I have 4 young kids and really appreciate this video. My wife and I have tried to teach each of them to swim at an early age because drowning is SO SILENT! Once we were at a local park lake with my daughter who really young. She was in like 1-2 feet of water, and we were both within 5 feet of her watching as intently as possible. Suddenly a little girl playing next to her said something like "are you ok?" which made us look and see our daughter's face was underwater and she was drowning. The whole thing lasted like 10 seconds, but it was still really scary. I think we would have seen in time regardless, but the fact that we were trying to watch so closely and almost missed it was crazy.
You also have to be very careful when multiple kids are in the pool. Sometimes a kid who is a great swimmer can drown when another kid starts panicking and climbs on top of them to stay afloat.
Second on the "good swimmer drowning" part. I once swam in a pool with a few cousins of mine. I was around 18 and just finished a life guarding course at school. One cousin was around 11 years old.
She was panicking next to me in the pool all of a sudden and climbed on top of me. She wasn't heavy but her human effort to grab and exert pressure to use me as a float to stay above water forced me under. It was hard to get back up for air, and very sudden to which I didn't have a ton of air to begin with.
I remembered training, which was to pull the victim down with you to short circuit their brain into letting go, and it worked. I was able to swim out from her area, surface, catch a breath, and go help her to the shallow end.
"I remembered training, which was to pull the victim down with you to short circuit their brain into letting go,"
That's exactly how I was taught as part of lifesaving training along with the most effective way of swimming (and 'towing') the person to safety. BTW, that was many decades ago (presumably things haven't changed much since then).
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I think its that most animal bodies are horizontal and thus float in a way that makes it trivial to keep their heads above water; in contrast to humans which have a bodyplan that requires constant stabilization to stay vertical, both on land and in water. It's the same reason baby animals can usually start walking minutes after being born while human babies require months to learn how to stand and walk in a stable manner
Some species like proboscis monkeys and crab-eating macaques know how to swim instinctively but most primates need to learn either through mimicry or trial and error. A lot of them try to avoid deep water even when they can swim (that's probably more a function of predator avoidance though).
I don't think humans are really bad at swimming, we just panic and splash around instead of kicking our feet like any other animal does.
Human babies can swim, kinda. But the instinctive version of swimming that comes preinstalled in our brains is not like riding a bike. It's something that we forget how to do if we don't practice, and then we have to re-learn it.
Was looking at the videos and my main take away was : "Why do they allow these floatation devices in the pool?" If you cant swim and are short enough (basically most kids) why let you climb on that slippery ballon and go in the water? It's like giving kids knifes and let them in the bouncy castle.
If your kid can't swim you shouldn't let it go in on its own. There is no reason to spoil the fun for everyone.
You can ban all fun or tell parents to use common sense and have a backup for idiot parents.
In this specific pool I would also create a barrier/line between the shallow bit of the pool and the deep end. In some of the videos the kids end up in the deep end by just playing, even without the floating devices.
Also kids should be taught to swim at a young age. At least where I'm from there are many places where kids can fall into the water.
Any public pool worth visiting (in the US) has strict rules about only allowing coastguard-approved flotation devices. These devices are designed to allow an unconscious child to float face up. Which means fuck-all if they're already stuck under a float.
Floats in public pools are a Bad Thing, I completely agree.
If the pool staff is obsessive enough to check your float's USCG approval, it's probably not going to be any fun. It may be happening because you have a critical mass of bad swimmers trying to drown or because the lifeguards are the fun police, but in either case it's not a very good pool.
Source: fun police in high school and now have young children -- highly supervised pools are a bummer.
In defense of the parents, I think a lot of drownings are people who can swim, but not very confidently, and get into the panic response described at the link and end up being unable to recover without outside help. I've seen this happen to both children and adults.
When I was about 10, I was able to swim but I was not great at it.
For some reason (I think someone dived just in front of me), I needed to stop swimming and ended "vertical" in the water. It was quite unusual for me at the time. For a moment, I tried to go back to swim horizontally on the belly, without success. Then tried on the back, no success either. After a few tries, I began panicking like it is said the the video: I was just climbing an invisible ladder... A guard finally helped me reach the border of the pool and that was over.
