How to Keep Your Child Safe While Swimming
Did you know that Florida loses more children under the age of five each year to drowning than any other state? This summer especially, with heat indexes on the rise and more children flocking to the swimming pool, it is important to keep swimming safety precautions in mind. WaterproofFL, a campaign designed by the Florida Department of Health’s Injury Prevention Program, emphasizes all layers of protection and precautions necessary to keep our children safe while swimming. To help prevent these fatal accidents from occurring, we encourage you to take a look and follow these tips from WaterproofFL:
Stay Active
- Actively supervise children in and around open bodies of water—don’t simply stay present in the area where your child is swimming—stay active and alert to their activity.
- Do not rely on swimming aids such as water wings or inner tubes to replace adult supervision.
- During events or large gatherings near a pool such as barbeques, do not assume that because there are several adults around, someone is supervising your child. At every moment, an adult needs to be actively paying attention to the little swimmers.
Teach
- First, teach yourself—CPR is a certification that is easily and readily available in cities across the state of Florida. CPR is easy to learn and can save your child’s life in a case of an emergency. Check out The American Red Cross website to find a certification program near you.
- Next, teach your child—slowly introduce babies to water around six months of age.
- Enroll your child in swimming lessons as soon as you think they are ready. Infant Self-Rescue survival swimming lessons are available for children as young as 6 months.
- Teach your child to swim with a swimming buddy at all times.
Prevent
- Make sure your pool has a fence around it that is at least four feet high and prevents children from wandering into the pool area unsupervised.
- Parents occasionally get distracted by household chores—this is a perfect opportunity for a child to wander in a pool area and have an accident in the short time it took to take out the trash. Door alarms, childproof locks, pool alarms, and pool gates/fences set barriers between your child and the pool to prevent accidents and alert you that your child is near the pool unsupervised.