Hacker News Reader

Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

The US is a vast, varied geographic landscape. On the coastlines, obviously learning to swim is going to be more common than in the Arizona desert. Most of the US isn’t near some enormous body of water, even if small lakes and streams are nearby. It just isn’t reasonable to teach when most people might go their whole lives not needing to swim.

View on HN

You might not know, but many, many houses in AZ do have dug pools in their back yards. Fly over in an airplane sometime. More water access than I had growing up in the PNW when it wasn’t raining.

Arizona was a stand in for "any place that doesn't have direct access to a large body of water." Even if Arizona has large retirement communities rich enough to have pools in most homes, my point stands.

What’s large? I’m not sure the creeks and swimming holes I frequented in my youth would qualify.

Also, the post isn’t about swimmable water—it’s a cautionary tale about how little it takes to drown. I can confirm that as one winter my neighbor drown in a shallow mud puddle off his back porch. He had a non-fatal heart attack and fell into it unconscious.

Large is exactly 20910 liters or more per square foot, absolute cutoff, and if you go even one under it's no longer large.

Man, this is just not an accurate stand-in, though, _because_, well, Arizona has literally over 500,000 residential pools. It's actually one of (if not) _the_ highest pool-per-capita rates.

And because of that, drowning is the leading cause of death for children 1 to 4 years old in Arizona.

As a result, parents here are fairly fastidious about early childhood swim lessons. It's a _big_ deal for us. We've had both of our kids in lessons as early as a year, but a lot of folks start at 6-9 months.

If anything, the distributed nature of the many many many many _small_ bodies of water makes the drowning problem more pervasive and dangerous. An ocean is... well, an ocean: its availability for extremely small children is limited by geography, and many areas where you might take small children are policed by professional lifeguards. Backyard swimming pools, on the other hand, can be a lurking danger literally over your neighbor's wall. My parents had a neighbor one house over who had a 4 year old drown in their pool... from one house further over. He had stacked chairs against the cinderblock wall and climbed over while his grandfather was watching him but dozed off. Even if you don't have a pool in your own backyard, it's a risk here in Arizona.

I don’t care, I picked a hot place less likely to have large natural bodies of water. I don’t know why this is so difficult for you to grasp.

Arizona was the worst possible example. It has the lowest ratio of people per pool in the county. Additionally, pools are far more dangerous for children than the coasts because they are sitting right there at home ever present waiting for you to relax and lose track of the kids.

Setting those aside, the canals for irrigation are more dangerous than rivers. The southern half is also filled with dry riverbeds that turn into raging rivers in storms. Finally, Phoenix itself has something like 4 lakes within an hour drive and the salt river that people float.

The heat of Arizona makes water recreation a huge part of life.

I don't care - you can figure out my point

Your point is wrong. Everywhere in the US has access to some form of swimming.

Whether or not someone learns to swim is dominated by what their parents raising them decide. It’s much more likely to follow an urban vs suburban/rural divide than any kind of geographic correlation.

It’s not - there are tons of places with no access to swimming. It also has less to do with urban/suburban. If anything, urban is likely to get more, as they can potentially reach public pools.

It’s about access to water. If you parents don’t take you, if there are none around to naturally discover, if there are none around which you personally have access to, you don’t learn to swim.

If you do, you typically do. Simple as. I really do not understand why people seem to think everyone has a pool. You can tell many of the people in this sub grew up middle class at least!

There is also a tight correlation between swimming skills and economic class. Reasonable access to a pool or natural water body is not a given, as you point out. Even if you're reasonably close to one of those, sufficient regular time to teach your kid to swim is a luxury. That leaves swimming lessons, which cost money. Access is the main problem, particularly in urban areas.

Not really access, but interest. The YMCA offers swimming lessons easily within reach of poor families that want them. A subset of the population just thinks it’s useless.

I disagree, YMCA lessons are not accessible. First off, you don't know what level your child is, and I remember being stressed trying to read our Ys website to understand what the levels meant. This is important because 2, the classes fill very quickly. You have to know what you want and sign up as soon as they're available. And finally, the classes are at very specific times, which certainly do not work for all working parents schedules. For example, it will just be tue or Thur at 5:45pm. If you can't make that you are SOL.

Put them at the lowest level if you don’t know. That’s easy.

As far as schedule goes, who’s taking care of the kid? At age 3 or 4 when you do this, it’s not like they are in school so some adult has to be around at 5:45pm.

Look, I'm telling you this from my perspective as someone who tried to do the exact thing you're saying. If those things stressed me out as an adult who knows about swimming, and crucially prevented me from signing up my kids for swimming lessons at the Y, then it is going to be even more true for people who are low income and not knowledgeable. These are real barriers. Acting like they're not is just putting our collective head in the sand and letting the problem perpetuate.

Your barrier sounds like some other anxiety issue unrelated to economic status.

You know how important swimming lessons are and yet just gave up and skipped it entirely? Or are you actually privileged and had other swimming lesson options for your kid and just didn’t want to bother with the affordable system’s constraints?

Lots of lower middle class/poor including me when I was growing up went to this without a problem. 25 cent public bus ride with mom was an adventure

How long are you from being poor? Are you poor now? Did you raise a child while poor within the last 5 years?

Public bus rides in my area are 9x your cost, and 4x that cost for elderly people.

Public bus rides cost proportionately the same to min wage in California if that helps.

The Y and the bus haven’t turned into upscale things if that’s the point you’re trying to make.

A related aspect that I experienced was that public pools were typically cold enough that my kids did not enjoy them much. Private swimming schools keep their pools quite warm.

Now that pools are practical, I expect weather to be a larger factor: swimming is much more desirable in hot dry weather. I'd predict there are more swimming-hours per capita in Phoenix than Boston.

You seem to think swimming is only useful if you accidentally end up in a giant body of water. In reality swimming skills are damn useful as soon as you end up in any water that goes up to your head, and those bodies of water are everywhere across the globe. More so for children.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com