After that, I tried to put me under the same circumstances: vertical in the water, 2 m from the border. And then convert to horizontal swimming. Every time it was easy. To this day, I still have no clue why I was not able to do that
And the parents not knowing this distinction. "My kid can swim" can mean any number of things. They rely on their kid being able to swim even marginally and expect the lifeguards to be infallible. It's sort of to be expected because most people in general do not have extensive experience nor basic training when it comes to being in or on water.
Indeed. All the pools around here that I've been to have a simple rule: All kids old enough to walk and unable to swim must wear (not just hold) floatation devices at all times. Also when not in the water. And also when in shallow water.
Only exception is during swimming lessons, and those are with a swimming instructor right there with them in the water.
Swimming seems to be at least partly a cultural thing. In the Philippines, I'm regularly surprised by the number of people who say they can't swim. A handful of videos is a small sample, but it seems to be a similar situation here where 5 out of the first 6 videos I watched were black kids. Being a lifeguard in a high risk area would be too stressful for me. I'm stressed just watching these videos. Big respect to watchful heroes saving the day for these kids.
"Swimming seems to be at least partly a cultural thing."
I was brought up in Australia and I was taught to swim earlier than I can remember. My mother would take me to the beach grab hold of my swimming costume from behind and get me to dog-paddle around the age I learned to walk. This was not unusual when I was growing up, most of the kids at school were reasonably good swimmers by the age of eight.
Also, early on we were taught to recognize rip currents and told to keep well away from them—they looked seductively harmless but are in fact very dangerous.
When I was about seven we moved to a country town about 100 miles or so from the beach but it had a swimming pool. There too the kids were good swimmers, much better than I expected as they had grown up without access to a beach.
That background leads me to my point: whenever we hear of someone being drowned at our beaches and rivers it is so often either a vising tourist or some migrant who was born overseas and did not learn to swim at an early age. For local people of my generation who were brought up as I was this cultural difference is striking obvious.
Pools are part of the culture in all parts of Australia. Even the outback. It's just so warm all the time that pools make sense everywhere. If there's pools everywhere it means people are scared (or excited) and teach their kids to swim.
Black people being unable to swim is a trope in the United States, to the point of being a racist joke. There's some truth to it - black neighborhoods were less likely to have amenities like public pools, and black families were generally less able to afford paid swimming lessons for their children.
Many years ago when I was a teenager I worked as a swimming instructor. In my experience, most black kids were terrified of the water and getting them over that fear was vital for teaching them to swim. Some white kids were similarly terrified, but not as many. It was something like 8 in 10 vs 2 in 10. I don't have an explaination for it.
I understand how the lack of amenities, public pools etc., would seriously disadvantage kids and would set back their leaning to swim. What is less clear is why families would actually need to pay for swimming lessons. When I was growing up in Australia swimming was so ubiquitous that what we kids didn't learn from our parents we almost picked up by osmosis — immersion with other kids in the water, etc.
That's not to say kids weren't taught, they were but by that time most kids already had basic water skills, dog-paddling, treading water etc. Thus teaching was aimed at perfecting the correct stroke for the different swimming styles, the crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, sidestroke, etc. and it was taught at school. The thought of paying for swimming lessons would have been completely foreign to most of us (professional swimming teachers would have been reserved for those in competition such as the Olympics).
Why isn't swimming a compulsory part of school sport? If it were then all kids would be taught at least the basics.
Is it a trope, racist joke, or simply a statistic that needs to be known for the safety? According to CDC, child drowning victims are 3:1 blacK
>>Every day, there are nearly 10 accidental drownings in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s 3,500 people every year who die in water. Within these numbers is a startling fact: the fatal-drowning rate of Black/African-American children is three times higher than white children.
In an effort to drive equity we have stopped building public pools in Washington state so all children can drown equally thereby fixing the racial disparity.
The best filter, when I worked at a pretty low-wealth public pool, was when someone tried to wear a shirt into the pool. It was a filter that cut across socio-economic (couldn't afford swimming clothes), physical (out of shape), and personality (low confidence).
We never let shirts into the pool, and then you made a mental note to watch for that person. Realistically, though, you spent much more time fishing out the confident , in-shape (or at least not fat) kids who bee-lined for the diving boards without any apparent plan for the time starting after they hit the water.
