Sorry you had that experience surprisetalk. Glad for you that it was all ok.
Theres a saying that comes to my mind, I think it used to be a lot more common.
"it only takes 6 inches of water to drown"
Fall funny, get nocked out and land in a puddle or whatever, or cant lift your head out of it for whatever reason etc etc.
I am VERY conscious of water & my kids, being a scuba diver myself I have a fair respect for the sea as well, and still we have had experiences that left us a little shook.
Scary. Glad it turned out okay. The rule should be any standing water feature below 3' (1m) above grade should be enclosed by a fence to a height of 4' (1.3m) above grade if kids are anticipated to occupy the space.
And, for oceans, rivers, and flood water: remember that 1m³ of water weighs 1.1 ton/1 tonne.
> The rule should be any standing water feature below 3' (1m) above grade should be enclosed by a fence to a height of 4' (1.3m) above grade if kids are anticipated to occupy the space.
Children drowning is tragic, but this is nanny-state stuff. Are we to wrap literally any pond, lake, stream, fountain, etc. with a four-foot tall fence, because children exist? Imagine Central Park, but with the ponds surrounded by chain-link fences -- now that I think about it, I'm sort of amazed that New York City (where every other building is perpetually surrounded by ugly and useless scaffolding because one person died from falling bricks once) hasn't actually done this.
At some point, parents have to take personal responsibility for where their children run off to. Per TFA, the state the story took place in already had a law stricter than the one you're saying should exist [1]. It didn't prevent this incident. To the author's credit, this is not a plea for better laws, but rather, one for better parental supervision -- they knew there was a water feature, and still let the child run free.
So, PSA: teach your children to swim, and keep a close leash on the ones who don't know how yet.
[1] In many states (including PA, apparently, per TFA), it's already required that you wrap any standing water greater than 24" deep with a fence, even if you don't have children or ever intend them to be there.
Learning about dangerous things is a critical part of growing up. Fencing off dangerous things does nothing. Education and care and relevant, proportionate ideas about safety is what’s needed here, not nanny state over-reach.
(Source: parent of 2 boys who grew up in North Cornwall, where the community reaction to the (insanely dangerous) local sea is to learn about it, get in it and be aware of your limitations)
Related PSA that drowning doesn't look like drowning [0] — people don't yell, splash, and wave like you might expect and is "almost always a deceptively quiet event".
1 more PSA, Drowning is the #1 cause of death for people with autism. It generally happens when the person is being supervised by someone not their parents.
If you are taking care of someone with autism around water, be super aware of that.
A child with autism is 160x more likely to die from drowning vs the general population [1]
Key drowning indicators include: head low in water with mouth at water level, head tilted back, eyes glassy/empty/closed, vertical position without leg movement, hyperventilating/gasping, and attempting to swim but making no forward progress.
On a related note. Don't assume if your child slips/falls into a pool, you will hear it. I happened to see my daughter step off a ledge in a hot tub once and she just vanished. Not a sound. If I had been facing the other direction, I would have had no idea.
As a child before I could swim I slipped and fell into a pool at a party at my grandparents house full of adults. A teen, who was inside the house, is the only one who saw me. He ran outside, dove into the pool, and saved my life. I remember my mom being hysterical and the teen being treated like a hero. I don’t remember his name he was a neighborhood kid known by my grandparents. (Maybe he cut their yard idk)
I was struck by the comment that teaching kids young kids how to swim is uncommon in the US.
I got my kids into swimming lessons on their first spring (was advised to avoid it during the winter).
And it's part of primary education in my municipality, with the express purpose of reducing drownings: it's not sport, the curriculum is 100% geared towards familiarity and safety.
Everyone's holidays are at a beach, so water safety is a constant concern, and looking at Our World in Data, Portugal had far worse numbers for drownings than the US in the 80s, but are much better now.
I think it very much depends on where they live. But part of the reason more people don't know how to swim is probably because many urbanites don't have good access to pools. Many public pools in urban areas were shut down in response to civil rights when black people were no longer allowed to be blocked from using them and racists would rather nobody has a pool than allow black people to swim with white people. And then in later generations, if a parent doesn't know how to swim, they aren't likely to take their own kids to go swimming.
A lot more rural people know how to swim because of all the natural bodies of water around, but our population overall has been consistently skewing urban for a number of generations now.
As a pool owner (3 feet in the shallow end and eight feet in the deep end) and parent of a three year old plus older kids that grew up with the pool — I can not fathom allowing a four year old to explore the yard on their own when this was there. Even if just two feet deep. A body of water that goes down into the ground (which this fountain appears to be) is dangerous to young children, period. I respect other peoples’ parenting styles but I personally don’t understand.
