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Water Safety
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To ensure that your children are safe, never leave them unsupervised around water. Here are some tips to keep your child safe around the water this spring:
- Teach your child to swim, but remember that younger children shouldn't be left unsupervised around water even if they know how to swim. The AAP recommends that children under age four not be given formal swimming lessons, especially as a primary means to prevent the risk of drowning.
- Always wear a US Coast Guard approved life jacket when on a lake, river or ocean while boating, water skiing, jet skiing or tubing.
- Warn your children about playing in canals or other fast moving water.
- Do not let your child play around any water (lake, pool, ocean, etc.) without adult supervision (even if he is a good swimmer).
- Don't allow running or rough play around the water.
- Childproof your swimming pool with a fence around your backyard and a fence (at least 4 feet high) around the pool, with a self-closing, self-latching gate. Also consider having a phone poolside and learning CPR in case of emergencies.
Water Safety Internet Resources:
- Swimming Pool Safety Tips: learn about the 'LAYERS OF PROTECTION' to keep your kids safe around a pool, including supervision, locked access doors to the pool area, a fence around the pool and water survival training. "The goal, with instituted layers of protection, is to come as close to a 'fail safe' system of preventing drowning incidents as possible. Meaning that if there is a momentary lapse of supervision for whatever reason, we have several backup systems in place. All must fail before a drowning can take place. A door has been left unlocked or open; the alarm system or device for the door has been turned off; the pool safety barrier has been left open; your child does enter the water, panics and does not attempt to utilize survival swim training; CPR is administered too late to save the child."
- Safety Barrier Guidelines for Home Pools: Swimming pools should always be happy places. Unfortunately, each year thousands of American families confront swimming pool tragedies - drownings and near-drownings of young children. These tragedies are preventable. This U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) handbook offers guidelines for pool barriers that can help prevent most submersion incidents involving young children.
- Water Safety: tips from the American Academy of Pediatrics to keep your kids safe around water and prevent drownings.
- Drowning in Infants, Children and Adolescents: from the AAP Committee on Injury and Poison Prevention, recommendations for parents, pediatricians and the community to prevent drownings in children and adolescents.
- Swimming Lessons Recommendations: AAP statement, which states that children are not developmentally ready for formal swimming lessons until after their fourth birthday.
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