I'm assuming your in the US when you talk about the black kids. How much do you think US segregation on racial lines in the 20th century has an impact on this?
I think everyone should spend ten minutes watching these videos. I did this once eight years ago and now the "look" is so burned into my brain that I can't unsee it. I have kids now and I am glad I could possibly spot this. The lifeguards are WAY faster but it's better than not seeing this at all.
Back in my youth, I worked as a lifeguard. It was at a pretty swank pool with a community that had an active swim team, so I didn't have a lot of trouble.
But lifeguards somehow find each other, and I knew several who worked at the local waterpark, and their jobs were way, way harder. No deaths during that time, but a lot of close calls. It's quite a thing to be 16-17 and have that pattern recognition stored, and it sticks with you.
Well worth the time to watch these videos. It's not quite the same, but it's close enough.
If it helps, the videos are of kids being rescued mere seconds after showing drowning signs. Watching these gives you very quick training on what those signs are, in a way that images or instructional pamphlets can't.
I have two boys, went to the ER so many times for stitches, sprains, and other things when they were small I felt like we should have got loyalty rewards.
These seem to be (based on two) lifeguard rescue videos. 30 seconds of lots of kids in a pool, lifeguard jumps in and swims to a person you were not able to spot needed help, and then they help that person back up safely.
By "drowning" they mean "displaying the instinctive responses to perceived difficulty maintaining breathing in the water"
I haven't watched all of them. So far no one has drowned. For a variety of ethical and legal reasons I very much doubt any reputable organisation would put a video of a fatal drowning on their site.
In the 5 or so videos I watched they were all rescued!
The app seems to be timing your response relative to response of a lifeguard: negative seconds if you noticed before a lifeguard jumps into the water, otherwise positive.
They don't drown/die. There is an instinctive response to not being able to keep oneself over water that has certain "look". The videos show busy pools and you basically try to find Waldo before the lifeguard pulls them out.
Is this only a kids thing? I'm a terrible swimmer and very dense (on fresh water my head will be completely underwater even with the lungs full), and had to be rescued once on the verge of hypothermia on an ebb tide and I was able to call for help.
I think there is another element at play in these videos: in addition to being well-trained and paying attention, these lifeguards also know these kids.
I think they recognize some of the kids and are on alert-- in at least one video, the lifeguard jumps in a mere 2 seconds after the kid slides off the float, and there are others that are similarly fast. Of course, it could also be that they happened to be looking at just the right time. However, in the 2-second one, the lifeguard turns to look at someone below them who splashes, then turns straight back to the section of the pool with the kid who then slides off, and in she jumps.
In some cases I would guess that they either know the regular kids, or they've been watching and gradually adding/removing kids from a mental list of high-risk candidates to keep an eye on. In other words, their excellent response times are aided by both their ability to recognize the signs as well as context gained throughout the summer or that day.
I watched a few videos and found myself analyzing how good swimmers each were and got a lot better at spotting danger by noting who looked good and checking on them less often. So I don't think you need to KNOW the kids over multiple visits, but just constantly scanning for and assessing skill level.
I agree, there are some that appear more competent and others that seem less so. Granted, all are capable of panicking and needing assistance, but prioritizing does look like an effective strategy.
i did about 20 and in a couple of the "2 second" ones i had already clicked the person the lifeguard rescued 2 or 3 times before they fell off. My best time was -15s.
This would be a lot more interesting if there were videos where the lifeguard did not need to jump in, or where you had to pick within 4 or 5 seconds who you thought would need rescuing - the site didn't support this, per the "2 second" style ones i was clicking the obvious child repeatedly before the "game" decided to score it.
Whoa! I didn't even realize the page is like a game! I was just watching them like embedded YouTube videos, not understanding that I could click on the video to see if I was correct and getting a score.
It's a different video each time. Refresh the page to try again. It's important in my opinion, I never would have thought that the drowning instinct is part of the problem - it silences any panic response that would grab the attention of people nearby.
Sometimes they don't even manage to make splashes and it looks like they're just stationary when in fact they're an impending sinking stone in under 30s.