I almost drowned as a kid - in shallow water, and with a swim ring around my waist. I'll explain situation here as a cautionary tale for parents.
That swim ring was a bit loose. I was standing in the water, probably jumping up and down like kids do. Somehow, I lost balance and as my upper body fell to the side the swim ring moved from my waist toward feet. It stayed there and pulled my feet upward while my head went below the water. I was powerless to return to the surface as feet were stuck in that floating ring, forcing me upside down. Fortunately, a family friend noticed the situation and pulled me from the water. Near-death situation, and it looked perfectly safe.
I was taught to swim as a kid and spent summer days in the water of Long Island Sound. As a maybe 10 or 11yo swimming at a Rhode Island beach, I was tossed into some rocks thanks to some pretty rough waves. I float, so I've never worried about heading in the right direction when under water. Even still, all that tossing and turning without a deep breath was damn scary. I sat out for a bit and then went back in. Not one adult I was with, or any others for that matter, came a runnin'.
Years later, when I was taking the lifeguard class in high school, one of the first things we were taught is that you can drown on dry land with a tablespoon of water. I remember that to this day (that was back in 1980).
These days, my head is on swivel at the pool. . . And I'm not the guard. Just paying attention to all the little people. And during water aerobics, I watch the adults in the pool who are not good swimmers.
Kids can learn to swim (read: not panic and keep the important bits above water) pretty much the time they learn to walk. By 3-5 they can learn to properly swim without assistance from floats.
You still shouldn't let them be around water unsupervised, but it can buy precious minutes when it matters and give parents some peace of mind.
Why is this back on the front page of the site? It was posted several days ago and has little to nothing to do with the content and context of the site.
Why didn't the aunt think to just go get her instead of calling you over to say "Hey so I know you told her to stay away from the fountain, but what about her walking around the rim of it, is that dangerous or not?"
Doesn't help for young kids of course, but I went to a university that required you to pass a swimming test (or have equivalent credentials, PE swimming class, or exemption to graduate). Don't know how strictly enforced it was if push came to shove but it was there
My university had the same policy. Despite having swim lessons as a child, I did not learn how to swim until university. I was finally able to swim the length of the pool using the side stroke, which along with the backstroke is the only thing I can barely manage. My problem with the crawl/freestyle (or whatever it's called) is breathing -- even when I was in good enough shape to run 5-minute miles on land, I would be totally out of breath before I even got to the end of the pool.
I haven't heard anyone mention this rule, which I think is useful:
Cars, dogs, and water.
These are the big three common things that children interact with regularly that can, and will, cause irreparable harm or death with functionally no warning and virtually instantaneously. Kids also don't have the experience or the intuition to figure out if a situation is dangerous; cars move too fast, dogs are too hard to read, and water danger is hard to grasp even for adults (the number of people, including grown adults, I've seen panic and had to get pulled out after gleefully jumping into water where it turns out they can't reliably touch the bottom is fairly high).
The first two require some strictness (i.e. being very clear about rules like never going near a road without an adult, and never hitting a dog or pulling it's ears), but water basically requires regular swimming lessons from qualified instructors. It's something I wish happened earlier, and that more families had easy access to.
Dogs are the 3rd deadliest animal to humans (discounting humans themselves), but since they are popular pets and more like another family member in some Western countries, they get a big pass imho (or rather, their owners) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_deadliest_to_h...
Just to go off of this, springs as well. Usually it's garage door springs or suspension of a car springs. People will DIY thinking it's a small thing but they can easily decapitate you. Some garage door springs have been known to level the families of entire neighborhoods or small townships. Garage door spring related deaths are far more common that you will ever know. Garage door springs also are known to be the main transmission vector for tetanus so if you survive the unspringing be advised there's a 90% chance it flung a deadly dose of tetatus and botulism (also grows on springs) into your every bodily orifice. You may think "well why is a kid fixing a car's suspension" but of course kids like poke around and explore because they're curious or they could be exploring your shop or your garage door mechanism.
This isn't shallow water by any means when kids are involved. There are routinely deadly accident where kids drawn in less than a foot of water (here[1] for example a 3yo in 23cm of water).
32 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 61.4 ms ] threadTheres a saying that comes to my mind, I think it used to be a lot more common.
"it only takes 6 inches of water to drown"
Fall funny, get nocked out and land in a puddle or whatever, or cant lift your head out of it for whatever reason etc etc.
I am VERY conscious of water & my kids, being a scuba diver myself I have a fair respect for the sea as well, and still we have had experiences that left us a little shook.
And, for oceans, rivers, and flood water: remember that 1m³ of water weighs 1.1 ton/1 tonne.
Also dangerous: low head dams. https://practical.engineering/blog/2019/3/16/drowning-machin...
