

Well done on instilling in your son the deep-seated lesson that you are not trustworthy.

Most child abuse is committed by family and friends. Perhaps a little skepticism is healthy, rather than teaching them to have unwavering trust in authority figures. Besides, you're bound to screw up a few times anyway (e.g. walking into them when they're suddenly standing where you don't expect, bumping a head when picking them up, …). Kids are fairly forgiving.

"rather than teaching them to have unwavering trust in authority figures."

The system would like to have a word with you.

> Most child abuse is committed by family and friends

Yes, a father in this case.

Rather than being a father who is not abusing his child, better to abuse the child to teach a valuable lesson that family cannot be trusted? Great lesson. How about being a father who can be trusted?

The instinct to shame people into being nicer to kids is in a way noble, but the confidence and vehemence of this comment is misplaced.

It’s not misplaced. Putting your kid in danger without their consent just to “see what it looks like” is completely insane and a huge betrayal.

> I said no, and then she suggested I try it so that I would at least know. So I picked him up and with no warning tossed him in.

record_scratch.mp3

> So I picked him up and with no warning tossed him in. He immediately froze under water, arms and legs outstretched in literally stunned silence. I counted to 5 and pulled him out and he was trembling with fear.

WTF, why would you do that?

At that point I realized that the time it takes for a kid to drown is one breath

I don’t think this is quite true?

You can’t breathe under water, maybe inhaling some water would spur your child into action and at least try get back to the surface. I think you just scared your kid.

My child is an infant and I slowly introduce him to putting his face under the water and now his whole body, seems to have mastered breathe holding pretty well. He comes up giggling even though there was a few times he inhaled some water. Recently he jumped into the pool unexpectedly, I don’t know why he did it, but I was watching him, he just chilled and wait till I fished him out. Came out smiling. Exposure is important.

Had an incident with my daughter where we took our eyes of her for a second and she fell in the water she was playing in. This was a small pool with just us there. We jumped and got her out but it was very scary. She did baby swim lessons so she knew to hold her breath but all it takes is a little longer without noticing. All it takes is not to pay attention... And this was before phones where everywhere. Be very careful. I think Freakonomics discussed how more children are killed by pools then by guns and how important it is to have fences around pools. My wife and me have different versions of who noticed first which is also interesting, scary moments mess you up.

Supposedly babies have a reaction that causes them to hold their breath automatically. I believe it's the same response that makes them freeze up. The lessons are more about reinforcing the breath holding part while teaching them to not freeze up the rest of their body so they can swim.

I had almost the same experience with my four year old this weekend. We were in the public swimming pool and she wanted to put away her swimming ring. So I took the ring and moved it away 3 meters.

I come back and she immediately jumps into the water where she could not stand. She was under the water for marely a second but I saw the panic in her eyes and I also saw that she didn't move in the water. So I quickly went in and got her out.

Luckily we stayed in the water for an hour more after this, so she's probably not afraid of the water. But she wouldn't take off her swimming ring anymore this day.

That's not completely true, but perhaps this could be interesting to watch:

http://spotthedrowningchild.com/

This is why my wife and I started our son in swimming lessons somewhere around 1 year old. Yes, it was fun, but it's an important life and survival skill.

Being a strong swimmer doesn't mean you're invincible, but being comfortable in the water helps in so many of the situations where one might freeze, panic, or otheriwse waste energy. Comfort allows a second or two of rational thought to assess the situation and plan for an exit.

One of many things I learned from [0] is that the vast majority drownings happen in crowded pools with a ton of floaties. It’s so easy to miss a kid falling in. Those floats are supposed to keep kids safe, but they’re a lot closer to being death traps.

[0] http://spotthedrowningchild.com/

I hope you made sure he learnt that water is awesome and fun after such an experiment that no IRB or METC would ever approve.

We sent our 6 month olds for water survival training. Apparently, they can easily learn to relax in the water, turn on their back and swim to the side in like 3 months. At the end of the course they try it by doing what you did

This is why my kid started swim classes (water survival) at 2.

They can learn to swim the length of a pool, float on their back at that age.

You deliberately threw your son into the water to see what happens because a random woman told you so? Schocking. Did you ever consider how that experiment would feel to your kid?

Relax, this was commonly done in baby swimming lessons in Switzerland. Not that big of a deal

They did this to me while I was 6 or 7 and my parents sent me to swimming lessons. Instructor threw me in an olympic sized poll while I had no clue on how to swim. Took me 30 years and a private instructor to get back and actually learn to swim. Great times. :)

Maybe it’s different in Switzerland, but when I took our baby to baby swimming, it did not involve just suddenly throwing the child into the water.

Baby swimming here (Germany) included not throwing them in the water, but placing them underwater manually for a short time; basically a very short dive. This works for infants because they have a reflex where they stop breathing when water hits their face.

However, reading up on that now, the fun thing seems to be that no one can reliably tell when that reflex stops. Could be a few months, could be just a few weeks, so the recommendation is to just not do it. TIL. In any case, throwing a child in the water should just not be done. Period.

How is that a counterargument? "Relax, parents regularly beat their kids with sticks for centuries and they were fine.."

Every time I hear this (my dad is a firm believer, for example, not you, parent commenter), I just ask if we have the same definition of "fine," because we're talking about whether it's OK to hit a child with a stick and they've taken "pro," so I'm not sure we do.

If it's not OK to hit an adult with a stick, it's not OK to hit a child with a stick! And it boggles my mind that this requires explanation.

>> So I picked him up and with no warning tossed him in

Why in the hell would you do that? You just created fear of water for the rest of his life. <<Shaking my head>>

Sometimes information is valuable even when there is no ethical way to collect it.

I hope there was a long discussion after the event, though.

If you're worried about fear of water, rather than damaging the parent/child relationship, that's easily solved. Swimming lessons will do the trick.

Their kid isn’t unique. They don’t need to know how that kid reacts - it’s perfectly adequate to learn from the millions of times it has happened to other children. Does the parent need to try having his own kid run into the road as well, to find out what would happen?

Perhaps true, but I would feel much more confident in my ability to spot a drowning child if I'd seen it with my own eyes, and "child drowning videos" is a very risky google. Tossing a kid in with no warning probably isn't the way, but "learn from the millions of times it has happened to other children" is not as straightforward a process as you make it sound.

> and "child drowning videos" is a very risky google.

A bit less risky than throwing your own kid into water (and publicly telling the story), no?

I would recommend this site: http://spotthedrowningchild.com/

and this article: https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/rescuing-drowning-child...

Sorry, you think it's better to drown your own child than to google it? You can just search "how to spot a drowning person" and you'll find loads of articles and videos

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