I was once called out by a lifeguard about that, as I was just chilling there enjoying my own stillness in a moment of zen; the lifeguard essentially pointed out that for them it was a false positive they had to weed out, and if I wanted to be helpful I could still enjoy zenness but assume a slightly different position that made it a bit more obvious I was not a case of drowning.
As teenagers, we had a diving competition. Stay underwater for as long as possible.
Of course we saved energy by being perfectly still and 'floating' beneath the pool's metal entrance stair case — as opposed to wasting energy pushing our bodies downwards.
Let's just say the lifeguard didn't like this method.
I didn’t know so much about the instinctive drowning response, thanks. I was a competent swimmer before I formed conscious memories and have never experienced anything like that. I have done a few water rescues but it was a clear case of someone in the water not being able to swim at all and was over quickly. I guess panic is a core feature of this response?
Yes, panic is a large part of the problem. I think I recall the feeling once, when my dad was teaching me to swim around 4 or 5. I think I tried to stand up, and just sunk, then I tried to pull myself up, and grasped at water. I figure at that point my dad just plucked me out of the water and told me to try again haha
This is likely perspective you have while also browsing HN on your phone. That's the whole point - it's really hard to spot one unless you are looking for him, have training and are positioned properly.
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You also have to be very careful when multiple kids are in the pool. Sometimes a kid who is a great swimmer can drown when another kid starts panicking and climbs on top of them to stay afloat.
She was panicking next to me in the pool all of a sudden and climbed on top of me. She wasn't heavy but her human effort to grab and exert pressure to use me as a float to stay above water forced me under. It was hard to get back up for air, and very sudden to which I didn't have a ton of air to begin with.
I remembered training, which was to pull the victim down with you to short circuit their brain into letting go, and it worked. I was able to swim out from her area, surface, catch a breath, and go help her to the shallow end.
That's exactly how I was taught as part of lifesaving training along with the most effective way of swimming (and 'towing') the person to safety. BTW, that was many decades ago (presumably things haven't changed much since then). .
Maybe it is just that most have 4 legs and that helps, but I'd guess monkeys know how to swim too. Not sure. I mean even snakes know how to swim haha.
What makes people so bad at swimming? Our big heads?
I don't think humans are really bad at swimming, we just panic and splash around instead of kicking our feet like any other animal does.
I never learned and never found the time to. But I'm pretty good at video games :)
You can ban all fun or tell parents to use common sense and have a backup for idiot parents.
In this specific pool I would also create a barrier/line between the shallow bit of the pool and the deep end. In some of the videos the kids end up in the deep end by just playing, even without the floating devices.
Also kids should be taught to swim at a young age. At least where I'm from there are many places where kids can fall into the water.
Except for the drowning
Floats in public pools are a Bad Thing, I completely agree.
Source: lifeguard through highschool and college.
Source: fun police in high school and now have young children -- highly supervised pools are a bummer.
For some reason (I think someone dived just in front of me), I needed to stop swimming and ended "vertical" in the water. It was quite unusual for me at the time. For a moment, I tried to go back to swim horizontally on the belly, without success. Then tried on the back, no success either. After a few tries, I began panicking like it is said the the video: I was just climbing an invisible ladder... A guard finally helped me reach the border of the pool and that was over.
After that, I tried to put me under the same circumstances: vertical in the water, 2 m from the border. And then convert to horizontal swimming. Every time it was easy. To this day, I still have no clue why I was not able to do that
Only exception is during swimming lessons, and those are with a swimming instructor right there with them in the water.
Even if your kid is capable, most people don’t hesitate to throw one on just in case.
I was brought up in Australia and I was taught to swim earlier than I can remember. My mother would take me to the beach grab hold of my swimming costume from behind and get me to dog-paddle around the age I learned to walk. This was not unusual when I was growing up, most of the kids at school were reasonably good swimmers by the age of eight.
Also, early on we were taught to recognize rip currents and told to keep well away from them—they looked seductively harmless but are in fact very dangerous.
When I was about seven we moved to a country town about 100 miles or so from the beach but it had a swimming pool. There too the kids were good swimmers, much better than I expected as they had grown up without access to a beach.