Finally, don't sleep in or build homes in flash flood areas: (US): https://msc.fema.gov/portal/home
Children drowning is tragic, but this is nanny-state stuff. Are we to wrap literally any pond, lake, stream, fountain, etc. with a four-foot tall fence, because children exist? Imagine Central Park, but with the ponds surrounded by chain-link fences -- now that I think about it, I'm sort of amazed that New York City (where every other building is perpetually surrounded by ugly and useless scaffolding because one person died from falling bricks once) hasn't actually done this.
At some point, parents have to take personal responsibility for where their children run off to. Per TFA, the state the story took place in already had a law stricter than the one you're saying should exist [1]. It didn't prevent this incident. To the author's credit, this is not a plea for better laws, but rather, one for better parental supervision -- they knew there was a water feature, and still let the child run free.
So, PSA: teach your children to swim, and keep a close leash on the ones who don't know how yet.
[1] In many states (including PA, apparently, per TFA), it's already required that you wrap any standing water greater than 24" deep with a fence, even if you don't have children or ever intend them to be there.
Er, no?
Learning about dangerous things is a critical part of growing up. Fencing off dangerous things does nothing. Education and care and relevant, proportionate ideas about safety is what’s needed here, not nanny state over-reach.
(Source: parent of 2 boys who grew up in North Cornwall, where the community reaction to the (insanely dangerous) local sea is to learn about it, get in it and be aware of your limitations)
[0] https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/rescuing-drowning-child...
If you are taking care of someone with autism around water, be super aware of that.
A child with autism is 160x more likely to die from drowning vs the general population [1]
[1] https://nationalautismassociation.org/resources/autism-safet...
I got my kids into swimming lessons on their first spring (was advised to avoid it during the winter).
And it's part of primary education in my municipality, with the express purpose of reducing drownings: it's not sport, the curriculum is 100% geared towards familiarity and safety.
Everyone's holidays are at a beach, so water safety is a constant concern, and looking at Our World in Data, Portugal had far worse numbers for drownings than the US in the 80s, but are much better now.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/drowning-death-rates
A lot more rural people know how to swim because of all the natural bodies of water around, but our population overall has been consistently skewing urban for a number of generations now.
That swim ring was a bit loose. I was standing in the water, probably jumping up and down like kids do. Somehow, I lost balance and as my upper body fell to the side the swim ring moved from my waist toward feet. It stayed there and pulled my feet upward while my head went below the water. I was powerless to return to the surface as feet were stuck in that floating ring, forcing me upside down. Fortunately, a family friend noticed the situation and pulled me from the water. Near-death situation, and it looked perfectly safe.
Years later, when I was taking the lifeguard class in high school, one of the first things we were taught is that you can drown on dry land with a tablespoon of water. I remember that to this day (that was back in 1980).
These days, my head is on swivel at the pool. . . And I'm not the guard. Just paying attention to all the little people. And during water aerobics, I watch the adults in the pool who are not good swimmers.
Water is scary. I have a healthy respect for it.
You still shouldn't let them be around water unsupervised, but it can buy precious minutes when it matters and give parents some peace of mind.
Why didn't the aunt think to just go get her instead of calling you over to say "Hey so I know you told her to stay away from the fountain, but what about her walking around the rim of it, is that dangerous or not?"
Cars, dogs, and water.
These are the big three common things that children interact with regularly that can, and will, cause irreparable harm or death with functionally no warning and virtually instantaneously. Kids also don't have the experience or the intuition to figure out if a situation is dangerous; cars move too fast, dogs are too hard to read, and water danger is hard to grasp even for adults (the number of people, including grown adults, I've seen panic and had to get pulled out after gleefully jumping into water where it turns out they can't reliably touch the bottom is fairly high).
The first two require some strictness (i.e. being very clear about rules like never going near a road without an adult, and never hitting a dog or pulling it's ears), but water basically requires regular swimming lessons from qualified instructors. It's something I wish happened earlier, and that more families had easy access to.
Just to go off of this, springs as well. Usually it's garage door springs or suspension of a car springs. People will DIY thinking it's a small thing but they can easily decapitate you. Some garage door springs have been known to level the families of entire neighborhoods or small townships. Garage door spring related deaths are far more common that you will ever know. Garage door springs also are known to be the main transmission vector for tetanus so if you survive the unspringing be advised there's a 90% chance it flung a deadly dose of tetatus and botulism (also grows on springs) into your every bodily orifice. You may think "well why is a kid fixing a car's suspension" but of course kids like poke around and explore because they're curious or they could be exploring your shop or your garage door mechanism.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2313873/
[1]: https://www.midilibre.fr/2022/08/01/un-enfant-de-3-ans-se-no...