That background leads me to my point: whenever we hear of someone being drowned at our beaches and rivers it is so often either a vising tourist or some migrant who was born overseas and did not learn to swim at an early age. For local people of my generation who were brought up as I was this cultural difference is striking obvious.
Come the era of civil rights a good number of these pools were closed down and filled in rather than allow mixed race swimming.
"White flight", redlining, and other economic pressures worked to keep new community pools coming into place in black neighbourhoods.
https://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/stories/2019/07/wolcott-segreg...
> and black families were generally less able to afford paid swimming lessons for their children.
Nearly everbody I know swims, black, white, etc. but I'm not sure very many had paid swimming lessons.
With accessable pools and beaches the swimming part comes along with people being in the water.
I understand how the lack of amenities, public pools etc., would seriously disadvantage kids and would set back their leaning to swim. What is less clear is why families would actually need to pay for swimming lessons. When I was growing up in Australia swimming was so ubiquitous that what we kids didn't learn from our parents we almost picked up by osmosis — immersion with other kids in the water, etc.
That's not to say kids weren't taught, they were but by that time most kids already had basic water skills, dog-paddling, treading water etc. Thus teaching was aimed at perfecting the correct stroke for the different swimming styles, the crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, sidestroke, etc. and it was taught at school. The thought of paying for swimming lessons would have been completely foreign to most of us (professional swimming teachers would have been reserved for those in competition such as the Olympics).
Why isn't swimming a compulsory part of school sport? If it were then all kids would be taught at least the basics.
>>Every day, there are nearly 10 accidental drownings in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s 3,500 people every year who die in water. Within these numbers is a startling fact: the fatal-drowning rate of Black/African-American children is three times higher than white children.
We never let shirts into the pool, and then you made a mental note to watch for that person. Realistically, though, you spent much more time fishing out the confident , in-shape (or at least not fat) kids who bee-lined for the diving boards without any apparent plan for the time starting after they hit the water.
But lifeguards somehow find each other, and I knew several who worked at the local waterpark, and their jobs were way, way harder. No deaths during that time, but a lot of close calls. It's quite a thing to be 16-17 and have that pattern recognition stored, and it sticks with you.
Well worth the time to watch these videos. It's not quite the same, but it's close enough.
We have three kids and I struggle to watch videos of stuff like this.
No drownings in the family, thank $deity, but we've had a fairly lengthy string of medical incidents over the years.
Let's just say I could probably find my way to and around both our local hospital, and the big city hospital an hour away, while blindfolded.
Dead Comment
I haven't watched all of them. So far no one has drowned. For a variety of ethical and legal reasons I very much doubt any reputable organisation would put a video of a fatal drowning on their site.
The app seems to be timing your response relative to response of a lifeguard: negative seconds if you noticed before a lifeguard jumps into the water, otherwise positive.
I think they recognize some of the kids and are on alert-- in at least one video, the lifeguard jumps in a mere 2 seconds after the kid slides off the float, and there are others that are similarly fast. Of course, it could also be that they happened to be looking at just the right time. However, in the 2-second one, the lifeguard turns to look at someone below them who splashes, then turns straight back to the section of the pool with the kid who then slides off, and in she jumps.
In some cases I would guess that they either know the regular kids, or they've been watching and gradually adding/removing kids from a mental list of high-risk candidates to keep an eye on. In other words, their excellent response times are aided by both their ability to recognize the signs as well as context gained throughout the summer or that day.
This would be a lot more interesting if there were videos where the lifeguard did not need to jump in, or where you had to pick within 4 or 5 seconds who you thought would need rescuing - the site didn't support this, per the "2 second" style ones i was clicking the obvious child repeatedly before the "game" decided to score it.
I was once called out by a lifeguard about that, as I was just chilling there enjoying my own stillness in a moment of zen; the lifeguard essentially pointed out that for them it was a false positive they had to weed out, and if I wanted to be helpful I could still enjoy zenness but assume a slightly different position that made it a bit more obvious I was not a case of drowning.
Of course we saved energy by being perfectly still and 'floating' beneath the pool's metal entrance stair case — as opposed to wasting energy pushing our bodies downwards.
Let's just say the lifeguard didn't like this method.